Stealth AMA Summary with Decentralized Club ✔️
Dear, Community,
Welcome to our community on t.me/decentralized_club Telegram group’s AMA. We really appreciate all your support. There were really good and thoughtful questions that were asked. For those who missed our AMA, this blog post is for you :)
✔️Introduction with Stealth :👉
Trader(BILLY):
Q1. Can you please introduce yourself and also tell us a bit about what STEALTH is about? James
James:
Sure. I am the lead developer from Stealth R&D LLC, a company that develops the protocol for the Stealth cryptocurrency (XST), and develops infrastructure around it.
My background is in science so I have done a lot of programming. I majored in Molecular Biology (BS) and did a PhD in Biochemistry (Colorado), and did my post-doc at UCLA.
Programming was a huge part of my research the whole time.
I got into blockchain in 2014 and never looked back. I have been doing blockchain work since that time.
Trader(BILLY):
That’s a peculiar combination. Molecular biology and blockchain
James:
I launched Stealth in 2014, under the former name of StealthCoin.
Trader(BILLY):
You had some varied studies man!
James:
Yes. Strangely blockchain and biology are not so different.
Both deal with living organisms.
In one case biology deals with carbon life.
Blockchain is a different kind of life.
If you ever develop, launch, and maintain a blockchain, you will know that the network has a life of its own.
Trader(BILLY):
Very nice way to put it!
James:
And the blockchain does too. It follows a set of rules you think you understand, but the complexitites of the the network and protocol mean it can behave in ways you didn’t anticipate.
One thing is a blockchain network never sleeps.
Like life, blockchains evolve.
And XST is no exception.
It started out as a proof of work (PoW) coin and then transitioned as part of the protocol into proof-of-stake (PoS).
Lately we have been guiding its evolution towards what we call Junaeth.
Junaeth is a high performance blockchain protocol that allows for 5 second blocks, and also is fully compatible with cryptographic privacy for all transactions.
The underlying cryptography for these transactions is zero-knowledge proofs, in the form of zkSnarks.
The Junaeth protocol is now fully functional and working in testnet.
It has its own branch in our github repository and the testnet has been running since November or so. So many months I kind of forgot when it launched.
Trader(BILLY):
Haha. Memory is a bitch sometimes
James:
In the meantime we have streamlined the protocol and with some of our latest commits, believe it is ready for mainnet.
I should plug our website, so people know where to go to for more info: stealth.org
It’s that easy.
Trader(BILLY):
👌👌
James:
Before we go to mainnet, though, we have to finish a couple of things.
First, we have been working on an infrastructure API that runs right in the client.
People who are new to crypto may not know what I mean by that, so I’ll explain.
A particular set of programmatic functionalities are required for blockchain infrastructure.
For example a third party program needs to be able to query a database somewhere for particular transactions, or a group of related transactions, that may belong to a specific wallet.
This wallet can be identified by what is known as an “extended public key”, and that key can be used to fetch transactional info for every single address related to that wallet.
And this allows things like multi-address wallets, where a program helps the owner of that wallet spend and receive coins. Such wallets are called “hierarchichal wallets”.
Other types of infrastructure are chain explorers.
An example of an explorer is chain.stealth.org
In this type of infrastructure, users can query for blocks, transactions, or addresses, and get all information related to any of these items.
This requires the blockchain to be parsed and the data “indexed” such that related data is stored in ways that link it to one another.
Typically this is done with what are known as “relational” databases.
Relational databases do help users manage related data, as the name implies, but they are not efficient enough to scale to global usage like we need for blockchain.
Instead Stealth uses what is known as a key-value level tree database. They are fast, but tough to program correctly. We, of course, don’t care how easy or hard the programming is, we just want it to be fast.
We have almost completed the API that will give all these functionalities. It is called StealthExplore, and a working version is on the development branch in our repository.
Just to give the members here an idea of the performance improvements, last night I ran a test of our API where I indexed all 3,000,000+ (3 million+) blocks of our blockchain, and it did it in about 1 hour.
A traditional relational database indexing using a something like nodeJS, would probably take a day or more to do this.
All aspects of our API are blazing fast, and it is also being developed for the future, using a system that can be dropped into a toolset that is optimized for in-memory (RAM) and high performance SSD storage (e.g. Optane).
So this is truly an API designed for the future.
One very cool aspect of this is that the API itself is integrated into the client, so that a service provider only needs to run the client if they need to have an instance of the API running on their own infrastructure.
To give the members here a sense of what that means, typical systems (everyone else), require service providers to run a client and a relational database, and manage the whole system. They might need two computers, and they need to keep both the client and database up. And then third parties may create their own APIs, built into explorers, and used for wallets.
This kind of diversity can be beneficial, but it is bad for standards.
It requires new service providers to decide from myriad options, and the option they use may not be optimal.
None should be as fast.
With StealthExplore, the API becomes a defacto standard because it is built into the client.
And then since no one knows the Stealth protocol and blockchain better than us, we believe it will be the optimal API for all uses. And anyone who needs additional functionality can submit either an issue at our github, or can submit a pull request if they want to contribute to development.
I just wrote a lot about the API because that is our active area of development. It works, as I mentioned, but we have a few more procedures to add to it, which should only take a week or maybe two to complete.
From there we are going to move on to implementing our anonymity solution, which is a version of the zcash protocol.
The anonymity solution is a prerequisite for moving the now complete Junaeth protocol to mainnet.
I’ll explain why.
Junaeth, to be a high performance blockchain protocol, uses what is known as scheduled block production.
In scheduled block production, the blockchain entity who will sign the next block is known. And they have a window to sign it.
Typically, in scheduled block production, these entitites have been so-called “delegates” or “witnesses”, elected by stakeholders.
While that may seem like a groovy new-aged democratic proposition, it is fraught with problems.
The problem is that stake is typically consolidated with the small group of people (or single person) who founded the coin.
They will have pre-mined (or ninja-mined) all of the coins and, had had an ICO, where they sold many coins but also kept many coins too.
Trader(BILLY):
That was a very nice introduction
James:
Thanks!
Trader(BILLY):
Thanks for the highly informative answer James
James:
I can go on and on and on and on about blockchain.
Cut me off any time.
Trader(BILLY):
So lets quickly move on to our last question and then to our Quiz round!
James:
Okay!
Trader(BILLY):
Q2. Can you shed some light on the Tokenomics and what is being done to develop the community of Stealth?
James:
Okay, I have interpreted tokenomics to be the origins of the money supply and how it has been distributed. As I mentioned all of the original XST coins were mined fairly, where our launch thread is on bitcointalk and anyone can peruse both the authentic community members and the trolls. Practically the whole community participated in the mining process at the time. The crypto mining community was small back then, and might even be considered “tight nit”, in that everyone knew everyone to the extent that you could recognize community members and had an opinion of them.
After that it moved to proof of stake.
Because of the fair mining process, and the long pre-launch announcement, coin distribution was quite nice.
Right now there are something like 35 million coins available.
The use case is to be a private payment system.
Meaning no one knows sender or reciever.
And not only private, the transactions will be fast with 5 second confirmations (compared to 10 minutes for bitcoin).
Only Stealth’s design will allow for this combination of fast and private transactions because we use a unique blockchain technology called a “hybrid ledger” or a “fused ledger”, which users can read about in our whitepaper.
Trader(BILLY):
Yes that’s great.. And how are you guys expanding your community? James
James:
For community development, we try to get the community to participate in development in several ways.
I should say this is the old-school approach.
We don’t hype or market, except if you consider my technical and excited ramblings like I did above as “hype”.
Trader(BILLY):
Haha. Better than hype 😝
James:
One example of our community engagement, is our testnet.
When we launched our testnet, we had a competition where participants competed to sign as many blocks as they could over two months.
I’ll tell you this was one of our best decisions ever in terms of development.
We had a mix of people and they all participated fully and it was something like 5 days before the protocol was nearly streamlined. We had I thin about 15 participants and practically no protocol issue was undiscovered.
With their help, I worked out some of the toughest bugs I fought during developement. Some I couldn’t figure out until I had more testers, a more diverse testnet in terms of composition, and more opportunities to unearth these bugs.
Like the testnet we have other competitions with a goal to development, offering bounties for the winners, and of course I enjoy getting the word out.
I do videos and we have what is known as the Stealth Development Blog Series that members can check out at https://stealth.org/news-and-development-blog/
Every time we hit a milestone, I make a blog and sometimes a video.
We also do things like these AMAs.
But mostly, to be frank, our chief mission is to develop the best protocol for nearly instant, private transactions.
A good protocol is the best advertisement.
🌠Live Quiz Session by Stealth 🌐
Trader(BILLY):
Q1. What will be Stealth team’s efforts focused on mostly at the moment?
Bhaskar:
Quantum Proof-of-Stake (qPoS)
Tony Montana:
Qpos
Mario Fisherman:
Pow
Sahil:
Privacy
Jerry Anggara | Alisha Kanya Ahalya •√:
Junaeth protocol
zafer metin:
> blockchain oracles
> sidechains
> onchain governance
> smart contracts
Joxes:
privacy
fafafifi 🇵🇭:
The reason for our focus on Junaeth is to ensure its speediest development and upcoming release on mainnet.
kunlefighter:
Scaling
Vario III Chan:
Yes
Ross:
New website from zero
Kath:
januaeth
Przemek:
TOR Privacy
Answer : Junaeth protocol
Trader(BILLY):
Q2. What are some exciting functionalities of Junaeth StealthNode Monitor and Explorer?
Tony Montana:
Staking
Bhaskar:
http://chain.stealth.org
Joxes:
chek blocks, transactions
fafafifi 🇵🇭:
This exciting new site will replace our current block explorers (chain.stealth.org, chainz.cryptoid.info/xst/, and blocks.stealth.org) and is the place to find live transactional data. Included in its functionalities will be the ability to search for transactions and monitor the blockchain in practically every conceivable way. In addition, visitors will be able to find all of the essential information about Junaeth StealthNodes. Until Junaeth is on mainnet, the site will display testnet information.
Tony:
Junaeth protocol
Vario III Chan:
QPoS
T L:
optimal API for all uses.
kunlefighter:
Junaeth is a high performance blockchain protocol that allows for 5 second blocks, and also is fully compatible with cryptographic privacy for all transactions.
Przemek:
To give the members here a sense of what that means, typical systems (everyone else), require service providers to run a client and a relational database, and manage the whole system. They might need two computers, and they need to keep both the client and database up. And then third parties may create their own APIs, built into explorers, and used for wallets.
Mario Fisherman:
developer from Stealth R&D LLC, a company that develops the protocol for the Stealth cryptocurrency (XST), and develops infrastructure around it.
Aldilan (aku suka lia):
Staking
Ross:
blockchain oracles, sidechains, onchain governance
Tony Montana:
Sidechains
Alejandro Urich:
5 second blockchain
Raj Choudary:
I’d have a block explorer where the block and hash refresh every few seconds but I’m not a web dev so I have no idea how to do all that.
Ross:
More speed
Maximar:
his exciting new site will replace our current block explorers (chain.stealth.org, chainz.cryptoid.info/xst/, and blocks.stealth.org) and is the place to find live transactional data. Included in its functionalities will be the ability to search for transactions and monitor the blockchain in practically every conceivable way. In addition, visitors will be able to find all of the essential information about Junaeth StealthNodes. Until Junaeth is on mainnet, the site will display testnet information.
Tony Montana:
Block every 5 sec
Jerry Anggara | Alisha Kanya Ahalya •√:
new and groundbreaking consensus protocol
Mario Fisherman:
chain.stealth.org
Chandra Prakash Singh:
you’ve got to offer transparency, in this specific case: private and non-private transactions to comply with the FATF Travel Rule; stealth will offer blockchain features to do so
T L:
chain.stealth.org
Joxes:
doing easier our lifes basically
Jack Ryan:
Ability to search for transactions and monitor the blockchain in practically every conceivable way
LA LA:
> blockchain oracles
> sidechains
> onchain governance
> smart contracts
Answer : This exciting new site will replace our current block explorers (chain.stealth.org, chainz.cryptoid.info/xst/, and blocks.stealth.org) and is the place to find live transactional data. Included in its functionalities will be the ability to search for transactions and monitor the blockchain in practically every conceivable way. In addition, visitors will be able to find all of the essential information about Junaeth StealthNodes. Until Junaeth is on mainnet, the site will display testnet information.
Trader(BILLY):
Q3. What enables Stealth to be a highly usable payment solution?
Bhaskar:
One thing we are noticing in testnet is that some VPS services prove difficult for their clients to maintain Tor connections. Tor is an anonymous network routing protocol that serves as the backbone of Stealth’s peer-to-peer communications layer. Tor is essential not only for user privacy, but also serves as protection against DDoS attacks that target clearnet IP addresses. To improve connectivity and circumvent incompatibilities, we will update the built-in Tor router to the latest stable version. Additionally we will add features that facilitate the use of Tor in more restrictive political environments.
Ayla Aish:
traditional proof-of-stake
LA LA:
The combination of Junaeth’s five second blocks and zerocash’s absolute cryptographic privacy will enable Stealth to be a highly usable payment solution. This usability will include a convenient denomination such that the Stealth money supply will be split 100-fold.
S.A.M. Crypto Trader:
Quantum Proof-of-Stake (qPoS)
Tony Montana:
Instant trasactions
Joxes:
5 seconds to confirm transations
T L:
QPOS
kunlefighter:
Qpos
zafer metin:
60 seconds
Maximar:
All will feature top of the line User Interfaces and User Experiences, to meet the demands of Stealth as a state of the art payment solution.
Mario Fisherman:
combination of Junaeth’s five second blocks and zerocash’s absolute cryptographic privacy will enable Stealth to be a highly usable payment solution. This usability will include a convenient denomination such that the Stealth money supply will be split 100-fold.
fafafifi 🇵🇭:
The combination of Junaeth’s five second blocks and zerocash’s absolute cryptographic privacy will enable Stealth to be a highly usable payment solution
Ross:
Being on web and any browser
Przemek:
Block time: 60 seconds
Kath:
QPoS
Answer : The combination of Junaeth’s five second blocks and zerocash’s absolute cryptographic privacy will enable Stealth to be a highly usable payment solution. This usability will include a convenient denomination such that the Stealth money supply will be split 100-fold.
🐧Community ask Questions by Twitter ✔️
Trader(BILLY):
🐦 Twitter Question No 1 :
Username : @hakan61006184
Why unspent transaction outputs (UTXO) are important for the Stealth infrastructure and what contribution does it provide for privacy?
What role does UTXO play to hide both the sender and receiver of each transaction?
James:
Question 1: A UTXO is like a travelers check. It represents a certain amount of money. To send money in a UTXO system, you can put one or many UTXOs together to add up to a single payment. What anonymity needs is that you don’t know the source of the funds. For a UTXO system, this means you don’t know which UTXOs were combined to make the payment. Anonymous transactions in this system means cryptographic way to represent a set of UTXOs such that you don’t know which they are. This is possible.
To understand the advantage over an account-based ledger, in an account based ledger you send from one account to another.
One balance goes up, the other goes down. It’s nearly impossible, or cryptographically highly impractical, to hide both sender and reciever and the amount that was transferred in this system.
Trader(BILLY):
🐦 Twitter Question No 2 :
Username : @DustyLoooza
Setting ALL CONFUSION aside,
What Really, are the main DIFFERENCES your of Quantum Proof of STAKE or qPOS against Delegated PROOF of Stake(dPOS)?
and Will this technology be beneficial to all USERS?
James:
Question 2: The biggest difference between Junath (formerly known as qPoS) and dPoS, is the autonomy of the block signers.
I was getting to this question before we had to move to the final AMA questions, but autonomy is very important. In dPoS you typicaly have a highly vested set of insiders who “call all the shots”.
I did about 30 minutes of video about the perils of dPoS. The example was Steem, where, at the moment, Justin Sun of TRON controls the whole Steem blockchain.
What is the advantage to users? Fortunately we can see the advantage with the Steem example. Currently Steemit (the company owned by Justin Sun) has plans to have exclusive rights to de-vest his holdings, meaning all of the vested Steem owned by Steemit and other select individulas can go on the market, leaving all vested individuals potentially holding the bag while Steemit sells whatever they can.
I don’t know if this is the plan, but it strikes me as a confidence killing scenario, and that is not good for the STEEM cryptocurrency, in my opinion.
Stealth will have nothing like this. Users will be able to purchase blocksigning rights using anonymized tokens. No one will know who the blocksigners are, and no one can influence their behavior, either by voting or any other political pressure. it’s pure autonomy.
I could go on, but I’ll finish there with that question.
✍️ Telegram live Questions answered by Stealth ✔️
Putri Anggraeni:
Q1.What role do you think XST will play in making blockchain highly adaptable in the worldwide stage?
Q2.Staking seem to be popular right now on many blockchain project to encourage investors to hold tokens and make it healthful for project ecosystem. Does XST support this as well? If yes, what will requirement of a Node and a Validator node be? And how does reward base on?
Q3.What are the advantages if we holding XST for the long term?
James:
When we launched Stealth, the idea was that one day the value of completely private (cryptographically anonymous transactions) would be appreciated by everyone using blockchain.
Currently, privacy is considered a useful feature, but not essential, for blockchain.
But for blockchain to gain worldwide adoption, it must offer completely private transactions.
Our current payment systems actually offer far more privacy than, say, bitcoin. If I buy something from Amazon, for example, the only people who know what I bought are Amazon and myself. My credit card company knows how much I spent, and where I spent it, but not even what I bought. All of these parties are private, so credit cards offer very good privacy.
Blockchain transactions are public unless they offer privacy. It is possible now to determine who you are and where you spent your money using blockchain forensics. Most people won’t feel like this is acceptable.
That’s why our chief focus has been developing a solution that most people of the world can embrace. But it has to have the performance characteristics that allow this adoption. That’s why we invented Junaeth, that supports both fast transactions and cyrptographic privacy.
One day, people will see the essential utility of this combination, and hopefully Stealth will already have established itself at the forefront of this combination of technology.
Isam Mery:
To ensure my financial privacy, in addition to your coin, what other tools should I use, connect my wallet to Tor, vpn?
What should the role of the community be in supporting these projects that guarantee us freedom and privacy (which are basic principles), without being singled out as people outside the law?
James:
First part: you should always use Tor. One thing I didn’t get around to mentioning here is that Stealth has Tor built-in, enabled by default. It has been on the Tor network since day one. If you run a full node, then Tor is essential. Fortunately it requires no extra work to take advantage of Tor when using Stealth.
> What should the role of the community be in supporting these projects that guarantee us freedom and privacy (which are basic principles), without being singled out as people outside the law?
This is a great question.
One thing the community can do is try to educate the rest of society about the level of privacy society already expects from their payment system.
I gave the credit card example above. It is private, but no one suspects anyone who uses a credit card of nefarious intent, simply becuase they are using a credit card.
The same can be said of other traditional payment solutions, like paypal.
Rohit (wHaLe):
What is the uniqueness stealth project that cannot be found in your competitors’ projects?
James:
The Junaeth protocol is unique. I’ve never seen another solution like it. I’m not sure why, because it works spectacularly.
I think the reason everyone chooses the politically-driven dPoS instead of developing a truly novel and economic-driven solution like Junaeth is control.
Founders of coins want control of the money supply and the entire blockchain. It’s human nature.
There are many exceptions, like PoW (Bitcoin, Ethereum) and other types of proof-of-stake (like PeerCoin). But it seems that when a high performance blockchain is required, the default is to fork an existing implementation of Bitshares or Lisk, and then award yourself all the coins, then control the blockchain using that stake.
Stealth absolutely does not embrace that idea. To have a high performance blockchain, block signing rights are tokenized and purchased from the blockchain, by burning coins.
In other words, the user effectively burns a certain amount of coins and gets permanent blocksigning rights and rights to all the future earnings associated with that token.
No one can influence the owner of that token, and if the owner wishes, can purchase the token completely anonymously.
Running on Tor, the owner can never be discovered.
So with Junaeth, unlike any other protocol, block signers have absolute autonomy.
I think this level of freedom scares those who establish coins using dPoS. Freedom is scary to most. At Stealth we embrace it.
Th Va:
What’s your outlook on the future of cryptocurrencies? What can we do to keep increasing adoption?
James:
I like this question to close because it is very general.
I think cryptocurrencies are on the path to greater adoption. Every year there are more cryptocurrencies and more people in the space. The amazing number of individuals who posted questions, and the speed at which they posted those questions here would have been unheard of just three or four years ago.
With adoption will become a new set of demands on the protocols we use for blockchain. My predictions is that these protocols will need a number of features that are not widely seen in cryptocurrencies today.
The main features are anonymity (to support fungibility of the currency, security, and autonomy of the user).
The other features are high performance block times, unlike Bitcoin, but like Stealth (with Junaeth protocol), and like some others, such as Bitshares and Eos. Though these latter two suffer from a lack of autonomy of block signers, with the problems I mentioned above.
Finally, coins will need low inflation, so that people who use the coins can treat them as a store of value to some extent. Bitcoin’s inflation will drop to less than 2% this year. Stealth with Junaeth will be 1% forever, providing just enough block signing rewards to have a highly robust and secure network.
> What can we do to keep increasing adoption?
Finally, the best way to promote adoption is by participating in the technology in any way you can. I like to take payment in cryptocurrencies if possible. That’s how I really got into it in 2014. I started by seeing if I could do odd jobs for people over the internet and requesting payment in various coins. Once you get coins, you have coins, and you can also offer them for payment.
Other types of participating can be to join channels like this and read the AMAs and ask questions, or by actually developing blockchain protocol, or creating infrastructure.
At the end of the day, blockchain is a community endeavor, and it will grow by participation either on the economic, social, or technical levels.
Joxes:
Hi, is great to be here
As a Stealth project, have you needed any round of financing, or has it been a voluntary effort?
Let’s be fair in the following comparison: Stealth could currently be considered 100% private and easy to use compared to large cryptos like Monero and ZCash?
Thank you James
James:
It’s all volunteer at this point. We never had any financing. There is no external control. We have no one who we are beholden to. Protocol development is 100% based on how we see the needs of cryptocurrency users evolving over time.
> Let’s be fair in the following comparison: Stealth could currently be considered 100% private and easy to use compared to large cryptos like Monero and ZCash?
We had to make the high performance protocol before we added anonymity. This protocol is called Junaeth and is complete. It’s half the objective.
The other half is anonymity. It hasn’t been implemented yet, but we will use the zcash protocol, currently implemented in several coins, one of which is named the same (zcash).