I was just excited about superblocks before, but I just realized that this coin is in fact trying to use cryptonote. That's very cool. This was very hard to see in the announcement. People either are or will be desperate for anonymity.
You're right, we have a system that uses a secondary currency called MOINX which like CryptoNote uses ring signatures and dual-key stealth addresses to create untraceable, unlinkable transactions. [
White paper] We never pushed it or the privacy angle very hard out of courtesy to SDC. It was their innovation and despite them not getting it quite right the first time, it's one I think they deserve more credit for. Later I held off on mentioning it until we'd implemented the fix.
I'm curious what the stances of coin will be in future:
1. will transactions be hidden by default to hide known actors, something often considered a necessity.
There are various levels of privacy available to users:
- (low privacy) Standard transactions on the main chain
- (moderate privacy) Transactions using (single-use) stealth addresses on the main chain, making them unlinkable
- (strong privacy) MOINX to MOINX transactions
There are some caveats though. The MOINX system is currently unused. I'm not sure if that's because we chose not to promote it heavily or because it's something people don't really have a use for, but if we were to start using it it would take some time before it could function effectively as each conversion from MOIN to MOINX creates more outputs that can potentially be used in MOINX transactions. I believe given the direction we'll be taking the project that the option to transact privately is something that users will come to appreciate.
Also, it's worth noting that having to convert from MOINX back to MOIN means compromising your privacy to an extent. This could be mitigated if we were to make MOINX the focus of the ecosystem, making it the currency of any services we build for example. We could even ask that exchanges switch to MOINX and leave MOIN purely for staking.
2. will amount transmitted be hidden like with RingCT on Monero?
When Monero does finish RingCT there's probably no reason why it couldn't be integrated.
3. will the use of Moin be hidden from ISP like with i2p
If someone wanted to hide it from their ISP there are already options such as using a VPN or running MOIN over the TOR network. (Settings>Options)
I believe SDC was working on native I2P support at one point, but I'm not sure if that's still planned. Again though, as the anonymous transaction function hasn't sparked a lot of interest so far we haven't given much thought to introducing other privacy-related features for which there might not be any demand.
4. will there be instant send feature? I'm not sure if this requires a multi-tier system of stakers. Vcash has a nice benefit of being quite secure with a single transaction.
No plans for this at present.
5. how will it address nothing at stake issue? Ethereum's casper implementation comes to mind.
We've landed on PoS v3 for now but I appreciate it's not perfect (and doesn't address nothing at stake). As you point out, the Eth team seem to be doing to most promising work in this area at the moment. It's something we plan to reevaluate and we'll be monitoring alternatives in the mean time. Perhaps in the end we'll just go back to trusty old proof of work.
6. how will scalability be achieved to VISA levels? projects like vcash, bitshares, nxt 2 stand out with some solutions to this, and I guess there's always the centralized lightning network type of solution.
This isn't a pressing concern. If we get to a stage where we're even remotely close to processing that many transactions we'll start giving thought to solutions.
I'll come back to that final question next time I'm on. Thanks a lot for the thought-provoking questions.
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