M I L L E N N I U M C O I NSaturday Night
Bulletin #2
Now that we have a skeletal web publishing and browsing
system, the integration of stealth transactions has begun.
Stealth addresses, as I'm sure many of you know is a very
elegant cryptosystem, where recipient of coins creates a stealth
public key, and the sender derives "ordinary" one time MIL
address from that. So with this no one can connect the derived
address to you.
Actually, this is pretty much the same what delegates already do, so why
stealth addresses? Is that an overkill? Or - just a pretty but
irrelevant, cosmetic feature to pull in some investor money, right?
Well, no. If it were simply a feature to paint over the wallet, I could
do this much quicker by just pulling the code from Github and compiling and hey
presto, we have a pretty nifty darknet market application. But I intend
to make every layer of the MIL3 play synergistically together to bring
about something novel.
I'm going to talk about this much more in the coming weeks, but here's
a first bird's eye view of the entire concept. So far, the absolute killer
app that has been based on cryptocurrency - the one that has the best
chance to break out from the money-game ghetto of Bitcointalk forum
and actually get some real users has been the darknet market (DNM).
Many DNMs model themselves after the centralized model of Silk Road,
which has caused problems, as the users can never tell if the owner of
the market is going to vanish with all the BTC. As this has happened a
number of times, there has been a growing demand for
decentralized
marketplaces.
Recently we have seen some decentralized marketplaces emerge, such
as Open Bazaar. These have teams of very gifted devs and often substantial
funding too, and it is the latter aspect that kind of sabotages their chances of
success. The reason being, Investors don't want to be seen funding a new
Silk Road, even though that is clearly more in demand than the "decentralized EBay"
idea that they are trying promote in order to be "respectable".
But our MIL is small and under the radar, and therefore well equipped to employ
the window of opportunity. Usability has been very high on the list of design goals from the
start, and if done well, it will attract users.
However, there is of course an ethical problem here, and one that I've given much
thought to. Do I want to make an application that allows people to trade
anything,
however reprehensible to myself? And I think I have made a small advance towards
a solution by introducing a new way to do anon transactions that I call the "
Glass Onion",
something that combines partial transparency with strong anonymity. That is, no one
can see who is trading with whom, but the delegates will see what is being traded and
they can refuse transferring the funds if they do not appreciate the trade (or the vendor or
the merchandise). As a result, if the majority of users do not like the vendor, he has
much harder time establishing business on the network compared to someone whose
list of merchandise is more non-controversial.
All this is to be implemented in a trustless and decentralized manner and this
is no easy task. But it is just this challenge what motivates and inspires me. Not the money,
although of course I'd like my tiny stash of MIL to appreciate in value. So this is the reason why I don't just slap
stealth addresses into the existing codebase and be done with it. They will function as building
pieces in the Glass Onion Market that I've described here and this takes a little more.
So that's all from me now. This missive became a little lengthier than usual, but I thought
it would be nice to get the cat - or sizable portion of the feline at least - out of the bag at this stage
already.
See you soon,
Yarko