Preface
This article was written for everyone who somehow missed out on making it big when they failed to take advantage of their first “opportunity of a lifetime”. If you missed that boat, you’re at the right port.
The author assumes you have a basic understanding of cryptocurrencies. I won’t explain what they are, how they work, or why they are so important. I assume readers already understand the basics.
There are many altcoin projects. I expect a few of them to one day surpass Bitcoin. This is the nature of tech. However, one coin outshines all the rest: ShadowCash (SDC). In particular, it is superior as a vehicle for return on investment. It’s probably the most undervalued asset I have ever come across.
Introduction
ShadowCash (SDC) is the cryptocurrency used within the blockchain based software platform being actively developed by the Shadow Project, a free and open-source software (FOSS) project, founded July, 2014. This project sets itself apart in many regards. The goal of the project is to create an all-in-one software platform for a completely private, decentralized, and free economy. This software platform includes 3 main parts, enumerated below, each completely finished or in the final stages of development:
P2P Cryptocurrency: ShadowCash (SDC) — 100% Completed
Secure Communication and Group Chat — Over 95% Completed
P2P Decentralized Market — Over 80% Completed
Final Stages Before Launch
Part 1. P2P Cryptocurrency: ShadowCash (SDC)
This part of the platform is 100% completed and offers several innovative features. Everything works. There is amazing tech here, enabling completely private and untraceable transactions, with no money trail, making ShadowCash a top contender in the privacy coin scene.
ShadowCash (SDC) is superior to both Monero (XMR) and DigitalCash (DASH), the only other competing privacy coins. A small critique of each may be expedient.
DASH’s use of masternodes is a major weakness, arguably providing unguarded targets for NSA packet interception and traffic analysis, compromising privacy, and an easy DASH killswitch if desired. The DASH GUI looks like “Web 1.0”. DASH’s “ASIC resistant” hashing algorithm is not special, valuable or ASIC resistant. True ASIC resistance comes from a Proof of Stake model, such as the one currently used by ShadowCash. No one can secure the DASH network’s blockchain from a Raspberry Pi or smartphone. The DASH network is highly centralized and closed off to ordinary newcomers by its masternode blockchain security model, because masternodes require owners to lock up 1,000 DASH coins as a security deposit, presently costing newcomers over $12,500 USD to launch a masternode. On the other hand, these masternodes’ huge security deposits keep DASH coins off the exchanges, artificially propping up DASH exchange rates, without providing comparable value. Now, on to XMR.
The XMR GUI doesn’t look “Web 1.0”; it’s much worse: only a command line interface is available. It’s like Microsoft DOS from last millennium. Like ShadowCash, XMR supports anonymous transactions using similar software implementations. XMR offers nothing else. It has no GUI, no secure communication, no built in marketplace. It offers no advantages beyond those present in ShadowCash. XMR’s inflated price is based on a couple Dark Net Markets (AlphaBay and Oasis) recently adding support for XMR as a payment method. That should give you a clue where the SDC price will soon be climbing beyond.
For those who don’t know, I’ll quickly explain some of the amazing technology behind ShadowCash. The software provides 2 easy ways to hold a SDC balance: “publicly” or “privately”.
The “public” way of holding ShadowCash is blockchain based, just like Bitcoin. Transactions are stored as public records on the blockchain; balances and spending between addresses are visible, but to some degree identities are masked by the pseudonymous addresses. ShadowCash also offers an enhanced privacy technology that I won’t explain herein, called “Dual Key Stealth Addresses”, which are blockchain based but much more private. According to the project’s developers, the dual key stealth address implementation will become the default implementation behind the “public” ShadowCash balances in a subsequent update.
The “private” way of holding ShadowCash will first be explained via analogy before getting into technical details.
Imagine, you go into a casino with 100 dollars cash, trading that cash for poker chips of varying chip values, but instead of gambling, everyone in the casino places their poker chips into unique piles sorted by chip value, gets a receipt for the chips they contributed, and then hangs around. Whenever you decide to leave the casino, you use your receipt to withdraw your $100 worth of poker chips from the various piles, not necessarily the exact same chips you put in. Finally, you cash out your chips for completely different dollar bills than you entered the casino with, and leave the casino with completely laundered money. This is how ShadowCash’s “private” balance feature works. Now, onto the technical description.
