On Friday, the developers of the former altcoin duckNote announced they had rebranded their coin, which is now going to be known as darkNote. [Editor’s note: We will still use the term “duckNote” where historically relevant.]

DarkNote is a fork of Bytecoin, the first implementation of CryptoNote, and its developers have hung their hats on the coin’s anonymity features, its ASIC resistance and its distribution model.

It has since gotten an upgrade.

“With the new name XDN received new DarkNote-only unique features, like encrypted messages, encrypted transaction comments, GUI wallet transfers aggregation, lots of source code and network improvements,” DarkNote developers wrote on Bitcointalk.org. That made DarkNote look like a familiar Internet banking system, but decentralized and privacy protected.”

Now, with what its developers refer to as a “quantum leap,” DarkNote has added new anonymity and mining features. Here is the full list of new features:

  • Encrypted transaction comments
  • Encrypted messages, sent via the DarkNote client on every XDN network address
  • Tweaks to the GUI wallet
  • A wallet pool miner that lets you start mining with the literal push of a “Start Mining” button
  • The blockchain was moved out of RAM

The former duckNote had taken a tumble this week, along with many other cryptocoins. With this announcement from the rebranded DarkNote team and the excitement it generated all week long from duckNote users, this might be a chance for XDN to gain a bunch of new users. DarkNote has been hovering in the mid-30s among all cryptocoins on CoinMarketCap.com with a market cap of about US$730,000 at the time of writing.

“Freedom is [the] heart of DarkNote,” its developers wrote on Bitcointalk.org. “You and nobody else know your DarkNote address balance, incoming and outgoing transfers, and only [the] receiver of your transactions can decrypt your transaction messages. DarkNote blockchain has an analysis resistance, unlike Bitcoin, DarkNote is a fully anonymous and you stay protected against hackers, gangsters and any kind of censorship. [In] fact only you know how many XDN funds you have and nobody can stop you to spend it, but all transfers are confirmed by decentralized Proof-of-Work network.”

Miners

DarkNote has one of the highest volumes of people mining it among all the CryptoNote coins. Already, there are nearly 10,000 different CPU miners on the DarkNote network, more than even on Bytecoin.

Anonymity

DarkNote using ring structures to obscure and anonymize transactions. That means it’s impossible to trace whether Bob sent DarkNotes to Alice, Alice’s sister, or whomever. Another anonymity feature of DarkNote is its unlinkable transactions, explained as follows on the website:

“The sender can produce only the public part of the key, whereas only the receiver can compute the private part; hence the receiver is the only one who can release the funds after the transaction is committed.”

ASIC Resistance

DarkNote also uses what it calls “CPU-efficient egalitarian proof-of-work,” which means that the coin would be indifferent to an ASIC arms race among miners. “It is a pure proof-of-work system that uses CPU and only CPU computing power for producing fast, secure and untraceable worldwide transactions,” developers said on the coin’s original Bitcointalk.org announcement.

Distribution

In the first year, 80% of all darkNotes ever will be mined. The reward structure works like Bitcoin’s, halving every month.

“With 320,000 XDN block rewards on first 11,000 blocks height, duckNote will reach 150 XDN minimum block reward approximately after 1 year of mining with about 80% of XDN in circulation,” duckNote developers told Cointelegraph in August. “After that moment, reward will always stay 150 XDN until blockchain existence. With maximum 8 589,869,056 duckNote units it will takes more than 77 years to reach that amount.

“So, being CPU – efficient Egalitarian Prof of Work cryptocurrency, with fully decentralized network and fair blockchain start, duckNote will have main amount of coins in open market circulation after one year. That makes duckNote cryptocurrency easy usable for real economy needs as well as good investment asset, predictable, based on market and media laws.”

Specs

Resources for DarkNote Users

Homepage:

ducknote.org/#home (This does not appear to have changed at the time of writing.)

GUI Wallet:

DarkNote Communities

darknotetalk.org

Exchanges:

Blockchain explorers:

Mining pools:

For a list of mining pools, go to the DarkNote [ANN] thread on Bitcointalk.org.

Did you enjoy this article? You may also be interested in reading these ones: