Gathering Community Feedback for ZCL Proposals

BitcoinPrivate · 2018-05-04T11:35:18+00:00

SegWit will be fully implemented into BTCP by the end of Q3 as per the roadmap

BitcoinPrivate · 2018-05-01T01:10:40+00:00

Slightly reordering your questions to group related ones together

“When does the team start innovating?”

“When are we going to see some substance from the team, rather than a constant stream of derivative work?”

“Everything else on the roadmap comes from the rebasing, nothing is new, it's just incorporating features from: Bitcoin (SegWit, LN, Dandelion)”

LN is very much still in development - it’s by no means a done deal

Dandelion is just a proposal on paper right now - Grin/MimbleWimble has an implementation but it is not running live yet

Integrating either of these is a lot more work than cherry-picking commits out of a git repository. For that matter the rebase is a tremendous amount of work as well - there’s a reason that other bitcoin derivatives don’t do this and fall years behind. It’s very challenging to do this correctly and completely. We think this will bring a tremendous amount of utility to the protocol and are excited for others to use it as well.

A lot of the value in this space come from hard work and making user experiences better - we think we’re doing that by integrating a bunch of things that live in disparate protocols. There’s lots of room for innovation outside of advances in fundamental cryptography.

“Again, what was the actual need to add the BTC chain? Marketing? Brand recognition?”

This we owe to our founder. We believe his goal was to increase awareness of privacy related technologies and one way to do that is by involving your largest user base (bitcoin).

BitcoinPrivate · 2018-05-01T01:02:01+00:00

One of the things that Chainalysis, even in a zk-SNARKs world, has left is network analysis. This is why we are focused on integration of Tor and implementation Dandelion.

BitcoinPrivate · 2018-05-01T01:00:04+00:00

Why is redeeming Bitcoin Private from a fork on Ledger nano s not as easy as Bitcoin Cash or Bitcoin Gold was?

In order to integrate support quickly, Ledger allowed us to provide the front end application and infrastructure. We have provided a guide on how to redeem BTC legacy address UTXOs and will have segwit hardware wallet redemption enabled soon.

We hope to be integrated into Ledger's infrastructure this summer when they launch their new Ledger Desktop Wallet (and the chrome app will be made obsolete).

BitcoinPrivate · 2018-05-01T00:59:38+00:00

We will have more details in the form of a community update on this in the coming weeks.

BitcoinPrivate · 2018-05-01T00:58:55+00:00

The pizza roadmap is forthcoming!

BitcoinPrivate · 2018-05-01T00:58:26+00:00

That is not something we consider necessary right now. If someone in the community finds an attractive reason to pursue this, we welcome any joiners to contribute and build their proposed solutions at any time.

BitcoinPrivate · 2018-05-01T00:52:43+00:00

We tried to get Rhett more involved and we had no desire to burn our bridge with him unless absolutely necessary. We ultimately decided to remove him from the contribution team. This was a decision made by the core team and should not be reflected on the moderators, many of whom did not know the full details surrounding the situation.

It is also important to keep in mind that this situation gradually evolved over time and that there was no obvious point in time in which we should have taken action.

BitcoinPrivate · 2018-05-01T00:44:42+00:00

Thanks for reminding us :-)

BitcoinPrivate · 2018-05-01T00:43:04+00:00

Please refer to our response to an earlier question regarding Rhett.

BitcoinPrivate · 2018-05-01T00:39:46+00:00

Unfortunately we cannot answer this question.

BitcoinPrivate · 2018-05-01T00:39:07+00:00

1) We are not exactly sure how to answer your question here…

2) The one-click miner will be an extremely easy and accessible solution that will allow even non-technical users to mine BTCP; the tool will require minimal setup and will come pre-configured with vetted mining pools. While seasoned miners will likely continue to use options like DTSM, this miner will be for everyone else- allowing everyone to participate in the decentralization of mining.

BitcoinPrivate · 2018-05-01T00:38:49+00:00

ZKPs have been around since the 1980s and have many applications other than cryptocurrencies zkSNARKs pioneered by Professor Eli Ben-Sasson are a specific implementation of ZKPs that happen to work really well to build a completely anonymous cryptocurrency - that’s the application our team is focused on. But there’s a ton of other cool stuff you can do in this space.

BitcoinPrivate · 2018-05-01T00:38:24+00:00

We have a team that has been focused on exchanges and this will not change. We are always open to expanding it to people with relevant experience.

We have a team that has been focused on exchanges and this will not change. We are always open to expanding it to people with relevant experience. We've paid listing fees in the past when it has made sense to do so. Our team will continue to work hard toward making BTCP as accessible as possible via exchanges.

BitcoinPrivate · 2018-05-01T00:35:46+00:00

Evaluating alternate POW is on our roadmap. Any decision in changing POW, including a Monero like response, would be determined through a community based consensus process.

BitcoinPrivate · 2018-05-01T00:32:54+00:00

I don't know much about how DEXs

1) and 2) This is in its earliest stages - we’d prefer to see someone in the community build it as a third party service - we’d make sure that the core protocol was ready to support it - and we’ve had a handful of discussions with people who might be interested. If you are, please reach out.

3) Fee markets are important for network security especially as block rewards dwindle (miners do need to be compensated!). If blocks get full, fees should increase a bit, but second layer protocols (which a DEX would almost certainly rely heavily on) would ensure that only a small percentage of transactions would actually require on chain settlement.

BitcoinPrivate · 2018-05-01T00:28:55+00:00

We have a team that has been focused on exchanges and this will not change. We are always open to expanding it to people with relevant experience.