The mechanism used for holding a private ShadowCash balance is a cryptographic technology called ring signatures, a type of zero-knowledge proof. A zero-knowledge proof is simply a mathematical way of proving a statement is true or false, with absolute certainty, without revealing any other knowledge about the matter. In the context of ring signatures, the information that can be proven true is whether a person is a member of a group, that is, a member of the ring. The software uses ring signatures to validate/prove whether a person has the authority to spend from the various piles of tokens, but nothing else is revealed about how many tokens that person has authority to spend or who that person is. The only information publicly known is how many tokens exist in each pile. ShadowCash has several groups of tokens, representing the full spectrum of coin values, just like the various piles of poker chips in our casino analogy, so that transactions of any amount can be assembled.
When a user converts a public ShadowCash balance (like cash) into a private ShadowCash balance (like a poker chip), the cash is destroyed, no longer existing as an unspent output on the blockchain, and whatever piles/groups of tokens were used for the conversion will now contain newly created tokens, and the owner will now have new private keys in their wallet which can be used to prove membership in the ring for that group, thus giving them authority to transfer tokens from those specific piles.
Conversely, when the “tokens” (private SDC balance) are converted back into “cash” (blockchain based public SDC balance), a person gets new ShadowCash coins whose money trail is cryptographically obfuscated such that nobody is able to know or prove who the sender was.
At the bare minimum, the value of this feature alone ought to add tens of millions of dollars to SDC’s market cap. Bitcoin offers nothing remotely close to this level of anonymity.
Part 2. Secure Communication and Group Chat
This part of the platform is over 95% completed. The next main part of the software is the secure messaging system which is currently undergoing a major GUI upgrade, including an update to support group messaging, similar to the experience of a chat room. Of course peer-to-peer messaging, with end-to-end encryption, will be great for business and making deals online without corporations, governments, or internet service providers spying on you. The normal peer-to-peer chat between 2 endpoints works 100% in the current version of the software. The update version, slated for release shortly, is simply for supporting group chat, improving performance, and sweetening up the GUI / UX (user experience).
Part 3. A P2P Decentralized Market
This part of the platform is over 80% completed. Possibly even further. Those familiar with the inner workings of the Shadow Project have kept their lips pretty tight. The market will by default run on top of the Tor or I2P networks (integration is done automatically in the background). It will be community driven in a free and fair way, based on consensus. Foreign governments won’t be able to restrict how the market is used. It will be practically impossible to shut down. I’ve been talking to a few guys from the project. And there are some really smart people working on this. They’re working on building some infrastructure with Docker and cloud based computing services, such as Amazon Web Services, to make launching new full nodes as easy as a single mouse click. This can be used to scale the network, providing lower latency so that the market will be extremely fast and ubiquitous, no matter where in the world the network is accessed from. The true IP addresses of nearly all nodes will be hidden. There are hundreds of billions of dollars transacted annually in government censored markets and tremendous global demand for a decentralized marketplace, especially one where privacy is securely protected straight out of the box, without need for users to have technical expertise to be protected.
Additional Strengths
Over 2 Years Mature, Strong Community
The age of the project, over 2 years, is a sign of strength and maturity. What is truly amazing is how this project has been completely funded by community contributions and donations, rather than by an initial coin offering, venture capitalists, or pre-mine investors. Given how far along things are, it’s unlikely that development will cease, as has happened with other altcoins and some ICO projects after the money ran out or when a major mistake was discovered. Investors will appreciate ShadowCash’s great risk to reward profile. This project has its own very powerful fuel, a community of people who believe in an idea and work unrelentingly, for delayed compensation, to bring it to success.
Slow And Steady Wins The Race
Not only is the project over 2 years old, development has been steady and consistent. The community has constantly been working on adding things, and improving the platform. New people have joined and started contributing. Even those who no longer contribute are holding their ShadowCash.
Organic Price Growth
ShadowCash has not been the subject of malicious price manipulation, with pumping and dumping and other tactics often seen with so many other cryptocurrencies. The growth has been slow, stable and organic, just like the growth in the community and its popularity in social media. The devs have been quietly working on this project for just over 2 years, doing their own thing, and it’s all taking shape.
Legitimate Bug Bounty Program
This project has a bug bounty program, where outside developers can be paid ShadowCash for improving the code base, with varying rewards, based on the severity and type of the bug reported. The highest payouts in the bug bounty program are for finding major security bugs in the code that affect transactional anonymity, etc . One such bug was found by an expert cryptographer, who was paid the highest reward possible under the bug bounty program, and the bug was patched quickly, showing that this is a legitimate project run by reliable people.
Lead Developer Reveals His Identity
The lead developer Ryno, who had previously maintained his anonymity, came out and revealed his identity, and allowed himself to be video interviewed, where he answered all the questions asked of him in a completely honest way. And it was very clear from the video that he is a competent developer, insightful, and trustworthy. At least that’s what I thought of the video. Ryno was not posing with lamborghinis or trying to sell a pipe dream.
