Part 1️: 250 PART/6 users – We’ll select 6 questions from the community. A user can post maximum 3 questions. 4 Questions will be selected from our website- please submit your questions in the comments section of this post. 2 Question will be selected from this Bitcointalk thread.
Part 2️: 250 PART/10 users – Open chat for 80 seconds. You can post Max 5 questions. Particl Team will select 10 questions and answer them.
On June 27, one of the most exciting AMA (Ask Me Anything) sessions took place in our group, which has reached 10,000 members. Congratulations to the Satoshi Club Community, we will continue to bring great projects and rewards. We were visited by our friends from Ethereum Classic Project. Our guests were @Classic_Kevin, @royzou, @passepartu and @antsankov.
Prize pool was split as follow: Part 1, $50 to 5 winners; Part 2, $50 to 5 winners; Part 3, $200 to 30 winners.
In
this AMA Recap we are trying to summarize some of the most interesting points
for you.
……………………………….
PART 1, INTRODUCTION AND COMMUNITY
QUESTIONS
Irina K. | @Satoshi_Club: Hi everyone, welcome to another episode of
our AMA series. We have today as guests our friends from Ethereum Classic
project @Classic_Kevin, @royzou and @passepartu.
Welcome guys and thanks for taking the time to join us.
a.s.: Hi Everyone and thanks for having ETC
participants here. 😚
Ciprian Ciubotaru: Hello. 🙂
Roy Zou: Hello. Thanks for having me!
Classic Kevin: Hey everyone 👋🏼
Irina K. | @Satoshi_Club: As you know, in the first part we have
questions collected from our community as comments on our platform. But before
we begin, please tell us a little bit about yourself and how did you come to be
involved in ETC project?
a.s.: I live in Germany and help in the ETC eco
with several administrative and marketing topics. I joined crypto world in the
middle of the 2017, as I first heard about Ethereum. I read a lot around this
project and then stopped on Ethereum Classic.
Irina K. | @Satoshi_Club: Nice. Thanks for sharing. What did you do
before crypto? Other tech projects?
a.s.: No, I am an architecture by profession –
offices, hotels, residential.
Alex Tsankov: I was personally a big DeFi enthusiast at the
very beginning, working with early MakerDAO. And I thought to myself three
things that led to ETC:
why is there no
supply cap of ETH?
if my DAO gets
hacked does that mean developers need to legally ask for a rollback?
why do we have to
switch to Proof of Stake on ETH, when PoW with sidechains works great?
ETC
addresses all of these, and I learned more about the community.
Irina K. | @Satoshi_Club: Why in the past? Not a DeFi enthusiast
anymore?
Alex Tsankov: I am still a big enthusiast! I think DeFi is
the best application we have so far for Ethereum.
Classic Kevin: I’ll start. So I’ve been “in crypto for wow
for about ~7 years lol. I was a noob in the start like everyone else but I
started mining and getting into how it works for a while-the saw the dao
exploit and how it was handled. Started joining the Ethereum classic social
media channels and eventually started a bunch of social media accounts devoted
to ETC. Volunteer registered on github ETC volunteers.” And that’s how you can
join the project! Haha That’s the short version.
Roy Zou: Hi all! I am Roy, now live in Canton, China. I
joined Bitcoin community since 2011, and the first organizer of ETC Chinese
community and one of very early stage of builders of ETC community along with
Arvicco at the beginning of this community since July, 2016. previously advisor of ETCDEV team. And now
board of director of Ethereum Classic Cooperative organization.
Alex Tsankov: One interesting thing about etc is that there
is no central organization, like the ETH foundation.
Irina K. | @Satoshi_Club: Could you explain how does this help the
project?
Alex Tsankov: That’s a great question! So one of the advantages
is that it requires building real community consensus to make a change to the
code. You need to go to all the sub groups (tribes I call them) in the ETC
community to make a change t something. Rather than just got to one
organization.
Irina K. | @Satoshi_Club: And is the
process the same for every decision? Or just for big ones? I mean, doesn’t this
make the decision making process slow?
Alex Tsankov: Yep. It does mean that the process is slow,
but it is also more organic. Similar to the way right now it is very tricky to
change the HTTP protocol or TCP/IP.
