The Satoshi Club Telegram channel has a very active and enthusiastic community of around six thousand members. The Satoshi Club approached the Ambassadors to see if Cardano would be interested in taking part in a Cardano AMA session. Results included 100s of new active crypto members joining the Cardano Telegram channels and a new level of knowledge about Cardano for a community that was not previously active in following the Cardano Project. This set the foundations to build a positive relationship and connection between two crypto communities.
Once details were discussed between Ambassadors and the Cardano Foundation, Lgbeano, Priyank and Josh proceeded to collaborate with the Satoshi Club team to finalise the finer details.
The AMA was held within the Satoshi Club Telegram channel and organised into three Stages for ease:
Stage 1: A few days before, the Satoshi Club and Cardano community in Telegram were made aware of the AMA; they were given a link to a website in order to ask any questions. Prior to the AMA, five questions were selected by the Satoshi Club hosts and passed to the Cardano Ambassadors to prepare their answers. The channel was muted, to allow the hosts and Ambassadors to introduce themselves and kick things off… The AMA had begun! 4
Stage 2: Once each question was answered by Lgbeano, Priyank or Josh the community were invited to ask follow up questions; the channel opened for 2 minutes to allow the community to post live 1. In less than two minutes the channel flooded with almost a thousand amazing questions (which gave telegram a few problems!!). With so many great questions, it made picking very difficult. The channel was muted again and the Ambassadors had about 15 minutes to select 5 questions and post their answers!
Stage 3: While Lgbeano, Priyank and Josh were preparing their answers, the Satoshi Hosts had set up a cool quiz 1 on their website for the community to answer while they waited; once the ambassadors followed up on their chosen questions it was time to end.
The AMA finished very positively with many thanks all around 4. The engagement, positivity and feedback from the community was over whelming!
Since the AMA we have received many invitations to participate in similar AMA’s within different communities. This is amazing to see and although it was initially organised as a one off trial event, it could mean more AMA’s with the Ambassadors in the not so distant future!!
A few words from the Ambassadors;
Lgbeano
When Serg first approached us enquiring if we would be interested in an AMA, I didn’t realise the amount of time and organisation that would go into it. It didn’t take long to realise how well the Satoshi Club team organise their AMA sessions which gave us great ideas for the future. I could not believe the interest, positive participation and welcome we received. I would like to thank the Satoshi Club for having us and opening up a potential path to help spread the word of Cardano; the feedback we had was amazing!
Although we are not currently planning to hold anymore AMA’s, I think I can speak for Priyank and Josh when I say, we really enjoyed it and maybe one day you will see us in an AMA near you.
Josh
When I first heard about the AMA with the Satoshi Club on telegram, I was a little sceptical that it could work with the fast passed nature of telegram channels. However I wanted to give it ago and see how it would play out. With a nervous few minutes in preparation before the AMA with Priyank and Lgbeano and some encouraging words from the Satoshi Club hosts in private, we were ready to roll with the questions!
It took a few questions before we settled down and got into the rhythm of the telegram style AMA, but once the nerves had settled we were away and running! I have to say it was an amazing experience to be asked so many great questions about Cardano, and it was also a great feeling to put to bed a couple of misconceptions too! The Satoshi Club and their hosts were very warm and welcoming, and were showing some fantastic knowledge about Cardano!
Its great to see other groups and communities becoming excited about Cardano, also a pleasure to have the opportunity to answer a few question that people have! I thoroughly enjoyed it and look forward to doing this more with other communities and my fellow ambassadors! I want to thank Satoshi Club for inviting us along, and hope to have the chance to do it again in the future!
Priyank
It was an interesting and gradually fun experience, I would say it went better than our initial (anxious) expectations, being the first time participating in such event. Much of the target audience were new to Cardano, and once the Stage 2 (live AMA) was activated, we were taken aback by the flood of interesting questions and it soon became apparent that we wont be able to go through the entire stack of questions, to pick questions by distributing the periods. I loved the fact that the questions were not about “when”/”what” or price related, but more about “why”/“how” relating to the workings or upcoming advances – especially from a community where some of the participants were not active members of Cardano groups.
As already mentioned by Luke and Josh, special props to the Satoshi club admins for maintaining the channels well – keeping it value-oriented. The feedback received from the audience post the AMA was quite encouraging, and I would love to see more personnel from Cardano engage in such activities.
We are please to announce that we had an AMA with our friends from Stealth! James Stroud, Lead Developer and Co-Founder of Stealth, was in @Satoshi_Club at 10:00 UTC, 2nd of April. The total reward pool was 200 USD and was split in 3 parts. Here is the recap of the AMA.
