The whitepaper is technical because we're a research project about an advanced blockchain protocol. We can't show an MVP of sorts as that would have no meaning to us. Nowadays most whitepapers are full of buzzwords. Dusk research paper is exactly the opposite and way more advanced. It goes to a great extent to describe accurately the technology used and the algorithm. You won’t find details of business development or even use cases. This is because it is intended as a development manifesto (a proof of concept - similar to what an aforementioned prototype or MPV would prove) of a complete system with all components laid out and specified quite formally.

We have released a mini series on Medium called "Dusk in a nutshell" which covers some of the more technical parts in the whitepaper and explain them in a somewhat easier manor.

Part 1; https://medium.com/dusk-network/dusk-in-a-nutshell-50b6e8a17c00

Part 2; https://medium.com/dusk-network/the-anonymous-network-layer-explained-ccb93fd222ca

Part 3; https://medium.com/dusk-network/sba-in-a-nutshell-67e5ae29489b

Could you rephrase the question? I honestly have no clue what you're asking about

You can read more about it here; https://medium.com/dusk-network/secure-tunnel-switching-explained-39cb1e420019

Marcel Roelants joins Dusk Network as Strategic Advisor

Dusk Network proudly announces that Marcel Roelants, Advisor and former General Manager of BitPay, and former General Manager of GE and MasterCard, has joined Dusk Network as a Strategic Advisor.



Marcel has over 25 years experience in change-leadership, from helping startups succeed to successfully operate as EMEA Executive (General Manager) for companies like GE and MasterCard. Marcel has always been driving growth and process improvement with the customer in mind. He has led multiple manufacturing turnaround processes and has even grown financial services P&L’s up to $1 billion in revenue. Over the last few years Marcel has been working as active board member with several FinTech companies. This includes payment solutions with new mobile wallet technologies, Bitcoin blockchain solutions and global acquiring solutions for online businesses. Marcel has an engineering background, combined with a Masters in Marketing and has led teams directly and indirectly of more than 200 people.

Besides that, Marcel is currently Advisor, and former General Manager, of BitPay. At BitPay he was in charge of global growth opportunities, regulatory aspects and payment related subjects. For those unaware, BitPay is the world’s largest bitcoin payment processor. It was founded in 2011 as a way to make it easier for businesses to accept bitcoin as payment. In May 2016 they launched a BitPay Visa card which lets you load dollars using your bitcoin wallet. Nowadays, it can count businesses like Microsoft and Newegg on its merchant list which continues to grow day by day.

With his experience in advising and coaching startups together with his connections and great leadership, we are certain that Marcel will be of great value to the Dusk Network.

How to learn more about Dusk Network
The Dusk Network is a project coordinated by the Dusk Foundation. We are a decentralized ecosystem entirely focused on providing the perfect trade-off between privacy and transparency. Dusk protects privacy and fits regulations in payments, communications and asset transfers.

Please consider joining us at the following media:

• Website
• FAQ
• Telegram
• Twitter
• Reddit
• LinkedIn
• GitHub

I'm not sure if we'll release an updated whitepaper. If there are any changes in the future- we will of course update the whitepaper. For people who want to see even more in-depth explanations we are releasing a developer blog each month, as well as make parts of our private Github repository public after each section passes a security audit.

We are selling in private placement only. If people are interested they can email pledge@dusk.network with your sales proposal. Dusk will give preferential treatment to buyers who have a clear value add to the Dusk Network and its development.

More information about our sale can be found here: https://medium.com/dusk-network/dusk-network-sale-update-6bcbeeef0b1f

The reason to why our whitepaper is so technical is because we're going to build a unique and advanced blockchain protocol. We can't release some kind of MVP because it's not like we're building an app. What can do is explain in extreme detail the way our protocol will work. Besides that the code is developed in a private Github repository and will be made public in sections after each section passes a security audit. An article detailing the development progress will be published each month as well.

The general complexity of network gossip protocols, is O(loдN) which represents the number of rounds to
reach all nodes in the network, where N is the total number of nodes. Nodes only send a limited number of messages and do not wait for acknowledgements. Such a system can easily scale although it cannot achieve unbound scalability given the requirement of achieving global dissemination.
In the case of the Dusk Blockchain, there is an inherent partition of nodes given by the fact that messages around block proposals, validations and voting is performed solely by Provisioners which relay these messages solely to other Provisioners.

A smart contract will not be a requirement for launching a STO. We will use a special cryptographic accumulator which will allow us to store zk-KYC data directly on the chain. Now I want to give you an example or comparison so you can relate but the issue is that there is nothing to compare it with as this will be quite a unique feature of the platform. Basically, the cryptographic accumulator will allow the nodes to validate the inclusivity of a given transaction to this accumulator (meaning that the person making the transaction passed the KYC) and therefore will simulate the functionality of a smart contract, but with anonymity.

We are registered in The Netherlands and have both offices in Amsterdam and Rotterdam!

We have been looking into this since this happened!

It was not our website but a third party hosting site, all has been fixed! 

Our Devnet together with the wallet is scheduled for launch this quarter, with the testnet coming up in Q1 2019.

I think I found the reason. I'm hosting on Tinypic.com and they seem to be down right now. Are there any other hosts you would recommend?