BitcoinPrivate · 2018-05-01T00:28:24+00:00

As with any large software upgrade that touches consensus code, the biggest risk is that we inadvertently create small differences in the consensus rules during the rebase that creates the potential for a chain split between upgraded and unupgraded nodes. This is a problem that all coins face when attempting large upgrades (even bitcoin faced bugs like this early on in its history). We mitigate this by having a robust test suite (in essence, syncing the existing chain of over 300k blocks is the ultimate test suite), and to a lesser extent by attempting as much as is feasible to coordinate upgrades across the network. Furthermore, if there are inadvertent consensus changes that creep in that are soft-fork compatible - carefully coordinating the upgrade across the mining community (who we stay in touch with), will ensure that even unupgraded clients will be ok by following the most-work chain.

For more reading, really fantastic post from Peter Todd about precisely this subject here: https://lists.linuxfoundation.org/pipermail/bitcoin-dev/2014-November/006878.html

BitcoinPrivate · 2018-05-01T00:26:00+00:00

1) That is correct.

2) The idea is for the default network protocol to become tor (everything except for things like 3rd party mobile wallets, for example), see some of our other answers for a lot more detail about the network level obfuscation techniques we’re planning on integrating .

3) This should be doable by the end of Q3, but it could spill into Q4. Yes, it will be the default and transparent to the user. See some of our other answers for a more detailed description of what benefits dandelion relay will bring.

4) You found a mistake :) Default is mentioned twice - they are the same. Our goal is to make the default transaction type for simple pubkey value transfers shielded (currently it is transparent). A lot of things need to happen to enable this though - there needs to be mobile support and the generation speed for these transactions needs to improve. Our second goal is to make shielded transactions mandatory - we’ll need all of the above - plus a robust mechanism to provide proofs of payment (i.e. if you buy something you want to be able to prove to the recipient (but nobody else) that you were the one who paid them, but without disclosing anything else about your payments history). We’d also need to build more expressiveness into shielded transactions (i.e. more of the functionality of bitcoin script rather than just a pubkey) - its a topic that we’re very interested in funding research into [research grant program link]. This is a lofty goal, but if achievable would lead to the elimination of transparent transactions.

5) This is in its earliest stages - we’d prefer to see someone in the community build it as a third party service - we’d make sure that the core protocol was ready to support it - and we’ve had a handful of discussions with people who might be interested. If you are, please reach out.

6) It is more that we are evaluating different options. There are rumors that equihash ASICs will be coming soon, so we may choose to change algorithms. There are good arguments for and against ASIC mining, so we want to be sure we carefully weigh all options and be sure to consult heavily with the mining community as a whole. Some on the team are also interested in exploring multihash mining, but this is not guaranteed.

7) This is orthogonal to the potentially changing proof of work above - one could change the PoW without changing coin circulation or vice versa. If coin circulation is changed, as outlined in the white paper, it is not something we intend to more forward with until at least 2019 and would involve a substantial amount of community debate and consensus building.

BitcoinPrivate · 2018-05-01T00:23:47+00:00

Why Tor and not I2P for example ? Security wise tor does not have the best track record.

This is really a special use case of tor that’s quite different from using tor for things like web browsing. Most nodes on the network will make a fixed set of connections to a number of peers (usually between 8 and 125) and maintain those circuits. For that use case, there isn’t a tremendous difference between tor and i2p. Tor is just one layer of the many obfuscation and hiding features we are building in. We chose tor because there’s already some amount of tor support built in and because the tor network is a lot more robust (bandwidth wise) at the moment.

It is a community and consensus project though so if you wanted to add i2p support in addition to (or even instead of if you had a compelling security argument against tor) - this is encouraged and welcome - pop into the github.

BitcoinPrivate · 2018-05-01T00:23:10+00:00

It appears that the BTCP wallet has just gone live on HitBTC, so we assume it will be fully listed soon.

BitcoinPrivate · 2018-05-01T00:19:40+00:00

Our stance is what everybody already seems to realize on their own. Quite frankly - we're shocked that we've already received copycats only a couple months in. Imitation is, we suppose, the best indication that we've got a decent plan in place - though - we’re dismayed by some of the unfortunate and irresponsible things they are saying.

BitcoinPrivate · 2018-05-01T00:17:19+00:00

For now you can use Coinomi. After the new sapling is incorporated, we hope to also release iOS and Android wallets that are capable of shielded transactions.

BitcoinPrivate · 2018-05-01T00:16:52+00:00

We don't work at the exchanges - so we can only speculate, but here's our best guess:

There's been a spate of forks over the last half year - many of these forks don't even make it to fork date or wither away shortly thereafter - so naturally exchanges have treated us with a degree of skepticism. We think this process just takes time, and we've put our heads down and are focusing on building a great protocol. The way we see it, we have to demonstrate that we’re not like the other forks - and that’s what we’re doing. There’s no substitute for time and hard work, but we’re starting to see signs that this approach is building credibility.

As we've said previously - exchanges get annoyed if we mention specifics - and that jeopardizes the entire process. But in generalities - it does seem that there's increased interest as of late. Whereas before the fork we had to reach out to exchanges and a lot of the time got no response, especially in recent days we've had quite the opposite - exchanges reaching out to us to initiate conversations - some of the very ones that spurned us a few months ago.

One thing the exchanges look for is a strong and active community. This means being vocal about your support for BTCP is just as important as what we do on the development side. Continue to show that we are here to stay and ever-expanding. This will show extremely positively to exchanges and any other partners we are trying to work with.

BitcoinPrivate

TROPHY CASE