Also
the ETC community is very technologically sophisticated. We did three hard
forks in the last year, Atlantis, azatlan, and Phoenix, which is more than the
ETH community did.
Classic Kevin: It’s the “ungovernance” is actually very
similar to bitcoin in that everybody has their own say so and there is no 800
number you can call if you’re back one gets lost or stolen there is no central
authority. It’s just Code running on a block chain.
a.s.: Also, as there is no authority, only a
protocol, no one can take it down, theoretically.
Irina K. | @Satoshi_Club: No one did so far, so I say it’s a pretty good
assumption. For sure many tried.
a.s.: All technical developments go through an ECIP
process (Ethereum Classic Improvement Proposal). Yes, it makes the decision
slower. And this is the price one pay in a decentralized, permissionless,
censorship-resistance.
Classic Kevin: We don’t have a central authority for the
government or any group to just shut ETC down. All it is a blockchain. Same
with bitcoin. Corporate coins with single companies doing everything they can
be shut down with the snap of a finger. When a project is so open and
distributed like ETC or BTC all it is volunteers. This is One way in how you
minimize trust.
Alex Tsankov: Exactly. Right way to view ETC is: Run your
smart contracts on Bitcoin. But I will give two cents: ETH forced people to run
code with a bailout in it. And first ETC didn’t have a name. It was just people
and miners who said no to running the bailout code. Only after a few months,
and signing from ETC Declaration of Independence, did ETC become its own chain.
Q1 from Telegram
user @bigbit
How long did it
take to decide and what were your thoughts and feelings when deciding that the
only solution is a hardfork from Ethereum?
Classic Kevin: It can take years actually. When we
introduced the monetary policy it was difficult to convince each party of the
proposal. It actually took a very long time. However, if you take some of these
non-contentious agreed-upon proposals they are much quicker and easier to pass
in ECIP and implement in the clients.
Roy Zou: It is not a decision for ETC community to do a
hardfork for what happened at that time, we just chose to stay at the original
chain.
a.s.: There is misunderstanding in the crypto world.
First there was Ethereum network. After the DAOhack, a flaw in the smart
contract interacting with the network, the community decided to hard fork. The
minority, who hold to the original philosophy was named Ethereum Classic. The
hard forked is the Ethereum (ETH). And if we get more philosophically, there
were two “groups” from the day one of the Ethereum and it came into
an appearance with this event.
Irina K. | @Satoshi_Club: Got it. Actually this is not very well known.
The general belief I think is that ETC is a hardfork from ETH, not the other
way around.
Alex Tsankov: Yes, my personal belief is that it is good
there is ETH and ETC. Because there are some smart people on both sides. Some
people in ETH say they achieved majority hash power to do rollback, so it is
ok. But in ETC we stick to the original principle of immutability, which is why
blockchain exists.
Classic Kevin: ETC founders “originals”: Elaine Ou, MikeyB,
Arvicco, Igor, Bitnovosti, and more I’m forgetting of the top of my head,
anyone else you can Roy. You can always look at the early contributors on the
GitHub for the Ethereum project.
Classic Kevin: Time preference. Rome wasn’t built in a day.
And ETC teams and parties received NONE of the financial benefits Ethereum had:
premine, ICO, dumped free post dao ETC etc. Blockchain’s are about minimizing
trust. Ethereum is doing this absolutely poorly.
Q2 from Telegram
user @juaniss
Is Gödel Labs a
commercial project? Does it bring profits and sustain the main project?
Roy Zou: Gödel Labs is an incubator of Blockchain. We
contribute to foster the ecosystem of community. But it is not just focus on
ETC, it is broadly the whole Blockchain community.
Irina K. | @Satoshi_Club: oh, ok. Is this an ETC initiative? Or how is
it related to ETC?
Roy Zou: of course, ETC is one of main field Gödel Labs
will invest.
Irina K. | @Satoshi_Club: But is it operational? Does it have any
project/ incumbents?
Roy Zou: Gödel Labs will invest in protocol-level
projects for ETC. And previously we announced we will build a dedicated team
for ETC. Gödel Labs is already doing the investment, education, and community
building stuff in China.
