Doubloon is a groundbreaking cryptocurrency research project that has pioneered many new improvements not present in any other project. The main highlights of our research efforts include a brand new Egalitarian mining algorithm called
Itsuku along with pioneering our new trustless zero knowledge system.
This is a PRE-ANN to inform the general cryptocurrency community of our work here and how to get involved with testing cycles as well as the upcoming launch of Doubloon.
Doubloon is the result of over seven months of research and development. We intially started this project as a comunity effort towards a planned hardfork upgrade to Boolberry because the developer abdandoned that project. When we revealed our ANN our efforts have motivated the original developer to return to work on BBR. We also paired up with another team of researchers to pioneer a new zero knowledge protocol which will be the first of its kind. As holders of Boolberry we will continue to support that project during this interim period, although, our main focus will be on Doubloon. The timeline below displays the original path for the project:
Doubloon is a brand new privacy protocol and will be the first trustless zero knowledge cryptocurrency. Our research team is compromised of leading professors from universities around the world and our development team is compromised of veteran PhD and MSc level contributors. Our goal here is to establish a new benchmark for research and development within the cryptocurrency privacy vertical.
Doubloon will be fairly launched with no ICO. We'll be implementing a reasonable premine for research, development and marketing fund and utilizing a mining tax for ongoing project related funding. In addition will be providing an optional in-wallet donation address that will go towards the i2pd team for those that would like to contribute to their efforts towards improving the router. At the moment, our team is working is on a private repository while we refine the project until its ready for public testing.
In the near future, we will be releasing a public testnet for the mining algorithm followed by a public testnet for the rest of the codebase. After the code has been thoroughly tested, we'll announce our launch date which is currently planned for Q1 2018.
Coming Soon
We initially brought Professor Fabien Coelho on board to peer review the Cryptonight and Wild Keccak algorithms to see if they could be improved upon which also led us to review other promising algorithms as candidates to replace WK. We discovered the Merkle Tree Proof-Argon2, or MTP-Argon2, algorithm designed by Biryukov et al. of Equihash and Zcash fame. Biryukov and Khovratovich designed the Equihash algorithm in use by Zcash. Their latest design MTP-Argon2, or Mekle Tree Proof, was designed as a successor to Equihash with the primary function of providing an Egalitarian mining solution.
Professor Coelho reviewed this algorithm and redesigned it to be hardened against all known attack vectors along with optimized proof sizes, which is known as Itsuku. The new algorithm has 1/16th proof size of the original MTP-Argon2 design. Our research into designing and peer reviewing this algorithm has been shared with the ZCoin team as part of their bounty program as an attempt to unify and peer review the design. Marc Bevand research has also been crucial in helping improve the design.
One of the primary benefits of Itsuku is that the miners bear the resources burden while verifiers do not. This is a true egalitarian mining algorithm and unlike the current CN mining algorithms, one that has seen a substantial amount of active research and peer review from within the academic community. Initial spec is 2GB but in any case, even with 64GB of RAM there won't be much speedup, since the limiting factor is bandwidth and not space.
Dr. Coehlo is a professor of Computer Science at the prestigious MINES ParisTech, PSL Research University. His research into Merkle Tree Proofs and Proof-of-work algorithms dates back to 2007 before Bitcoin was launched. It goes without saying he is a true pioneer and leader in this field.
Arnaud Larroche and Baptiste Colin are two of Fabien's students at MINES ParisTech. They've written a Python implementation of the algorthm.
https://github.com/baptistecolin/itsuku As stated earlier, our C++ implementation will be made public in the near future for testing along with a GPU miner contest we’ll be holding to make sure everyone has access to the same competitive mining tools.
Relative links:
Merkle Proof -
http://www.hashcash.org/papers/merkle-proof.pdfEquihash -
https://eprint.iacr.org/2015/946MTP -
https://arxiv.org/pdf/1606.03588v1.pdfMTP Attack -
https://eprint.iacr.org/2017/497ZCoin Bounty -
https://github.com/zcoinofficial/zcoin/wiki/MTP-Audit-and-Implementation-Bounty-SubmissionsMarc Bevand's Blog covering MTP -
http://blog.zorinaq.com/attacks-on-mtp/Itsuku Whitepaper -
http://docdro.id/gxDifaI (design is in section 4.3)
Itusku Python Implementation -
https://github.com/baptistecolin/itsukuIACR Publication -
https://eprint.iacr.org/2017/1168In an effort to provide transmission privacy, we’ve integrated the i2pd router into the new codebase with advisement from the i2p team. 1776, the developer spearheading this effort has made a massive amount of progress in this area of the project and we will have a i2p design available at launch. He has a ton of experience in this area and has brought that into this project for peace of mind. In the future he will be submitting an improvement proposal to i2p team to increase efficiency.
A project can have the best technology but if it's not user friendly then it will be harder for less technical end users to adopt it. Keeping this in mind our designers have crafted a beautiful GUI wallet that includes features such as an address book, in-wallet explorer and mining. We will also be following up with mobile applications but they may not be ready at launch.
All in all, our efforts here will culminate into a new zero knowledge privacy protocol along with new egalitarian mining algorithm.
Our public testing for Itusku will be announced very soon so stayed tuned to this thread for updates. We invite everyone in the cryptocurrency community to join us on this adventure as we pioneer the future of financial privacy.
