SMART Coin Observer

submitted 5 days ago * by xinxi Litecoin Developer

Litecoin, being a very successful digital currency, has many superior aspects than its predecessor Bitcoin such as faster confirmation time, nearly zero blockchain congestion, and no pre-mining. However, as we know, each Litecoin transaction consists of at least one input and output, and for now, the amount of each input and output is clearly shown to the public, causing privacy issues and potential loss of fungibility. To make Litecoin even more attractive as a digital currency, we are planning to add the confidential transactions feature into it.

The basic idea of confidential transaction is to obfuscate the amount of Litecoins in all inputs and outputs and at the same time guarantee all outputs equal to the inputs in a cryptographically verifiable way using a technique named Pedersen commitment. More details can be found in [1, 2, 3].

According to [1], confidential transaction requires only a soft fork, so the deployment requires only a consensus from the miners, and the resulting new Litecoin Core will be backward compatible. Therefore, confidential transactions is also the most practical way of upgrading the anonymity of Litecoin at this moment.

Ring signatures [3, 4] can further improve anonymity but requires a hard fork to our best knowledge, which thus requires an almost unanimous decision from the whole Litecoin community in order to avoid a split of the Litecoin blockchain.

Regarding the plan, @coblee has clearly shown his interest in supporting the confidential transaction feature, and I have been working on it since two weeks ago. Now that the survey has been done, we will come up with a concrete implementation plan as soon as possible. If anyone outside the Core team wants to participate, kindly contact us.

[1] https://bitcoinmagazine.com/articles/confidential-transactions-how-hiding-transaction-amounts-increases-bitcoin-privacy-1464892525

[2] https://people.xiph.org/~greg/confidential_values.txt

[3] https://eprint.iacr.org/2015/1098.pdf

[4] http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/um/people/yael/publications/2001-Leak_Secret.pdf

Quote from: Zer0Sum on September 24, 2016, 02:02:49 PM

Quote from: bones261 on September 24, 2016, 05:55:42 AM

Tether is a pegged token. It is always worth exactly $1.00. It's very stable. You can use it on exchanges like Poloniex and Bitfinex to trade with. I'm not sure what other vendors accept Tether. You can use Tether to transfer funds from one place to another, or back to your wallet, without having to worry about any downward market movements for BTC or other cryptocurrencies while the transfer takes place. You may need to share your KYC info with certain places to use Tether.
However, you should remember, that the US dollar is not exactly perfectly stable either. It buys less and less as the years go by. It is also created out of thin air by the banks via issuing loans. The bubble's going to burst some day. All the US dollar is backed by is the integrity of the US government.

Tether is not a "peg". Tether is an asset-backed token...
Each Tether is backed by 1 USD sitting in a Hong Kong bank.

And based on the way Hong Kong regulatory authorities hung Bitfinex Customers out to fucking dry...
Tether likely carries very substantial counterparty risk.

"Pegs", on the other hand, are very expensive to maintain...
Because they require maintaining a delta neutral position and adjusting it hourly/daily...
(Even with their advantages, both the British and Swiss central banks have gone broke in recent years maintaining pegs).

http://www.investopedia.com/terms/d/deltaneutral.asp

There are no wacky short cuts to delta neutral (like the SBD "dollar peg" fiasco that's always off by 20%)...
Someone has to pay the FULL cost of negating volatility.

http://www.lumbridgecity.com/bitcoin-prices-are-being-systematically-manipulated/

The Truth About Bitcoin Trading ROBOTS

The truth is, these advanced computer programs can easily coordinate the data from all the trading exchanges, they can take the public information about where all the trade orders are standing above and below the markets, and they can precisely calculate how much money is needed to push the market just far enough to cause these standing orders to get executed… and then they calculate exactly how much money is required to push the market just far enough the OTHER direction, to cause the next wave of orders to get hit.

Knowing the range and depth where orders are placed, these trading ROBOTS intentionally soak HUGE profits from small price moves because they activate thousands of small orders – that are placed by naive, inexperienced small traders like you and me.

It Is Just Going To Get Worse, Not Better

The more exchanges that provide a means for leveraged trading different Cryptocurrencies, the more opportunities for these trading Robots to make massive profits.

Quote from: Zer0Sum on September 29, 2016, 03:21:11 AM

STEEM is doomed because it's the 12th century Feudal System meets the Hunger Games...
Where 50 Lords For Life toss crumbs to a horde of starving Serfs.

No amount of lipstick on the STEEM pig will matter.

At least COVAL is a rebranding of RibbitRewards...
So it has a very experienced team and, probably, your typical alt distribution.

A rethinking of the billion $$$ rewards industry is a home run waiting to happen.

> Incent warning. Max Keiser involved

Quote from: sofu on October 02, 2016, 06:59:45 PM

When Keiser is talking the first time about a shitcoin its ok to buy some. When he his going full retard in shilling shit you should gtfo. Remember his Startcoin to $1 hype Grin

Quote from: BitcoinNational on September 25, 2016, 04:13:37 AM

http://www.lumbridgecity.com/bitcoin-prices-are-being-systematically-manipulated/

I feel this happen from long time ago this was also something that traders of forex do but, in order to do this thing you need to be a whale the ammount and of money you need is insane from a perspective of a poor guy.

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1377459.0

Re: Using compact indexes instead of hashes as identifiers.

Japanese investors flock to megabanks’ subordinated debt

(Nikkei) – Yield-hungry Japanese insurance companies and other domestic institutional investors are aggressively pursuing a type of perpetual subordinated bond issued by the country’s three megabanks.

