SERO - A new blockchain tech may light up the deep web

[Prina1]

So far, at least, the market value of most cryptocurrencies has been dictated by the demands of the Deep Web ecosystem.

What does the Deep Web means?

On wikipedia, the deep web is collectively referred to as a site accessible only by special softwares, special licenses, or special settings for computers. Server addresses and data transfers on the Deep Web are anonymous and hidden. Deep Web networks are typically based on anonymous network transport protocols such as Tor or I2P. Tor focuses on providing anonymous access to the Internet, and I2P protocol focuses on anonymous web hosting. Layered encryption systems keep the identities and locations of Deep Web users anonymous and untraceable. Deep Web network encryption technology sends user data through a large number of intermediate servers, protecting user identity and ensuring anonymity. The transmitted information can only be decrypted through the subsequent nodes in the path, and these nodes lead to the egress node. Because the system is too complex, it is almost impossible to regenerate the node path and decrypt the information layer by layer.
Due to the high level of encryption, the website can not track its user's geographical location and IP, and users can not know the relevant information about the website host. As a result, communications between Deep Web users are highly encrypted, allowing users to communicate, post blogs, and share files in a confidential manner.
The Deep Web was originally just some technical features, the technology itself is not evil, but these characteristics are widely used in illegal online trading activities, such as illegal data, pornography, drugs, firearms and some of the communication of illegal organizations. In fact, some legitimate transmissions involving confidential information also operate on similar technologies, such as military secrets, some private communities, classified assets transactions, and so on.

Dark web and the rise of BTC

The attributes of cryptocurrencies like BTC are well matched by the business motivations behind the Deep Web. Bitcoin is based on blockchain technology, andthe blockchain is naturally decentralized, order-banking, to financial institutions, no middlemen,no government intervention, the transaction address has no relationship with IP addresses. These characteristics are in line with the needs of high anonymity and security of the dark network e-commerce. It can be said that the block chain has gradually acquired a new kind of technical standards for the Dark Web network, especially involves the potential
asset trading platform.

Bitcoin was born in January 2009 as an experiment that was initially almost worthless, but its real rise in price came in 2011, more or less thanks to a website called the “Silk Road”. The "Silk Road" was born in
February 2011. Besides jewellery, the goods sold on the website also included a series of "commodities" banned by various countries. At that time, the transactions of these commodities were settled with BTC as the payment currency. After the “Silk Road” was seized in 2013, according to an FBI investigation, its founders made at least 700,000 BTCs (about $80 million at the time) in profits between 2011 and 2013, while the total transaction value of the “Silk Road” was 9.5 million BTCs.

More private cryptocurrency - the Monero coin

However, the honeymoon period between BTC and the Deep Web did not last long. According to the survey report, the proportion of transactions related to money laundering using BTC in the Deep Web has
been declining, from 1.07% in 2013 to 0.12% in 2016. The essential reason is that the BTC as a kind of "None-anonymous Coin" (that is, cryptocurrency with transparent transaction data and account address),
has natural defects in its anonymity, its trading addresses and transaction amount of natural exposure to a third party. Bitcoin trading has become increasingly transparent as intelligence agencies around the world track it, often appear the seizure of currency account addresses, and the hard to- find currency substitutes face the same transaction risks as legal currencies, so the Weep Web world has been looking for the substitute for its currency.
Among many choices, LTC surpassed BTC in terms of transaction speed and low handling fee, and then became the favorite cryptocurrency in the Dark Web, but it is also not good for a long time, because the need for convenience can not replace the importance of transaction security.
Eventually, Monero currency such as higher safety coefficient currency has become the darling of the Deep Web transactions. In the summer of 2016, AlphaBay, the main market of theDeep Web, first introduced the
Monero coin (XMR) as a means of payment.
This decision also led to the rapid growth of the market value of Monero coin from $5 million to $185 million that year. The most important reason why Monero coin is so popular is that it adopts ring-signature
cryptocurrency technology. It is a completely anonymous cryptocurrency, whose addresses, transaction amount, sender and receiver information are completely hidden and cannot be tracked and
inquired.