Part 1
We have collected hundreds of questions from the community and have selected 5 of them.
Irina Kravchuk:
Hi again friends. Our guest today is Dr. James Stroud – Lead
Developer and Co-Founder at Stealth. Welcome dr. James. Thanks for taking the
time to join us.
James:
Hi, and thank you for this invitation!
Serg:
For introduction, can you tell us briefly about you and abut
Stealth?
James:
My name is James Stroud, and I am the Co-Founder and Lead
Developer for Stealth R&D LLC, a company that is dedicated to developing
the Stealth cryptocurrency protocol and building infrastructure for it as well.
I earned a B.S. from UT Austin in Molecular Biology, then a
M.A. in Biochemistry from Columbia University in New York, then a Ph.D. in
Biochemistry from the University of Colorado at Boulder, and finally did a
postdoc at UCLA. I then joined the faculty in Chemistry at UNM and stayed there
until I got into blockchain.
I got into blockchain in 2013 during the enormous pump,
where I bought BTC the top and watched it go down immediately. This left me not
defeated but even more resolute to become good at trading. It also made me
explore blockchain more deeply.
After a couple of months of studying the technology, I
decided I had to participate somehow in any way I could, so I volunteered to
help with some projects. The first thing I learned was to build the GUI
(graphical user interface) clients.
I don’t know how many people that hold cryptocurrencies do
it this way today, but when I first got into it, you typically had to download
a full blockchain and run a server to use most coins. The server program, which
I call a “client”, provided a GUI where you could send and receive coins.
Building these for new coins was always a chore, and it was a good way for me
to start to learn the details of cryptocurrency technology.
Soon, I decided that I wanted to launch a coin myself, and
this was Stealth. We launched Stealth in 2014, and it was originally known as
StealthCoin. My idea is that practically all cryptocurrencies lacked privacy,
and Stealth would have a goal of being the premier private cryptocurrency.
I’ve been working on Stealth ever since, and in the last two
years, have been completely dedicated to it. I quit my faculty position at UNM
in 2016, and joined a different gaming-focused cryptocurrency company. Stayed
with them for about 1.5 years, then founded Stealth R&D to exclusively
develop Stealth’s core technologies and related infrastructure.
Irina Kravchuk:
So you’re a veteran in this field. Thanks for the intro.
We’ll start with the questions from the community
Serg:
Q1 from
@victbt
What is the STEALTH business model? How do you
generate the profit?
James:
Stealth is a cryptocurrency, just like bitcoin. Neither have
a profit model. I launched Stealth a long time ago and I am dedicated to making
it the most useful private currency possible.
We have a company called Stealth R&D LLC that we made
simply to formalize the relationships between the core dev team and to
interface with exchanges who want an organization to “represent” Stealth to the
exchanges. They want to know who to call to if they have a problem with their
blockchain, and things like that, so we made a company for that purpose.
However, we don’t have a business model for the coin itself.
There never was an “ICO” or anything like that. It’s a cryptocurrency and was
mined out fairly and the mined coins and any coins earned from those through
proof-of-stake are traded on exchanges.
Irina Kravchuk:
Our Q2 is somehow related to the motivation that might drive
you.
Serg:
Q2 from
@toanphamhd
What do you think is the biggest problem STEALTH will
solve which is not solved by other projects and why this is the problem
important?
James:
The biggest problem is a particular combination of
requirements that will make cryptocurrencies useful or not.
First cryptocurrencies need to be useful for the whole
planet.
That’s called “scalability”.
Second, cryptocurrencies need to have fast transactions, so
that the user experience is similar to the most convenient payment systems,
like credit cards. By fast, we mean a vendor and a customer should both feel a
transaction is final within 5 seconds.
Third, crytpocurrencies need to offer at least the same
level of privacy as other payment methods, like credit card. People don’t think
about this very often, but credit cards are very private payment systems. Only
the vendor and you know what you bought, and only the vendor, credit card
company, and yourself know how much you spent where.
Most cryptocurrencies don’t offer anywhere near this level
of privacy.
Irina Kravchuk:
Speaking of privacy. Can you tell us how are you/ Stealth
related to Tor Project and Tor Browser?
James:
Bitcoin, for example is completely public. Services exist
that can identify individuals by network patterns within the bitcoin
blockchain. If an identity can be tied to any single transaction, then
practically all their blockchain spending patterns can be determined.
