[ANN] MoX - Medium of Exchange - Draft Paper

[moxnetwork]

We are pleased to pre-announce MoX -- an efficient block chain with good privacy and modern monetary policy.

The design is novel. Draft paper is here:

https://mox.network/indigopaper.html

We are remaining anonymous for now. Since the design is novel, we ask that those of you who deeply understand block chain consensus review it and tell us what's wrong with it. If you find a fatal flaw we may decide to reward you from our initial coin allocation.

As for next steps we are not doing an ICO or airdrop. Instead we will be allocating coins via a scheme called Proof of Donation (POD). We are assembling a list of Bitcoin addresses that correspond to worthy charitable causes. Send coins there and we can verify those coins on the block chain and then allocate initial MoX coins accordingly.

Edit:

Also see: https://github.com/moxnetwork/mox

Main site at mox.network is not live yet.

- The MoX Developers

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[moxnetwork]

CPoW doesn't require any special hardware. It's an algorithm that could be executed by any computer, and the whole point is that it doesn't require anything over and above that. The goal is to eliminate runaway proof of work and the associated energy/capital and environmental cost.

A full MoX node on a somewhat busy network could probably be run on a mid-tier VPS or something as powerful as a decent modern laptop or desktop. Any node can mint if it happens to manage to mint during a stalled chain and is later assimilated. Minting requires a little bit of extra CPU but nothing dramatic.

[jimlite]

More details simplified

[moxnetwork]

Here's a bullet list:

• Block chain, not DAG etc.
• Alternative consensus algorithm designed to reduce and manage work requirement
• Block "minters" compensated from fees, not new coins. Fees are low and computable ahead of time.
• Anyone has a chance of becoming a minter, no special hardware or insane amounts of compute required. Not proof of stake.
• New coins are allocated as interest earned on deposits, not directly to block creators.
• Design could accomodate more sophisticated monetary policies in the future.
• Privacy through complete elimination/obfuscation of both senders and receivers, keeping all fixed identities off the chain. 100% of chain is ephemeral tokens talking to ephemeral tokens and encrypted messages.
• Has some support for DAPPS via key/value store, more DAPP features planned.
• Off-chain layer two network analogous to lightning network planned.
• Completely original, not a fork.
• "Presale" will be done via charitable contributions, not as a get-rich-quick scheme. We may allow optional contributions to us or may hold back a small percentage of initial coins, but the vast majority of any presale will go directly to organizations with charitable aims (and we will not be middleman).
• Lower latency and faster full mesh UDP protocol (still in dev), compressed blocks that reference transactions, small TX size, fast block time.
• Relational data model for fast queries and could support direct use of "real databases" like PGSQL, Microsoft SQL, various cloud SQL engines, CockroachDB, etc. Initial version uses SQLite3. Relational model lets things like token balances be queried without "chain rescan" nonsense.
• Primary dev is a past developer of many secure protocols, cryptographic systems, and distributed networks for industrial and military clients. Of course you have no way of verifying that yet, so I could be a pajama wearing troll on a pogo stick, but there it is.

[kurbeks]

watching

[sdogemoto]

Really kind of need ELI5 on the mining stuff in here. I am not a cryptographer.

[moxnetwork]

I'll try but it'll be an oversimplification.

A room full of people deal themselves a poker hand. (They can't cheat because of crypto magic.) They then play poker. The game goes on with the winner of each round creating the next block... until someone can't win. (This can't happen in poker but pretend it can.) When somebody can't win someone else can join the table, but to really have any chance in the game some plurality of the players have to agree to let them in. If any player doesn't win long enough they're out of the game.

[Tactical Genius]

Remaining anonymous for now won't help the project very much if you ask me. There have been numerous projects that have scammed people so people have wised up now trying as much as possible to avoid being scammed. So you may want to rethink your decision. In any case your project is really novel and i will keep an eye on it.

[moxnetwork]

Yeah we might drop the anonymity at some point. Still thinking about if/when.

As far as scams: we are not doing a conventional ICO, and the code is open, so if the system works it should stand on its own. We're going to allocate coins by allowing people to contribute to charities directly, not through us, in what we're going to call a POD (proof of donation).

[moxnetwork]

Right now we are mostly interested in comments from people knowledgeable on consensus, etc., so we can refine our design pre-launch.

[SimpleMan]

Good privacy is quite a relative term if you put it that way. Can you maybe let us know a little bit more about the degree of privacy users of your network can expect?

[moxnetwork]

Privacy is hard to quantify. I'd say more private that Bitcoin or Ethereum but possibly less than Monero. Of course that depends on the security assumptions behind Monero being good but that's another question.

There are things we can do to further improve privacy in the future. Privacy isn't the only goal of the project, but we're trying to improve privacy over most cryptocurrencies.

[moxnetwork]

Basically there is no way to track custody on the chain directly. Sender and receiver addresses never exist on the chain. You just see funds moving around but can't see the entities moving it or easily determine whether e.g. two transactions belong to the same 'real' transaction.

As the paper says: imagine a room full of invisible people passing money around. You'd just see wads of cash floating around under the direction of mysterious forces.

This really has a different privacy profile entirely from Monero. Monero puts addresses on the chain but uses ring signatures to cloud things up with noise. This just keeps addresses completely off the chain, but money flows are less clouded.

Personally I would not rely on either system (this or Monero) alone to protect me from e.g. a nation state or someone else with really serious resources. If I had an adversary like that I'd take layers upon layers of precautions. Both this (MoX) and Monero are almost certainly good enough to protect you from your average cyber-criminal, surveillance company, spammer, etc.

[koralan]

Mox is a project focused on the interests of users. A portion of the exchange fee used as a reward and without additional rewards will limit the inflation of the currency. Is this one of the special elements of Mox?

[deebosch]

If I understand it correctly verification of submitted "ticket" will require a lot of hashing (the bigger the chain the more hashing) by the whole network? While in bitcoin it requires a lot of work to produce result, but much less work to check its validity, you propose the opposite?

[moxnetwork]

koralan: correct. The term "progressive" refers to this as well as the equitable distribution of coins. (It should not be read as necessarily an endorsement of a particular political party or platform, since the meaning of that term there varies quite a bit around the world.)

deebosch: yes, but the chain would have to get insanely long for this to matter. SHA-256 does about 275mb/sec on a 2.7ghz Core i5. A year of block chain at one block every 15 seconds would be 67mb of minter tickets or about a quarter of a second. Still does make me wonder if whether it should be:

Scoring Hash = Hash( Minter Ticket | Scoring Hash of Previous Block )

Yeah, I think we might make that change. That would make it basically free but would preserve the dependency on all previous tickets back through the entire chain.

 

[moxnetwork]

Just revised the paper to update the algorithm as above since it's cryptographically equivalent but much more efficient. Thanks @deebosch -- gave you a little credit at the end in the appendices.

[moxnetwork]

Something on the main site now: https://mox.network

[moxnetwork]

Two major charities lined up for POD. If anyone knows of any others please suggest.

[act0d]

waiting for more info