Irina K. | @Satoshi_Club: Got it. So it’s still work in progress it
seems, there aren’t any projects currently incubated by Gödel Labs? Quick
questions: why Gödel labs? Where did the name come from?
Roy Zou: Multigeth client support, and ETC community
building include ethereumclassic.cn.
Classic Kevin: A very strong presence over in China for ETC.
Alex Tsankov: ETC is a very international project. Our main
development centers are: USA, which is where I am, EU, and China. Many
different viewpoints.
Roy Zou: Kurt Gödel’s theories deeply shape how I look
at this world. For memorize him, we named company as Gödel Labs.
Classic Kevin: Yeah it’s pretty crazy actually. How many
other projects can you realistically has this type of distribution of
development teams? Or developers? that’s one thing that separates Ethereum
classic as a legitimate project from the other 2000 coins listed on CMC.
Not
to mention the outreach and Community engagement and growth, Roy is one of the
reasons why this project succeeded as it did in the very beginning.
Q3 from Telegram
user @Brainchest
The success of ETH
in that they chose the right position in 2016 and made a rollback or do they
have the right management? But my question is as follows. Do you plan to make
changes to the management and more successful promotion of ETC.? After all, you
have a more powerful argument for investors. You are true to this promise not
to change the code itself.
Roy Zou: I think I am the first Chinese to tell
Chinese community about the ETC and start a consortium in Sept, 2016 to support
ETC, along with the main companies and organizations in China, including the biggest
names in the ecosystem.
Classic Kevin: I would encourage everybody that wants to get
an understanding of how diverse this ecosystem of participants actually is
(traders, investors, developers, minors, exchanges, any service providers. Then
watch the first summit in Hong Kong. You’ll be quite shocked. The Hong Kong summit
in 2017.
Irina K. | @Satoshi_Club: When is the summit?
a.s.: For this year there is no one due to global
situation.
Roy Zou: I translated the Declaration of Ethereum
Classic Independent and co-work with other members to deploy the economic
policy.
a.s.:
By the way there are in other languages, too, which could be found on the ETC
subreddit on the right sidebar.
Alex Tsankov: I personally think the ETH community is doing
something wrong by pushing Proof of Stake so hard.
I
believe in the strategy of a solid base main chain with good security
properties. And then you use smart contracts with sidechains to increase
capacity on the network. Proof of stake has so many potential issues people
don’t talk about, and ETH foundation hides. Like here is one: with proof of
work, the computational work and mining is timeless, anyone can see and compute
it, it can never be faked. With proof of stake, if you get 50%+ of the network
you can rewrite all history in one go.
This
is very unfair to users and Dapp developers who may not believe in Proof of
Stake; so that is why ETC is picking up traction right now.
a.s.: First the etc website was revamped. Now, I
(German/Russian) and several other doing translations into other languanges.
The planned languanges are also listed on github. With this the broader
audience can be reached, too.
Alex Tsankov: The marketing strategy for ETC is very
developer focused right now. We want ETh developers to know they can deploy
their dapp on ETH and ETC with the same codebase. This will build users, and
applications which will lead to more investment.
Irina K. | @Satoshi_Club: Are there any running applications now on ETC?
Alex Tsankov: Yes, I run the biggest DeFi app on ETC. It is
called commonwealth. gg it is a peer to peer savings fund that holds over
12,000 ETC in its smart contract. I also maintain a website dappdirect. net
which lists out stats for all running ETC dapps, like dapp radar.
Alex Tsankov: …because for a long time people thought etc
was just for trading, but I was curious if it could be used for smart contracts
as well as eth and it works very well! Gas fees are very low right now on the
network too. It is cheaper to use ETC than eth right now. 😁
If anyone reading is an eth developer, I would suggest they try to deploy an
app on ETC and see what it’s like. They will be impressed.
Irina K. | @Satoshi_Club: What about the management part of the
question? Are you happy with how the things are going, or do you plan any
changes?
Alex Tsankov: Yes, I have an ECIP I made. To change the
hash algorithm on ETC to one called “keccak256”. This is much higher
performance than even Bitcoin Sha256, over 4x more hash per unit of energy. So
I believe that if the ETC community chooses to adopt it, there is a chance ETC
could become the highest hashpower chain on the planet, of all PoW chains. Higher
hashpower = more secure network. This is the core thesis of the bitcoin white
paper itself.
a.s.: And this is also tested under the tech people.