Such hybrid subordinated convertible debt is known as additional tier-1, or AT1. When the issuer’s capital is impaired beyond a predetermined trigger level, due to write-offs on bad loans, for instance, these debt instruments are automatically converted into stock. The issuer could arbitrarily stop paying interest as well. The higher risks are compensated by higher returns.
http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2016-10-18/world-gone-mad-japanese-investors-edition

Bitcoin vs the 11th-20th ranked alt-coins by proportioned marketcap
http://woobull.com/crypto-currency-index-funds-the-simulations-have-surprising-results/

The oligarchs are going to sell. Now, because there is not a line of investment bankers all waiting to purchase steem, you can't buy it with a credit card or with any standard investment approach, and there are no institutional investors in the steem itself that means the people that are most likely to buy it are the 7k active users. That leaves each active user having to purchase 145k steem to get us back to a $1 range. Maybe I'm a fool, but I don't see that scenario passing.
https://steemit.com/steem/@aggroed/steem-keeps-falling-the-silence-is-deafening

https://streamium.io/
Stream Live Video And Get Paid
Set how much you want to charge your viewers, start broadcasting and earn bitcoins on a per-second basis.

---
Disney = DragonChain

Quote from: iamnotback on October 27, 2016, 07:26:25 AM

Quote from: ccs5t on October 26, 2016, 09:45:04 PM

Looks alright to me aside from the sketchy no name developers?

@jl777 is not a no name. I am @anonymint and I personally communicate with him and was aware this project was coming. I am not anonymous. Go to my Steemit account for my photos and LinkedIn.

You can see he was having technical interactions with the Zcash team on their Github.

James is exclusively a C programmer. He is good enough C programmer, productive, and sincere about the work he does.

That doesn't necessarily mean he completes every project on time, or that he has good judgement about features or marketing. He had accomplished some major projects in the Nxt ecosystem, and some of those remained half-baked (and still being worked on) such as Bitcoin Dark (which is apparently transitioning to Komodo so he can fulfill his obligation to BTCD investors).

My understanding is there are others helping him on the marketing this time. And I would presume also others advising him on feature set.

James is not a good GUI programmer, so make sure he has someone on his team who is good at that.

I can't vouch for the quality of this project, because I have not been tracking it. But I can vouch that @jl777 is a legit programmer. He is serious and coding every day without fail (know this because I was chatting with him daily about programming during some periods in the past, not lately). I have had numerous technical discussions with him in private chat.

Apparently nobody knows his identity. And @DecentralizedEconomics is incorrect to claim he once ran for mayor of San Diego. James comes from financial background where he was a programmer. That is all I know about him.

I was aware months ago he was going with the name Komodo.

The speculators I know have gained wealth in BTC by buying ICOs and holding for the 10X gain. You've got to select the quality projects that will have follow through, have experienced marketing, and have some whales who are accumulating. @jl777 knows some of these people. Again I can't vouch for the future success of this speculation.

I am not currently vested in Komodo, except if you can consider my relationship with @jl777 as a conflict of interest or form of vestment. I have no funds to make a highly speculative long-term (i.e. > 3 months) payoff investment at this time.

Note I would prefer if @jl777 had another quality developer on his team. (Edit: I see some other anonymous devs are listed, but afaics we don't know who they are or what work they have done in the past)

ZCash-based Komodo (KMD) recently started its public ICO to raise funds for development, and ended up bringing in more than 1000 bitcoin on the crowdsale’s first day. At press time, that funding amount is worth around $648,220 USD.

Disclaimer: This article is sponsored by Bitcoin PR Buzz.

One contributing factor to this large initial success was that the team offered investors a 25 percent bonus for buying into the project on the first day of the ICO.

According to a press release, the project’s developers will use funds from the ICO to continue work on the cryptocurrency, the main selling point of which is its ability to send anonymous transactions over Bitcoin’s ZCash fork through zero-knowledge proofs.
Full Anonymity and Security With Komodo

komodoIts Delayed Proof of Work consensus mechanism, said developers, also allows Komodo blocks to be notarized on the Bitcoin blockchain through “notary nodes.” These nodes send information from the Komodo blockchain to Bitcoin’s blockchain, then back to Komodo.

Developers claim that this notarization process makes rewriting the Komodo blockchain impossible as long as the Bitcoin blockchain remains secure and uncompromised.

The new Delayed Proof of Work mechanism is also reportedly more energy efficient than regular Proof of Work, since it borrows power and security from the Bitcoin blockchain instead of relying entirely on Komodo-specific mining. This method, the team claimed, makes Delayed Proof of Work just as efficient as a Proof of Stake cryptocurrency, while retaining Bitcoin-level security.

This project came from research done by the BitcoinDark (BTCD) and SuperNet teams. Therefore, developers have enabled BTCD users to swap their holdings for KMD at a 50 percent bonus. BTCD users will also get a “special asset” that lives on the KMD blockchain and allows users to continue receiving BTCD dividends.

The KMD supply has an initial cap of 100 million. Developers claim that 90 percent of that will go to ICO participants, with the other 10 percent held to pay for development and marketing.
http://bitcoinist.net/komodo-first-day-ico/

man it's been awhile since 'discuss' said something SMART

The importance of the name https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1684812.msg16916060#msg16916060

http://www.america2050.org/maps/

the aim of inspiring a generation to re-think, re-design & build a positive future through the framework of a circular economy