The ultimate shielding solution with Zcash

Both Monero and Zcash are typical representatives of anonymous coins. But on the technical level, the zero-knowledge proof technology used by Zcash surpasses Monroe's ring signature technology in terms of
anonymity. The zero-knowledge proof technique solves the problem of being able to prove to you that an assertion is true without revealing any information about it. Take the cryptocurrency transaction as an example.
It is to try to prove that the transaction is correct and the asset is valid without telling the payer, the payee and the amount involved. The default ring number of Monroe's ring signing technology is 4. , in
fact, using a different ring numbers may let traders visible, which means that on the basis of every transaction, anonymous intensity is constrained by the number of ring’s participants. The blockchain analysts, although cannot prove that trading is related, but they can calculate the probability of the transaction association. Zcash's hiding method is much more advanced than Monroe. It can hide the trading history in all the transactions that have occurred before, completely breaking the chain traced between transactions, and can achieve the ultimate concealment scheme.

Why isn't Zcash as popular as Monero on the Deep Web

Although Zcash has the best anonymity, some problems limit its applicability in Deep Web transactions. One of the problem is that Zcash is not 100% anonymous currency: the Zcash protocol uses two types of
addresses for transactions: the "z address" for invisible transactions and the "t address" for transparent transactions. In the Zcash protocol,, all transactions for both t addresses are transparent and the transfers
history can be publicly accessed. When a transaction generated between the t address and the z address, a third party can view part of the information of the private transaction, thereby affects the anonymity and allow the observer to analyze the identity of the anonymous transaction. Another problem is zero knowledge
proof of the speed of encryption transactions, because of the complexity of mthematical calculation, Zcash’s anonymous transactions generated time is much longer than that of Monero, which means that people can't widely used its anonymous functions, which also affects the popularity of z-address anonymous transactions, thus reducing its anonymous security. In fact, due to its performance problems, The transaction between z address only accounts for about 10% of the total transaction volume, and all other transactions are transparent. Therefore, although zero-knowledge proved to be a powerful anonymous scheme,
these problems existing in Zcash itself have long affected its popularity in the Deep Web transactions.

Current problems encountered in the deep web trading

Although cryptocurrency provides a certain degree of anonymity for the transactions of the Deep Web and promotes the emergence of the Deep Web e-commerce, it seems that it has reached a bottleneck stage at
present. At present, the use of the Deep Web for cryptocurrency has encountered the following problems:
1. Even with the blessing of anonymous cryptocurrency like Monero and the onion network of deep web, under the supervision of the national intelligence department, because of the ring-signature scheme like
Monero coin, the number of cryptographic transactions signed each time is limited, and the bulk transactions can still be traced back.
2. Due to the anonymity of transactions, the upstream and downstream of deep web e-commerce are strictly separated and unable to communicate with each other, resulting in a very simple business model. Smart contract is an effective solution to solve the problem, however, the above-mentioned anonymous cryptocurrency used by the Deep Web is a pure payment currency, and the technology used does not support smart contracts., in the aspect of cryptocurrency. Therefore, it is impossible to support complex upstream and downstream business logic at the cryptocurrency level, even if it is an interactive action to confirm the
transaction.
3. These cryptocurrencies are controlled by market makers and their prices have skyrocketed and plummeted, which to a large extent has caused troubles to the cost and profit accounting of the Deep Web ecommerce.
4. There are just a few anonymous cryptocurrencies, and the dark network ecology has its own circulation environment and scale. Previously, the technology on the market could not support these ecosystems to issue their own cryptocurrency according to their own business rules and economic models. Market rules determine the price of money, and the use of existing cryptocurrencies is likely to become a
victim of the secondary market.

