-- Skycoin --
Written From Scratch in Golang. Inspired by Bitcoin
15 second transactions. 100 million coins
Provably Secure. First Secure Non-PoW Coin
No mining. No 51% attack. No double spending
github: https://github.com/skycoinSkycoin is a second generation crypto coin.
Skycoin is designed to be a simpler, easier to use, more secure Bitcoin. Skycoin emphasizes simplicity, security and usability over doing everything.
Skycoin is a nuclear bunker designed to survive the looming internal and external threats Bitcoin is facing. Skycoin is setting a new standard for security and crytocoin protocol design.
Skycoin is being developed in collaboration between AKS, Myth and Syndicate under Darknet Plan and OP Redecentralize.
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Skycoin uses a protocol called Obelisk instead of PoW. Obelisk is a provably secure PoW alternative for creating fair total orderings in decentralized systems with adversarial nodes. Obelisk was chosen over other proposals because it is provably secure and can be layered over Bitcoin's existing security model to eliminate the possibility of 51% attacks.
Skycoin transactions are free. Users receive coin-hours for each hour they hold a coin. Coin-hours are spent on transaction fees. Transactions bid to enter a fixed sized block.
Skycoin transactions are fast. Most transactions are executed within fifteen seconds. Off blockchain transactions are instant.
Skycoin may have an inflation which is capped at 2% per year. Skycoin holders vote on a per project basis how the inflation is spent. The inflation is intended to fund projects which increase the value of Skycoin.
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Development Process:All Skycoin components are in Golang and C. There are multiple teams working on Skycoin and multiple independent software components required to achieve the long term vision of the project
This is an open source project. There is a huge list of bug fixes and things that need to be implemented. Substantial allocation of coins are reserved for developers working on the project. We have several shiny amazing next gen things in progress that we believe will have an impact that goes far beyond the Bitcoin community.
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Design:Skycoin tries to offer more security, greater privacy and better usability than Bitcoin.
Skycoin Philosophy:
- complex systems cannot be secure
- simplicity over complexity
- decentralized but pragmatic
- emphasis on usability
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Partial feature list:Security:
- higher level of security for non-technical users with improved ease of use
- deterministic ESDSA, enforced signature mutability
- hardening against SHA256 pre-image attacks, hardening against side channel attacks
- hardening against "offline" attacks on secp256k1
- optional quantum computer resistant TwoStep protocol transactions
- standardized remote signature HMAC API for hardware wallet devices
Privacy:
- Skycoin transactions have higher privacy than Bitcoin transactions ("wallet mixing", "money pot"
- Skycoin protects its users from identification for increased safety in hostile countries (ex. HTTPS/TLS tunneling)
- stenographic wallets
Usability:
- Wallet supports Bitcoin and Skycoin
- 15 second transactions (point-of-sale)
- simple 256-bit deterministic wallets
- clients only need unspent output set instead of whole block chain ("Snapshot")
- coins divisible to 6 places
Distributed Exchange:
- Off blockchain Transactions (through standardized API, "gateway")
- powerful scripting language for contracts (non-turing complete statically typed LISP variant)
- Open Transactions type crypto-equities, bonds, options and other securities
- OTC gateway API (based upon FIX, SWIFT, FIXatdl)
The blockchain is for settlement between counterparties. Price data and bid/ask orderbook data is not in the blockchain, but supported through the gateway API. Fractional Skycoin transactions and micropayment are handled as off block chain transactions.
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Coin Distribution:- There is no mining.
- All coins are created in genesis block.
- The coins will be distributed in a fair, open process
- There will be a coin giveaway for alpha testing
- No matter what distribution strategy is chosen, we expect that some people will whine.
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Software Release Schedule:The first Skycoin client will be released in January. White papers will be released as they are finished.
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No Mining: Satoshi has stated that mining is Bitcoin's only flaw. Miners are the greatest non-crpytographic threat to Bitcoin retaining value on geographic time scales. Mining introduce human factors and greed into the survivability of Bitcoin as a currency
- Dishonest miners may destroy Bitcoin
- We are close to a 51% attack
- gigahash.io has abused its hashing power to steal Bitcoin from gambling sites
- services such as cex.io allow people to rent a 51% attack by the minute
- mining pools will form cartels to orphan blocks mined by non-cartel members, to enhance their block rewards
- mining cartels will rent capacity to orphan blocks from other pools, if the reward is greater than the cost
- pools have begun capping block size to drive up transaction fees. Bitcoin transaction processing rate may be unable to keep up with growth in transactions from new users. Bitcoin is becoming unusable for micro-transactions.
- Every month more mining power is concentrated in the hands of a smaller number of people
- Mining ensures majority of new crypto-coins go to people with botnets, GPU farms and ASICs not available to the public.