Stealth is not related to Tor at all. We don’t share
development with them. Stealth has Tor technology integrated, unlike most
coins. Tor is there to protect privacy.
Serg:
but there are services which somehow randomize the
transactions, right? Or they are not so efficient?
James:
There are services that randomize bitcoin transactions, for
example. These are called “mixers”. I would not recommend ever using these
services.
First a mixer is a proprietary service, not a trustless
blockchain service. What this means is that a mixer can just keep your coins
and never send them where you want them to go.
Second, once you mix coins with a service, they are tainted.
Tainted coins can be blacklisted, and they are blacklisted with astonishing
regularity.
Irina Kravchuk:
What does it mean if a coin is blacklisted?
James:
For example, an experiment I do not recommend running would
be to mix some coins and then send these coins to Coinbase. Once these coins
are at Coinbase, they will detect that they were run through a mixer, and
completely lock your account, maybe permanently. Then possibly deny you service
in the future, indefinitely. That’s a type of blacklisting.
Irina Kravchuk:
That’s interesting. But do they treat high-privacy coins
differently? Like yourself or Monero etc. I mean you get the same result – you
can’t track the first sender
James:
This goes back to the fact that Bitcoin and most
cryptocurrencies don’t have privacy. This lack of privacy means different coins
can have different values. For example, to Coinbase, an unmixed amount of 1 BTC
will have a value of 1 BTC, but a mixed amount of 1 BTC will have a value of 0.
Some exchanges allow trading in privacy coins. I believe
Coinbase offers ZEC, which is a privacy coin. I don’t remember Coinbase’s
complete offering, so I could be wrong.
Serg:
Q3 from
@Magoy12
What is the main role of STEALTH tokens? Can you
explain in Details about Project’s Work and Mission with work of Token in
Entire ecosystem?
James:
It might be a misnomer to label the Stealth currency (XST)
as a “token”. XST is the currency of the Stealth blockchain. Most of the time
the term “token” is reserved for passive tokens on a smart contract platform,
like Ethereum.
This means the main role of Stealth is that it is a
trustless payment processor, like Bitcoin, Z-Cash (ZEC), or Ripple (XRP). Stealth’s
niche in the cryptocurrency “ecosystem” is therefore a payment system for those
who demand the same privacy, speed, and scalability as they demand from
traditional, centralized, payment options like credit card.
No other cryptocurrency that I know of is engineered to
offer this combination.
Serg:
Q4 from
@manugotsuka
Stealth, on one of your 2020 milestones will change
from OpenSSL to secp256k1, this change will boost up the synchronization ans
bootstraps times and also taking less CPU resources. But Why secp256k1 and not
secp256r1? I think this last one has more potencial with stealth in term of
SECURITY and user PRIVACY?
James:
Well, there are lots of different elliptical curves one can
use for public key cryptography. Stealth was launched using secp256k1, and so
we need to support that curve for existing transactions. In terms of this pair
of curves, secp256r1 is marginally stronger, if you consider the bit strength
of both curves.
In my opinion, were we ever to change curves, we’d opt for a
quantum-resistance. I don’t that secp256r1 could fit the bill. Of course,
neither could secp256k1.
Irina Kravchuk:
Thank you. Small question here. How do you deal with
volatility?
James:
If you mean price volatility, we don’t deal with price
volatility. It happens on its own. Stealth is a cryptocurrency and trading
markets determine price. There is no mechanism in the protocol to stabilize its
price. There are lots of stable coins available, but XST is not one.
Serg:
Q5 from
@dani_unss
How you compare to Zcash and Monero?
James:
This is a tough question, because I don’t want to offend
anyone who may like either of these coins. But we have some differences, and I
think we are better, depending on one’s requirements for a cryptocurrency.
First, Zcash and Monero are both proof-of-work (PoW). PoW
has some advantages and disadvantages.
First the disadvantage of PoW is that it is inefficient.
When I say this, I’m not talking about energy efficiency. Energy efficiency is
very important for the environment, but doesn’t have much bearing on blockchain
functionality.
By inefficient, I mean PoW is a competition to sign the
immediate next block in the blockchain. Competition is inherently inefficient,
and it makes block times slow and irregular.
Stealth uses proof-of-stake (PoS), which can be very
efficient, both for energy and blockchain function. The Junaeth protocol, which
is fully functional in testnet, is on of the most efficient forms of PoS
possible, using scheduled block production. In this system, there is no
competition for the next block. This makes block times highly regular and fast,
at nearly perfect 5 second intervals.