ShadowCash Pays Interest
Stock investors often prefer buying stocks that pay dividends. ShadowCash has a feature similar to stock dividends whereby ShadowCash investors can earn a consistent cash flow. The only requirement is for a holder to run the software (a node) on their computer with coins in the wallet. No special hardware or expensive equipment is needed. Even a Raspberry Pi is adequate. ShadowCash is slightly inflationary, with the SDC money supply expanding at 2% annually, or approximately 130,000 SDC per year. This inflation is a good thing, because 2% is very reasonable, very low, and it’s how the network pays for securing the blockchain and preventing double spending attacks. The newly minted coins are awarded to those who run the software while holding coins. In effect, it’s like having a savings account that pays interest on one’s balance. Because not everyone who owns coins is staking with them, the actual interest earned is closer to 3–4% per year. This makes SDC even more attractive to invest in. There’s huge upward potential with SDC prices, and you earn interest denominated in SDC on your SDC holdings. Anyone who holds BTC and is lending out their BTC holdings to be used as leverage by traders on an exchange (also risking BTC theft), could just take those BTC and use them to buy SDC to stake with, because SDC pays better ROI than the exchanges do, and price support levels have been stable for months, making a large price fall unlikely, especially with user adoption and momentum picking up.
Low Money Supply
SDC is a very rare coin. Only around 6.6 million SDC coins exist today. With its low 2% annual inflation rate, even 20 years from now, fewer than 10 million SDC coins will exist.
Low Percentage of Coins For Sale
Confidence in the project is at all time highs, evidenced by the small percentage of the money supply listed for sale on the ask side of the orderbooks at Bittrex and Poloniex. This means holders are optimistic about holding, again bullish for upward pressure on SDC exchange rates.
Insanely Cheap Coins
Look at how many developer hours have gone into the overall Shadow Project, the beautiful GUI, the active community, the functional p2p network, the intelligent design and plans that have gone into the project, the wiki, the Raspberry Pi staking guide, the innovative tech, the messaging platform, and the nearly completed market, which is far better than OpenBazaar on both a technical and privacy level. Check out the gif images on The Shadow Project blog, offering a video-like sneak-peek of the new Group Chat functionality. Also consider coins that offer less or coins that offer about the same, and look at their market cap relative to ShadowCash. It’s insane that SDC is available for such low prices.
Finally, consider how much money has been raised by the most recent ICO projects that basically have nothing to show and somehow raised millions, or tens of millions of dollars, all because of hype and empty promises. Look at the DAO fiasco and how much money was raised and lost in that ICO. Buying at the current SDC prices would be like buying in at the very first round (the one with the lowest prices) of an exceptional ICO, on a project with huge potential, and barely any time remaining before launch.
SDC had very humble beginnings. No investor money to fund development, no ICO, no pre-mine, all organic and transparent. The ShadowCoin was launched in July 2014 as a so called “Fair Launch”, the gold standard for launching a coin at that time, where anyone with a mining rig or graphics card / CPU could mine coins during the Proof of Work phase. The “Fair Launch” model was designed to prevent a shitcoin’s creators from pumping and dumping pre-mined coins and then abandoning the project. Even though this project’s devs chose a “Fair Launch” and didn’t get an extra cut of the money supply for all their hard work, they continued their development contributions, week in and week out, month after month. This speaks volumes!
Closing Remarks
It’s a lot easier to get a great ROI if you buy something at an extremely low price. It’s much easier for a coin to go from $0.50 to $5.00 than to go from $10 to $100. Imagine how much capital would need to flow into Bitcoin to double its price! SDC could easily surpass DASH or ETH in a short period of time. It would take very little capital for SDC prices to achieve parity with the biggest coins in the crypto scene.
What price did you get in at?
ShadowCash (SDC) can be acquired in exchange for Bitcoin (BTC) on Poloniex.com, Bittrex.com, or in exchange for many other cryptocurrencies on ShapeShift.io.
Disclaimer: I am a long time holder of SDC for all the reasons shared above. Everything written herein, I believe to be true, to the best of my knowledge; However, these are my opinions only, not investment advice, and possibly incorrect. Perform your own due diligence and don’t rely on my opinions, because I am not licensed or competent to provide investment advice and cannot be held responsible for other people’s financial decisions.
Original article
https://decentralize.today/shadowcash-sdc-the-billion-dollar-baby-6b86f0660739#.6euv20rwa
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