I couldn't find a recent thread addressing this issue, hence I made a new one. My apologies if there was one.

Could someone help me out. I run a thread in the altcoin discussion section and I've never had problems with images not loading before. Now all of a sudden they stopped loading, giving me the image proxy error. The problem appeared today, have I missed an update or done something wrong?

Thanks in advance.

In regards to your question about MVP/Prototype
 
As for the MVP part, this is a research project about an advanced blockchain protocol, not an app. In that sense MVP has no meaning. But rest assured we are going to implement the technology iteratively and according to a set of specifications that are in our opinion close to an ISO standard.

In fact the very question about “showing code and progress” is very valid and we see it asked often in the cryptocommunity. But its important to understand that it comes from the fact that nowadays blockchain whitepapers are nothing more than a business plan full of technical claims that are not substantiated by a carefully laid out analysis or by formal descriptions of the envisioned algorithms. In that regard inspecting the code base is a way to understand the legitimacy of the development efforts and its “progress”. Dusk research paper is exactly the opposite and way more advanced. It goes to a great extent to describe accurately the technology used and the algorithm. You won’t find details of business development or even use cases. This because it is intended as a development manifesto (a proof of concept - similar to what an aforementioned prototype or MPV would prove) of a complete system with all components laid out and specified quite formally. In that sense, by inspecting code you would learn nothing more than what is already laid out quite accurately in the research.

Our mainnet is scheduled for launch in Q2 2019. Development is coming along nicely. We will publish a developer blog each month and update GitHub, once we pass the security audits, respectively.

The current team will be able to deliver the mainnet in time. Quality over Quantity Besides that, there will also be a public development group.

Dusk R&D
Dusk R&D is a research consortium where the primary goal is to iterate and improve on the Dusk Network white paper, and various research compendia. It will not only ensure a top notch technical system, but also the best talent in Europe working on improving Dusk Network. This research branch will feed directly into the two development teams and create a top-down adoption effect due to its academic and formalized validity.

There are three top notch research partner collaborations explored and/or confirmed and we will announce these as soon as we are able.

Dusk Core
Dusk Core is the development team directly led by Dusk’s own technical leads Emanuele Francioni, Fulvio Venturelli and others to be announced. They are responsible for the implementation of all the core aspects of the Dusk Network, such as our unique SBA* consensus mechanism, and our Secure Tunnel Switching methodology. They are complemented by our strategic partner, and award winning blockchain development team, Kryha.

Dawn Public Development
A community-driven development group. Dawn will concentrate on the user experience of Dusk Network, different language libraries, standardization, improvement proposals, Dusk wallet implementations, Dusk block explorer, and many more things. We look forward to announcing our Dawn community leads soon. They have extensive experience in blockchain and leading public development communities, and we are glad to have them onboard.

Thank you for your question. We have been discussing this point ourselves and there are pros and cons to both options; issue erc20 / delay.  The opportunity presented itself to work with a leading exchange and private sale contributors were vocal that they prefer to get tokens, or an erc20-voucher sooner than later. However, everyone agreed that a longer vesting schedule is preferred to reflect time till mainnet. Therefore we have decied to implement a state-of-the-art 12 month vesting system that we name; Second-by-Second (SbS) vesting.

It works as follows:
The smart contract will vest allocations second by second. What this means in practice is that,  at any point a token investor wanted to release their tokens, they can make a call on the smart contract and then will have access to the total number of tokens that will have vested at that second. For example. After the lockup, tokens will be vested over (365 days x 24 hours x 60 minutes x 60 seconds) 31,536,000 seconds. If someone wanted their tokens at the 1,234 second of the 12 month period, and they had purchased 31,536,000 tokens, they would receive 1,234 tokens at that point. If they did it at 6 months, they would receive half. If they did it at 1 day, 10 days, 57 days, and then every 3 weeks; they would receive the relevant whole tokens (rounded down) at each specific second.

This is a misconception. In democratic societies, privacy is very well accepted and even enforced at legislative levels by policy makers. An example is the GDPR. Another is the SEC enforcing secrecy to trading bodies in the stock market to prevent price manipulation. The Dusk Network provides the same level of privacy enforced by regulators. Only, it eliminates the “trusted third party” and returns the power of disclosure directly to the user.

For instance, in the case of payment, it is the responsibility of the wallet holder to show the details of the transactions on request of the auditors (by providing a view-key). In the use case of security, compliant confidentiality is achieved with KYC built in the protocol and the use of zero knowledge accumulators to keep the whitelist confidential.

Here's an example of why STO's need privacy;
Publicly opening a position in a security, heavily manipulates the price of that security. If Blackrock wishes to open a, say, $10M long position on a tokenized stock, they would raise the price of that asset if they would do it publicly. This is why it is illegal in regulated markets to openly advertise positions and why the buy/sell wall tricks so often seen on token exchanges would lead to indictments on regulated security exchanges. This is also the reasons why financial institutions resort to let brokers open positions on different exchanges on their behalf and most often resort to darkpools to execute their purchases or sales. If you wanna get rid of the broker middlemen and cebtralization, while enjoying the same benefits of darkpools in a decentralized fashion without prohibitive mediator fees you need (regulator friendly) confidentiality.