Also, Monero and Z-cash have two different types of privacy.
Monero uses ring signatures, which are themselves very inefficient because the
blockchain proofs are very large. They also take a lot of time time verify.
Irina Kravchuk:
Why 5 seconds?
James:
Z-cash has much more efficient cryptography, the zerocash
protocol, and this is the same protocol we are adapting for Stealth.
Five seconds is a long time for computers, so it gives
plenty of time to verify blocks, and cryptographic proofs for anonymity. However,
for people it’s short, and is about 1/2 the time of a typical credit card
transaction.
Consider if you use a card and insert a chip, you will wait
about 10 seconds for it to say “confirmed”. Maybe it can be as few as 5
seconds.
So, we chose a time that was long for computers but short
for people. This makes Stealth highly useable but practical.
Serg:
Thanks for your answer!
James:
You are welcome!
Part 2
The chat was open for 2 minutes and 400 questions were
posted by the Satoshi Club community. James have chosen 5 of them:
Q1: Raj
Choudary:
Which programming languages are you using in your
project? And why?
James:
Stealth use a few languages, and it depends on what part of
the project. For the reference client, Stealth uses C++.
A reference client can be considered the embodiment of the
blockchain protocol. If you want to really see how the protocol behaves, you
can’t simply read the specification, because the specification defines an ideal
behaviour.
In reality, the only real definition of behavior is the code
of the reference client. To give the most fundamental operational definition,
if the reference client allows a transaction into the blockchain, then the
transaction is valid. That may seem too obvious, or “it goes without saying”,
but it is a profound definition of the reference client, and I recommend one
ponder that definition even if it does seem obvious.
Stealth uses C++ for the reference client because it is
fast. Bitcoin was written in C++, and Stealth inherited a lot of the Bitcoin
code. For other parts of the project, Stealth uses python. For example, to
linearize a blockchain to create a bootstrap, the code is practically all in
python.
Q2: Kun
Aguero:
As you know that in the present market situation many
new coins or either dying or thriving for liquidity? How will you manage this
liquidity problem?
James:
Just like we don’t manage volatility, we don’t manage market
liquidity. The markets decide what coins live and what coins die. My philosophy
is that useful, innovative, and well-engineered technology will be the most
important considerations for markets. For this reason, we focus on Stealth
technology, not market issues.
Q3: Sergio:
Marketing is a leading element for every project. So what is your strategy to attract customers
and investors to XST in the long term?
James:
I’m focusing in market questions today, so I can clear some
air. Congratulations to those of you who offered these questions. Normally, I
avoid them. This question might be boiled down to “what is our strategy to
attract customers?”
Stealth has no customers. It’s a cryptocurrency. We don’t
offer Stealth for sale, so we don’t have investors. We have nothing to offer
investors ourselves.
We focus on developing the protocol. The only exception is
we believe it is important to present our technology, ideas, and work to the
public for feedback. To this end, we attend conferences, give talks, and
participate in AMAs, like this one.
However, we are not XST salespeople. If anyone is interested
in XST or the technology, they don’t need to own the actual currency. They can
help write code, offer suggestions, or simply ask good questions.
Q4: David
Prince:
What are your plans to move towards a more
decentralized and trustless solution?
James:
Stealth is already decentralized and trustless. It is a blockchain
protocol with consensus rules. It was mined fairly and is presently
proof-of-stake. The type of proof-of-stake consensus protocol will change
significantly when Junaeth is on mainnet (it is functioning on testnet right
now). But this change will not make XST any more or less trustless than it
already is.
Q5: Alice
Cắn dày:
Trust is very important in security, what makes
investors, customers and users feel safe when working with Stealth?
James:
One last market question! I may never answer these types
again 😎
I already mentioned Stealth has no customers and offers
“investors” nothing. If one wants to decide whether they “trust” Stealth’s
trustless consensus model, the code is open source, and the protocol is
specified in the white paper.
I believe this is truly the only way to trust any
cryptocurrency. If one relies on “trusting” founders or a business model, I
think they could make a costly mistake.
For those who are not technical, wait for cryptocurrencies
that stand the test of time and to be vetted by the expert community. Poor
cryptocurrencies will die quickly. Good cryptocurrencies will last for years
and decades.
Part 3
We had a quiz with 4 questions. 20 winners were announced:
Question 1:
By what algorithm Stealth Blockchain network aims to achieve
distributed consensus?
Correct Answer:
QPOS
Question 2:
How many tps have Stealth blockchain compared to bitcoin:
