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20 June 2014
For immediate releaseXC developers to showcase market-leading tech at Bitcoin in the Beltway
XCurrency core developers Dan Metcalf and Jasinlee will attend Bitcoin in the Beltway in Washington this weekend in order to showcase XC’s ground-breaking platform for private transactions, communication, and services.
XCurrency, the flexibly architected currency whose rapid pace of development has been met with a meteoric rise in popularity, is to have a booth at Bitcoin in the Beltway this weekend, giving attendees the first opportunity to meet XC’s core developers and to discuss its market-leading technology.
XC differentiates itself from other altcoin projects with its boldly pragmatic, real-world approach. It will run (and stake) on mobile phones, therefore it must be bloat-free and eminently scalable. It must be POS-integrated. It must be bulletproof. And it must be flexible. Over the past few weeks XC has rocketed toward these objectives by laying the technical foundations for a versatile platform in the form of a live, working wallet that demonstrates its privacy technology to the world. And this technology is ground-breaking.
The quest for “anonymity” has taken centre stage of late in the altcoin community, and at present several technologies aim to achieve it. However anonymity is a formidable technical challenge, and to date proposed solutions have either caused unworkable blockchain bloat, unwieldy transaction times, or have encountered unexpected forking problems. Here is a summary overview of XC’s solution to these problems:
XC is a network of nodes that (a) use end-to-end encryption to support transaction broadcasting, secure messaging, and true P2P anonymous transactions.* (b) Upon this is built an optional mixer that testing has shown** to eliminate any record in the blockchain of a link between sender and receiver. (c) This mixer is a revolutionary “multi-path” implementation that employs multi-sig to route fragments of transactions down separate paths through the network, compounding anonymity while adding redundancy and security.
No bloatSeveral projects’ anonymising strategies currently have an unworkable blockchain bloat problem. Technologies like ring signatures and zero-knowledge proofs currently lack a way of avoiding this. XCurrency uses standard transactions, but multi-path then achieves an extremely high level of privacy with a high degree of prunability, avoiding bloat.
No (semi-) centralisationBecause every XC wallet can function as a node, XC avoids what Bitcoin core developer Gregory Maxwell has recently called a security “chokepoint”*** in the use of semi-centralised nodes to forward transactions. This strategy is compounded by the need to hold a very large amount of coins in order for a node to function – a problem which is resolved by the small, random transaction sizes of multi-path architecture.
No prisoners’ dilemmaBuilding privacy upon Bitcoin-based technologies by forwarding transactions is problematic because malicious actors can steal transactions instead of forwarding them. Furthermore they can snoop on the broadcasting system and publish the identities of senders and receivers. XC resolves these issues through multi-sig and through end-to-end message encryption.
Not limited to only paymentsBitcoin’s elegance may be its greatest strength, but it introduces significant challenges in implementing additional blockchain-based functions, like secure messaging and decentralised cloud storage. XC’s “platform” approach incorporates this objective from the outset. As such, XC represents a comprehensively architected Blockchain 2.0 implementation.
Development plan and testingThough XC’s technology is real and free to download, several aspects of it are undergoing early testing. As such it should be treated as a beta release, and proportionate care taken with one’s funds when using it. In the coming months the cryptographic community will be invited to test it to its limits, and there will be a sizable bounty offered to anyone who can provably break XC's anonymity.
XCurrency is a four-week-old cryptographic platform for flexible digital transactions that has undergone a meteoric rise in popularity. Due to its newness there is currently a lack of technical documentation of its design, although in the coming weeks XC will publish its development plan and provide dates upon which this can be expected to be delivered. Given this, this article is not intended to be a technical explanation or formal defense of the viability of XC’s technology, and as such makes no claim of providing “proof” of this. Note also that XC is committed to the open source model. Open source code is vital for the health and advancement of cryptographic technologies, and so XC will make code available on a delayed timeline. This way, the community will derive the benefit of XC’s ground-breaking technologies, while the delay means that the incentive for developers to flood the marketplace with clones that lack a long term future and reduce the trustworthiness of the altcoin phenomenon is reduced.
* -
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=630547.msg7366633#msg7366633** -
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=630547.msg7310485#msg7310485*** -
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=641178.msg7160370#msg7160370
