Zcash + Dogecoin = TOS Internet MoneyTelegram: https://t.me/tosprTOS is a decentralized and open-source cryptocurrency that offers privacy and selective transparency of transactions. TOS payments are published on a public blockchain, but the sender, recipient, and amount of a transaction remain private.
TOS is based on peer-reviewed cryptographic research, and built by a security-specialized engineering team on an open source platform based on Bitcoin Core's battle-tested codebase. Our improvement over Bitcoin is the addition of privacy. TOS uses advanced cryptographic techniques, namely zero-knowledge proofs, to guarantee the validity of transactions without revealing additional information about them.
HOW TOS WORKSTOS encrypts the contents of shielded transactions. Since the payment information is encrypted, the protocol uses a novel cryptographic method to verify their validity.
TOS uses a zero-knowledge proof construction called a zk-SNARK, developed by our team of experienced cryptographers based on recent breakthroughs in cryptography. These constructions allow the network to maintain a secure ledger of balances without disclosing the parties or amounts involved. Instead of publicly demonstrating spend-authority and transaction values, the transaction metadata is encrypted and zk-SNARKs are used to prove that nobody is cheating or stealing.
TOS also enables users to send public payments which work similarly to Bitcoin. With the support for both shielded and transparent addresses, users can choose to send TOS privately or publicly. TOS payments sent from a shielded address to a transparent address reveal the received balance, while payments from a transparent address to a shielded address protect the receiving value.
What are zk-SNARKs?TOS is the first widespread application of zk-SNARKs, a novel form of zero-knowledge cryptography. The strong privacy guarantee of TOS is derived from the fact that shielded transactions in TOS can be fully encrypted on the blockchain, yet still be verified as valid under the network’s consensus rules by using zk-SNARK proofs.
The acronym zk-SNARK stands for “Zero-Knowledge Succinct Non-Interactive Argument of Knowledge,” and refers to a proof construction where one can prove possession of certain information, e.g. a secret key, without revealing that information, and without any interaction between the prover and verifier.
“Zero-knowledge” proofs allow one party (the prover) to prove to another (the verifier) that a statement is true, without revealing any information beyond the validity of the statement itself. For example, given the hash of a random number, the prover could convince the verifier that there indeed exists a number with this hash value, without revealing what it is.
In a zero-knowledge "Proof of Knowledge" the prover can convince the verifier not only that the number exists, but that they in fact know such a number - again, without revealing any information about the number. The difference between "Proof" and "Argument" is quite technical and we don't get into it here.
“Succinct” zero-knowledge proofs can be verified within a few milliseconds, with a proof length of only a few hundred bytes even for statements about programs that are very large. In the first zero-knowledge protocols, the prover and verifier had to communicate back and forth for multiple rounds, but in “non-interactive” constructions, the proof consists of a single message sent from prover to verifier. Currently, the only known way to produce zero-knowledge proofs that are non-interactive and short enough to publish to a block chain is to have an initial setup phase that generates a common reference string shared between prover and verifier. We refer to this common reference string as the public parameters of the system.
If someone had access to the secret randomness used to generate these parameters, they would be able to create false proofs that would look valid to the verifier. For TOS, this would mean the malicious party could create counterfeit coins. To prevent this from ever happening, TOS generated the public parameters through an elaborate, multi-party ceremony. To learn more about our parameter generation ceremony and see the precautions we’ve taken to prevent the secret randomness essential to TOS from being exposed (e.g. computers being blowtorched), visit our Paramgen page. To learn more about the math behind the parameter generation protocol, read our blog post or whitepaper on the topic.
REWARD STRUCTURE:1 minute block times, 12.5 TOS per block
- During the first two years, 80% goes to miners and 20% to Founders' Reward (so miners get 10 TOS per block for first two years, then 6.25 TOS, and then halving after)
- During the first ~month, the block reward ramps up linearly from 0.005(ish?) TOS to 12.5 TOS
(the mining slow start)
GitHub: https://github.com/tospr/tosTOS documentation: https://github.com/tospr/tos-docsFeel free to discuss and post your findings