A new technology: SERO - An anonymous blockchain that also supports Smart Contracts

A new technology called SERO (Super Zero) is expected to change the status quo. In one sentence, SERO is the world's first blockchain-based platform that provides privacy protection based on zero-knowledge
proofs technology and supports Turing's complete smart contract. In short, SERO allows the ecosystem to issue its own anonymous cryptocurrency, even non-homogeneous digital assets, and develop commercial applications for DApps If Zcash, Monero and Dash are the private version of Bitcoin, SERO is the private version of Ethereum.
In the face of the performance problem of Zcash, SERO's Zero knowledge proof encryption system - “super-zk", is an order of magnitude faster than the zk-SNARKs used by Zcash. After the performance problem is solved, the transactions initiated on SERO are 100% anonymous transactions by default.

What can SERO do for the Deep Web?

These new technological advantages are likely to make SERO have broad application prospects in the Deep Web e-commerce, including:
1. All transactions default to highly secure anonymous transactions
Zcash claims to be an anonymous currency, but it defaults to t-address transactions, which makes many transactions inadvertently transparent, and these inadvertent errors are likely to cause fatal consequences,
making more people discouraged from use it, not everyone understand the complex technology, but reducing the users’s understanding of the threshold, and reducing the chance of making mistakes is a must.
2. SERO’s transactions speed is fast and the user experience is good
SERO’s blocks generation speed is quickly, 15 seconds a block, 6 blocks to confirm the transaction. Combined with the optimization of cryptocurrency transaction construction speed, SERO's transaction
speed is dozens of times faster than Zcash, so that high-concurrency transactions can also have a good experience. Deep web transactions are not all bulk transactions, and the Deep Web ecology can also have
the business logic of snapping up and auction, which SERO makes this possible.
3. SERO supports Turing's complete smart contract
SERO support Turing’s complete smart contract programming, so it can write the business logic of the upstream and downstream contracts of the transaction into the smart contract. For example, the dark network trading parties can deploy the system supporting the multi-layer distribution system in the case of identity concealment, which can be used to support the B2B Market Center on the Deep Web, and bring
leapfrog development to the Deep Web e-commerce. In the simplest case, fully decentralized sealed bids trading can now be supported, where the smart contracts determines under which rules, who
will be allowed to trade, and automatically use pre-entered contract assets for payment.
4. SERO supports the issuance of anonymous coins using smart contracts
SERO does not deliberately emphasize its own coinage rights., but instead focuses on supporting the use of contract issuing tokens, which are the same as zero-knowledge-based anonymous coins as SERO. So
business ecosystems may issue its own cryptocurrencies for ecological circulation, instead of having to use the existing cryptocurrencies issued by the third party, thus can design their own currency allocation and
circulation rules, in such scenarios, the coinage rights are usually borne by a party with sufficient credit, such as a seller of goods in the seller's market. In many scenarios, it is possible to design a stable currency that
anchors physical assets, which avoids problems caused by sharp rises and falls in currency prices and makes it easier for the ecological parties to hold it for a long time, it is easier to exchange with real world assets,
and these monetary attributes cannot be achieved by Zcash or Monero.

SERO supports storage and anonymous transfer of data assets with complex structures

In addition to token, SERO also supports the storage and anonymous transfer of data assets with complex structures. The data structure of assets can be token, Ticket or Package. Because Package is data oriented,
this data structure can support unlimited nesting and form a complex asset structure that meets business requirements. Package can also store the user's assets or data encoded with a key, and can be easily transferred in the transaction. This feature will support more non-transactional scenarios such as anonymous chat, distributed storage, data privacy protection ,etc. Even more exciting, the technology promises to bring barter back to the market, remove the bubble and hegemony of centralised coinage, and
replace apples with marijuana? Not a problem, a Package can clearly describe the various attributes of a bag of apples (origin, storage, quantity, quality, and even historical transaction records), use the blockchain technology to ensure the authenticity of asset data, and fully quantify the asset value, and finally make the barter transaction possible.

Conclusion

Deep Web is the natural use scenario of cryptocurrencies and SERO, as a new generation of anonymous coin platform, will most likely re-activate the Deep Web world, and eventually become the uncrowned king of
privacy public chain.