Hey b-trading and gravitate,
It’s a great question.
Short answer:
MangoCoinz (at least for now) doesn’t use P2P technology.
Well, it’s running like a P2P in theory, but just on our machines. That’s why it’s centralized.
Long answer:
The reason why MangoCoinz isn't P2P is because of the nature of the app.
Because MangoCoinz is a way of mining crypto currencies on your smartphone there are certain trade-offs.
Nothing’s perfect, and in the tech world to achieve something you need to trade some features to achieve what you want.
I can give you a “scary" example of that trade-off.
Do you know how when you turn your WiFi antenna at home you automatically connect to your network? Well, that’s because you connected to that router before, and you saved it on your phone. And every time you turn your WiFi antenna on, your phone will first look for that router. And here is the “scary” part, let’s say you are in a cafe and your WiFi antenna is on and not connected to any networks. Your phone (which is maybe in your pocket) will be searching (probing) for your home router, but it won’t be able to find it because it’s not in range. But what’s this, a hacked is scanning the air for signals (probes) and intercepts your phone’s probe that is looking for your home router. And with that probe he will have some info on the network you are trying to connect to, and will spoof the info so that your phone will connect to his network, and then snoop on what you are doing or something even worse. Your phone won’t know the difference.
The way to avoid this is to keep your WiFi antenna off unless you’re using it. And plus it will save you on battery life.
The moral of the story was that you trade something (in the case of WiFi security) for convenience (connecting to your home router when you turn the WiFi antenna on when you’re at home).
MangoCoinz trades P2P (at least for now) for convenience and ease of use for everybody.
At the beginning of MangoCoinz we wanted a P2P network, but then we’ve realized that if you have the blockchain and everything is on the phones then you will eat up you data plan and storage. And we want MangoCoinz to be widely used, so you can’t say to people keep a few GBs on you phone free (most average phones have about 4-8 GB of storage and a bit chunk of that is used by bloatware, not talking about flagships but even they have a limited amount of storage depending on the manufacturer) for the app to function and get your data plan sucked so that you can’t even send an email.
And of course there is SPV (Simple Payment Verification) technology developed by BitCoin that allows you to have a header file on your phone and access the network with that (the file is less then a MB). But the problem with that is that people then need to have a client installed on their computer that will keep the blockchain and an app on their phone to mine. So they need to install double the software just so it’s fair to everybody, because SPV is susceptible to the “51%” attack. The attack is basically that as the blockchain is evolving and there is a main branch (graph theory) there could be someone with 51% of computer clients in the system that alters the blockchain for their gain (like adding an enormous amount of coinz to their waller) and then because they are in the majority, all the other nodes in the system will conform and will fork so that now the main branch is the altered blockchain. Because you can’t count on people to install the computer client, overpowering the system would’t be that big of a problem.
Technically we could have made MangoCoinz a P2P app, but we then looked at the practical aspect.
But the trade-off of MangoCoinz can be recouped with trading MangoCoinz for a decentralized crypto like BitCoin.
MangoCoinz was built from the ground up for mining on smartphones (Android for now).
We want to make crypto currencies accessible to everone.
Hope this answered you question. And if I was wrong somewhere please correct me.
Best regards, Srele from MangoCoinz.