- No one benefits from mining except miners and electricity companies
- electricity used by mining is wasted. Money spent on mining is being thrown into a hole, burnt and the costs are passed on to every Bitcoin holder
- Mining will substantially increase transaction fees to unsustainable levels when block rewards decrease. Bitcoin transaction fees may reach a level higher than the banking system Bitcoin was created to replace.
- Miners selling newly created Bitcoins to pay equipment and electricity costs, drives down the price of Bitcoin.
- If Bitcoin reaches viability as the next global reserve currency, the incentives for nation states to monopolize and control mining will be too great to contain.
Skycoin was designed to eliminate mining completely and eliminate the problems it creates. Skycoin replaces reliance on honest miners with reliance on mathematics.
- Skycoin is more secure because it does not rely upon the good will of miners
- Skycoin transactions will be cheaper because there are no mining costs being passed on to users
- Skycoin transactions are not subject to 51% attacks by mining cartels
- Skycoin is environmentally friendly and sustainable. Skycoin does not require twelve coal power plants to power mining
Eliminating mining creates new problems for coin distribution.
- We will not do a Nxt or Mastercoin style IPO because we believe they are unfair and discourages new users.
- We will not create 100,000,000,000,000 coins and give 10k coins to each user and hoard the other 99,999,996,000,000 coins like Ripple did.
- There will be no Ripple style secret back door deals at below market price.
- People who contribute to the success of Skycoin will receive whole bags of coins
Distribution will be as fair as possible.
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These are some things are working on.
TwoStep: Quantum Computer Secure Transactions This is a draft protocol for securing crypto-coin transactions against future advances in mathematics or computing which render discrete logarithm based public key cryptography insecure.
TwoStep is part of QuantumEclipse, a suite of next-gen cryptocoin protocols developed under OP Darknet Plan for the Skycoin Project.
This protocol is:
- secure if addresses are not reused
- lower overhead than Lamport Signatures
- works with SHA256 preimages equally as well as Secp256k1 signatures
- is not dependent on the security of discrete logarithm based public key cryptography
Proticol:
1> A user creates a transaction and publishes the SHA256 hash of the transaction onto the block chain (effectively a timestamp)
2> The user waits several blocks and publishes the transaction. Miners enter the transaction onto the block chain.
A transaction with a prepublished hash is "timestamped" by the publication of the hash. A transactions without a prepublished hash is a "non-timestamped" transaction.
Transaction Precedence Rules:
- if an unconfirmed non-timestamped transaction spends outputs used by a non-confirmed timestamped transaction, the non-timestamped transaction is invalid (time-stamped transactions have priority over non-timestamped transactions).
- if two unconfirmed timestamped transactions spend non-disjoint sets of unspent outputs, the transaction with the earliest timestamp is the valid one.
Address pub keys are not being published until they are first used in a transaction. The TwoStep protocol delays the publication of the public key for an address until transaction publication and then renders any transactions an attacker creates from the recovered private key invalid using the precedence rules.
Strict transaction precedence rule enforcement is not possible in Bitcoin, but is possible in Skycoin using new blockchain primitives introduced by Obelisk.
Money Pot RFC:Money Pot is a simple protocol that improves Skycoin transaction privacy by mixing transactions from multiple wallets using a third party.
The "body" of each transaction is a list of unspent inputs and list of transaction outputs. The body is hashed and the hash signed by the owner of the private key for the unspent output. The signatures for each unspent input go in the transaction header.
What this means, is that transactions from multiple wallets can safely be mixed into a single transaction by a third party. We call this "wallet mixing". Bitcoin transactions are easily traced because in Bitcoin the addresses of all inputs to a transaction can assumed to come from the same wallet. Skycoin breaks this assumption.
One simple protocol Skycoin implements for wallet mixing is called "Money Pot". Money Pot works as following following:
- three people send their inputs and outputs to a remote server
- server creates a transaction containing the inputs/outputs from all three people
- the server sends each person the transaction.
- Each person verifies the transactions and sends the signatures for their inputs
- The server publishes the transactions.
This protocol is much simpler than zero coin while dramatically improving transaction privacy. The third party is unable to steal users coins because of the design of Skycoin transactions.
Wallet Shuffle RFCShuffle provides a very easy way of moving coins between deterministic wallets. Shuffle is one of the ways Skycoin will improve wallet usability.
Wallet shuffle takes a seed for an existing deterministic wallet and seed for a new deterministic wallet and moves coins between the wallets using the Money Pot protocol. Every shuffle operation entails additional coin mixing and increased wallet privacy.
For instance
input wallet : 5a42c0643bdb465d90bf673b99c14f5fa02db71513249d904573d2b8b63d353d
output wallet: 1d26c392b3c1b6c5c7947e07934d8256bdf084bcf89f58d82ebef3c986e4836c
I am in, please let us know soon...