Classic Kevin: So based on blockchain principles and what
makes blockchains different from using regular databases like mysql or anything
else is the fact that chains are not meant to be intervened upon especially
when the issue happened on a Dapp and not the protocol. The HF was a bailout
plain and simple for the investors and interest groups of the SlockIt DAO.
From
a blockchain perspective they’ve set a precedent to do “we’ll rescue you forks”
and violated immutability for the sake of a smart contract. So wrong decision.
They have the worst management. First of all, their decisions are made up of a
small group of people and they are still being led in a moses-driven leadership
with Vitalik. Changes in management for ETC IMO are unnecessary as there is no
hierarchy and there is no leader. Companies that participate in the project
have every right to structure their management the way they want but not the
open source project.
Over
time we will catch up with their social media presence, and begin to level out
as time goes on. The promise is not only not to change the code but to minimize
the trust we have in those parties that will change the code for good or bad.
Immutability is a spectrum and 100% of chains are not totally immutable.
Security
first. Ethereum classic development has always been slow, methodical, and
diligent never overpromising things like shad ing or 10000 tps or anything else
you’ve heard.
Q4 from Telegram
user @Magoy12
With the Agharta
upgrade live, ETC is now more compatible with ETH. What is the reason for or
benefit of maintaining a high level of interoperability with ETH?
Alex Tsankov: This is good question. I tell people this: ETH
and ETC have different consensus algorithms but the actual application layer is
the same between them. So think of it like SQL. Eth and Etc are like PostgreSQL
and MySQL, with different teams and philosophies. But you can use the same
queries on both of them.
We
will maintain compatibility with ETH as long as it is beneficial to do so for
ETC. If ETH does something crazy, we will choose not to merge it into ETC.
a.s.: Also, as the Ethereum Classic (ETC) network and Ethereum (ETH) share the same base code (Ethereum) and due to it, it is easier for developers to move to the Ethereum Classic and getting its blockchain features. After this upgrade and the Ethereum switching its consensus mechanism to PoS, the both network will go its own road, but could benefit from each other in the future.
Classic Kevin: Atlantis, Agharta, and Phoenix were a series
of pre agreed upon, non-contentious, necessary upgrades to attain a parity
protocol with the ethereum protocol, bridging a lot of gaps for dapp developers
essentially making it incredible easy to port your existing dapp do ETC like
i.e. Maker, or any project.
We’re
already starting to see this with CHainbridge, Ethermint, and POA ETCBridge and
a lot more. Another one of the main reasons was the easier accessibility to the
immense degree of tooling in Ethereum that wasn’t available to ETC.
Q5 from Telegram
user @CryptoLove97
How are
developmental changes made on ETC network? Do you plan to transition to PoS for
scaling your network like ETH is Progressing to RTH 2.0 (Casper)?
Classic Kevin: Trust me before it was so difficult to
develop applications it discouraged a lot of early development.
Alex Tsankov: No plans to switch to PoS for a very long
time in Ethereum Classic. However, I know some people in the community that
say: If PoS is proven, over 10 years, same way Proof of Work has been proven
since 2008, then maybe we can consider migrating ETC to it.
Classic Kevin: Any changes whether their developmental or on
the social level or having to do with anything really about the project go
through the ECIP process. Proof of stake has not been battle tested and does not
solve the byzantine general’s problem which is basically the point of
Blockchains haha. In the beginning there was talk about doing a hybrid but that
was very short-lived because proof of work has demonstrated to be the most
secure mechanism and actually solves the byzantine general’s problem. By
separating node operators and miners. In POS that is not possible.
Alex Tsankov: Agreed, the ETH Foundation makes it seem like
PoS is simple, common sense improvement. The reality is that it is like changing
the engine of a moving jet, with another jet we don’t even know works! And why
should dapp developers and defi developers and users have to worry about their
business breaking because Vitalik wants to experiment? ETC provides solid
foundation to build a DeFi business on. All dapps are businesses,
fundamentally.
Classic Kevin: Take Segwit for example. That was alll due to
the node operators. Only had I believe ~30% miner support but guess what now we
have segwit on bitcoin all mostly done on a voluntary basis.
Alex Tsankov: One other note: I believe Proof of Work is
infinitely scalable.
Classic Kevin: In my opinion and proof of stake the rich get
richer and the poor stay where they’re at. I would never be in a position to
advocate for a change to that mechanism but potentially a hybrid if that’s
still in the research phase which I don’t believe it is.
a.s.: Basically copying the current system in the
world.
Alex Tsankov: Yes:
Proof
of Stake = Rich get Richer by having Money
Proof
of Work = Make money by doing hard work.
Classic Kevin: Also with proof of stake with the validator’s
or Block producers or stake pool operators has really shown to be rather
centralized. With mining if you really want to you could buy the equipment
necessary. With the other system that’s just not possible unless you can accrue
more capital than the whales ahead of you.
Alex Tsankov: Oh also one other note: many in DeFi community
don’t like Proof of Stake, because the yield competes with apps on the
platform. Think this way: if ETH PoS offers 2% yield, then nobody will use apps
like Compound or MakerDAO if they do less than 2%. It is basically like another
Federal Reserve.
Irina K. | @Satoshi_Club: Nice. Thank you guys. I think that on this
optimistic note we’ll close the doors of part 1 and proceed to part 2.
……………………………….
PART 2, TELEGRAM COMMUNITY LIVE
QUESTIONS
The
chat was open for 2 minutes; a lot of questions were posted by the Satoshi Club
community. Our guest chose some of them, but ONLY first five were rewarded.
Q1 from Telegram
User @CryptoLove97
Since, Majority of
Hash Power Rests with ETH, How Prone is ETC for a 51% Attack & Double
Spending? And, how would you Prevent this?
What was the reason
(besides EVM compatibility) behind breaking immutability with the Phoenix hard
fork?
Alex Tsankov: This is a controversial opinion, spread by
one developer in the ETC community.
Q3 from Telegram
User @Temidayo16
What does ETC have
to offer that another blockchain can’t rival?
Alex Tsankov: Very simple: we are the only proof of work,
turing complete, smart contract platform. Every other smart contract chain is
Proof of Stake. Also we are very decentralized, similar to Bitcoin.
Classic Kevin: well I’d point you to the roadmaps. Point you
to ETC being an authentic public blockchain, not a corporate coin or #1300 CMC
coin with 2 devs and nothing else. One thing people overlook is the fact that
ETC is light years ahead of other project in terms of infrastructure maturity,
ecosystem development, and social reach, authentic use i.e. tx per day, active
addresses, etc. Scaling will likely come in the form of sidechains (already
being researched and several PoCs have been delivered) and state channels
similar to Bitcoin’s lightning network time lock transactions. These are
already in production. 😊😊
Anything
that can be done without sacrificing security first and unproven/untested
technology. Remember no move fast and break things. Gotta get it right the
first time. 😉
Q4 from Telegram
User
About ETC goals of
the year.
a.s.: There are many goals for this year, but here
is an abstract from (link follows by mods):
To reach out to the non-english ETC social
channels to translate the English version of the https://ethereumclassic.org/
LLVM Instruction scheduler and performance
optimizations / JSON-RPC devp2p Wire protocol specification and reference
implementation research and possible design
Updates to ECIP process via ECIP-1000
discussion.
Astor experimental testnet SHA3 consensus algo
research review / Mining Algorithm Discussion: Astor SHA3 Change, DAG
reduction, No Change
My
personal are #1, #4. But it does not mean, that I don ‘t like others, too. 🙂
Currently this is
the year of DeFis, my question is what has Ethereum Classic done in this
regard?
Alex Tsankov: The biggest thing ETC can do right now in
terms of DeFi is:
Market to ETH
developers so they launch their dapp on both chains.
Work on wallets
like Saturn Wallet, or alpha wallet, that make it easier for users to use ETC
DeFi apps.
Q6 from Telegram
User @Ketz23
DeFi is one of the
hottest topic in the blockchain space right now. Can $ETC share your opinions
on DeFi with us? Do you think that DeFi will disrupt the existing financial
system? What is Unification approach towards the DeFi sector?
Alex Tsankov: DeFi is the *killer app* of crypto. Because it
solves serious problems with the financial system. I live in New York; I am
very familiar with finance applications.
They
are all very slow, expensive to use, lots of regulations, closed off to the
world. With DeFi, now the whole world has equal access to the market, no matter
where you are on earth at any time. This is a huge opportunity. We will see
stocks, bonds, real estate all integrated into DeFi apps in next 5 years. ETC
accrues value from this, because in order to use the defi apps, you need to pay
gas fees, and buy ETC off the market to pay for these fees.
Q7 from Telegram
User @kun4321
What is ETC’s plan
to increase its scalability?
Alex Tsankov: We believe in a rock solid base chain, and
then we have sidechains on top.
Q8 from Telegram
User @JackRipYourNeck
Crypto technology
is here more than ten years. Where do you think etc will be ten years from now,
in terms of organic growth? Thx!
Alex Tsankov: I believe there will only be 4 main
blockchains in the future. ETC will be one, because it is decentralized,
stable, good monetary policy, works well.
Q9 from Telegram
User @Ayoub41
As we know etc is
not a good investment for short term. What about long term?
Classic Kevin: Long term is perfect. ETC is not a pump and
dump where the devs will leave when price hits $X or $Y. It’s very much
demonstrated to be a long term one.
Q10 from Telegram
User @Harsha_prabath1
What are ways by
which ETC network generates profit/revenue to maintain project. What is your
revenue model? How it can be win situation for both investors and project?
Adoption is one of the important factor that all sustainable blockchain
projects should focus to be more attractive in the investors’ eyes. What ETC network
has done and plans to do to achieve real world adoption?
Classic Kevin: Right now its solely a donation driven process
but hopefully with all these goals and milestones and crazy interoperability we
can start fundraising for the project in different ways. I really like the
Gitcoin integration.
Q11 from Telegram
User @araceley
Why is ETC a way
better platform than ETH for DeFi projects?
Alex Tsankov: ETC has cap of 210mil coins, ETH is unlimited
right now. If you want unlimited money, just use fiat. 😄
Q12 from Telegram
User @Monica_012
Why anyone should
invest in ETC for long term investment? What is greatest strength of ETC? Tell
us some such feature that people / users should invest in ETC and this project
will get the support of community.
Alex Tsankov: ETC is very undervalued right now. It is
$5.90 compared to $200 for ETH. If you believe even ETC is 1/10 as good as ETH,
then you believe price should be $20.
Is Ethereum Classic
easy for new users? What are the highlights
that attract users of Ethereum Classic?
Classic Kevin: It’s as easy as ethereum. You may volunteer
in any capacity you may offer or bring to the table. If you can write a
contract on ethereum you can on ETC.
Q14 from Telegram
User @minseo2
I am a talented
developer with knowledge of Solidity, SQL and other programming languages. How
do you support your developers? Are there available grant programs? Any
upcoming developers workshop I should know of?
As usual,
for the third part, Satoshi Club Team asked the chat 4 questions about Ethereum
Classic. A link to a Quiz form were sent into the chat. Participants had 10
minutes to answer.
30 users with correct answers were rewarded.
1. What is Ethereum Classic?
– only a permissionless network
– only a decentralized network
– only a computing platform for smart contracts
-> all above
2. Why does Ethereum Classic stick to PoW consensus
mechanism and not to PoS? because …
-> it
was seen as the most resilient mechanism till now (e.g. of Bitcoin)
3. What language are ETC Smart Contracts written
in?
-> Solidity
4. What is an example of a node software that
CANNOT run Ethereum Classic?
-> NGINX
For more information and future AMAs, join our
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On 14th of May Kucoin were invited to conduct an AMA with the Satoshi Club Community. Our guest was the CEO and Co-Founder of Kucoin — Johnny Lyu ( @lyu_johnny ). Total reward pool was $200 in KCS for 30 winners. Johnny Lyu shared a lot of great information and important points for Kucoin with our Community. During the Live Telegram session with questions from Community more than 500 were posted. Kucoin AMA gained impressive interest in Satoshi Club Telegram group.
Part 1 and introduction
Serg | Satoshi Club: Hello, dear friends! Today we will have another episode from our AMA series in Satoshi Club. Today we present to you KuCoin! Our guest is Johnny Lyu — Co-founder & CEO of KuCoin. Welcome to Satoshi Club! Let’s have a great time together. Please tell us a little bit about yourself and how did you founded KuCoin.
Irina Kravchuk | SatoshiClub: Hi everyone and welcome Johnny Lyu
Johnny Lyu(CEO of KUCoin): Hello everyone, thanks for inviting me.
Serg | Satoshi Club: Please tell us a little bit about yourself and how did you founded KuCoin?
Johnny Lyu(CEO of KUCoin): I am the CEO of KuCoin Global and in charge of KuCoin, KuMEX, Pool-X, and other products. Before joining KuCoin, I used to work in the auto and luxury industries for many years. It is Michael who led me to the crypto world. We are high school classmates and Michael is an early Bitcoin miner. Michael used to be a user of Mt.Gox lol. He bought around 1000 BTC at the price of $10. And all these BTC went away with Mt.Gox. Actually that is one reason why he wanted to create an exchange that is super easy-to-use and secure, and that’s why we now have KuCoin.
Irina Kravchuk | SatoshiClub: I’m sure he wasn’t very happy when he lost 10k BTC, but it ended up quite well.
Serg | Satoshi Club: Ohh, I am very sorry for Michael 🙂 But I think he doesn’t regret it now because you have created KuCoin 🙂
Johnny Lyu(CEO of KUCoin): Yup, a sad story but ends well.
Irina Kravchuk | SatoshiClub: He should be happy. Motivation is costly sometimes. Like all good stories. How it’s been in the beginning? When you first launched?
Johnny Lyu(CEO of KUCoin): KuCoin was founded in 2017.
Serg | Satoshi Club: Was it difficult to find investors, developers, to attract the first users?
Johnny Lyu(CEO of KUCoin): We started in 2017 when the market is quite bullish, so there have lots of investors in the market. And our product is easy-to-use and friendly to global users, so we have accumulated quite a lot users from the beginning.
TWITTER QUESTIONS FROM THE COMMUNITY
Q1 from Twitter user: @banderamamusya Could you tell us more about The Project Pinocchio, which launch KuCoin announced in March? What data will you use to calculate the Pinocchio Index?
Johnny Lyu(CEO of KUCoin): As you know, Project Pinocchio is a neutral and credible alert platform for less trustworthy projects in the cryptocurrency industry. Through the establishment of a crypto credit reporting system, it will prevent malicious business behaviors such as cooperative breach of contract, illegal fundraising, and bad cryptos expeling good cryptos. Project Pinocchio is committed to creating a fair, just and transparent business environment, and providing a foundation for the healthy development of the blockchain and crypto industry.
Serg | Satoshi Club: So, it is like a blacklist for the crypto world?
Johnny Lyu(CEO of KUCoin): Yeah, you can understand the project as a blacklist, actullay we have published 2 lists till now.
Irina Kravchuk | SatoshiClub: That’s a great initiative.
Johnny Lyu(CEO of KUCoin): Project Pinocchio will introduce the Pinocchio Index as the evaluation standard, and all judgment results will be disclosed based on legal compliance. All information records will be stored on-chain with immutability via blockchain technology. Eventually, we will establish a non-profit credit reporting DApp. Pinocchio Index is a reference standard for the industry using multi-dimensional measurements, including moral hazard assessment, data analysis, public opinion monitoring, transaction history, project development, etc.
Irina Kravchuk | SatoshiClub: By the way Johnny Lyu. Where does the name come from? I mean the coin part is clear, what about Ku?
Johnny Lyu(CEO of KUCoin): In Chinese “Ku” means warehouse, we are the warehouse of coins, haha.
Q2 from Twitter user: @nandhase What is your view of someone manipulating the tokens in exchanges. What are the measures taken by KuCoin to prevent liquidity wash trading?
Johnny Lyu(CEO of KUCoin): Actually, market manipulation also happens in the traditional finance world. In order to ensure the fairness of transactions and maintain the healthy development of the market, governments have, in many areas, implemented regulatory policies to constrain market manipulation behavior. Since crypto is still in the early stages, I believe that with the improvement of regulations and compliance in the market, the market will be more fair and just.
KuCoin is always fighting against wash trading. To prevent it, we have developed a system that can monitor the traders’ unusual behaviors. If, through the system, we detect liquidity wash trading, we will warn them first and take more serious actions after.
Irina Kravchuk | SatoshiClub: And does the monitoring system work? I mean have you noticed a drop in this kind of behaviour on KuCoin?
Johnny Lyu(CEO of KUCoin): Yes, we have warned some market makers when our system detected their usual data in trading.
Q3 from Twitter user: @dangsaoha2 Kucoin is the only exchange currently supporting the L3 mechanism, does this make Kucoin different from other exchanges and attract users? Can you introduce us to the L3 mechanism?
Johnny Lyu(CEO of KUCoin): Actually KuCoin is one of only two exchanges that support Level 3 data push (the other one being Coinbase), as most exchanges only support Level 2. As you might know, Level 1 can only push the price, Level 2 can push the price and quantity, and Level 3 can push the price, quantity and order ID. The L3 mechanism is unique in the industry, enabling users to know the details of every transaction and so eliminate any market manipulation. With Level 3, you will be able to check every single trade on KuCoin, which means the platform is 100% transparent. The L3 mechanism can push data and matching results to users as quickly as possible, which means users can react faster and gain more profit.
Irina Kravchuk | SatoshiClub: Just to make sure I get it right, the id’s of every trade is public, right?
Johnny Lyu(CEO of KUCoin): Yes.
Irina Kravchuk | SatoshiClub: But they are not linked to users, right? I mean an id = an user?
Johnny Lyu(CEO of KUCoin): Every user can track the data, if you check your API notifications, you can find the trasaction details.
Q4 from Twitter user: @laivulong41 How does Kucoin solve the problems that exchanges are facing: system overload, lack of liquidity, hacker attack?
Johnny Lyu(CEO of KUCoin): System overload is a common problem in the industry, especially in extreme markets — many exchanges have had problems with their systems. With the completion of the Bitcoin halving, Bitcoin’s price will fluctuate violently with high probability, and be more prone to become an extreme market. Therefore, the exchange should be ready to deal with the extreme market at any time. KuCoin, through the development of dynamic capacity expansion technology, in the extreme market to come, can actively implement rapid expansion of server resources to deal with the impact of large traffic growth, ensuring that the trading system is not stuck and not down. Liquidity is an issue that users are very concerned about and that we have been trying to solve. In fact, the liquidity is pretty good on KuCoin. In the CMC global exchange liquidity rankings, KuCoin ranks in the top 10. Take BTC/USDT for instance, the spread is only 0.1 USDT on KuCoin for the majority of the time. You can easily buy 1 or more BTC on KuCoin without affecting the spot price much.
Security is also very important. Many exchanges have been stolen due to hacker attacks. To protect our users and our system while maintaining stability and reliability, we have introduced many security mechanisms. We developed a WAF web page protection system, which can better analyze user behavior and malicious attack data, and establish a more rounded risk control monitoring system. This has led to the efficiency of malicious attack interception increasing by 70%. We are also working with many security companies like Chainalysis and Onchain to improve our security. I cannot say too much about this as the hackers may be watching as well. But for sure, trading on KuCoin is pretty safe. Let me know if you have any suggestions to make KuCoin safer.
Serg | Satoshi Club: Btw, did you have problems during the high market volumes in the recent days? Coinbase was down if I am not wrong?
Johnny Lyu(CEO of KUCoin): We haven’t experienced any unexpected system down rencently. I know some exchanges were down in the dump in March 12, but we were good.
Serg | Satoshi Club: That’s a good sign.
Q5 from Twitter user: @salmanmbstu96 How about doing an IEO and Community coin vote Every month? Which will bring more volume to the exchange and may increase the use cases of KCS token along with the increase in demand.
Johnny Lyu(CEO of KUCoin): Good idea! Our Spotlight has been picking good projects, but we have a pretty high standard, so it could be hard to find that many qualified projects. The good news is we just launched the 6th Spotlight project — — LUKSO, and the token sale will happen on May 20. LUKSO, the blockchain for new digital lifestyle, was created by former Ethereum developer Fabian Vogelsteller, author of ERC20 and web3.js — both of which are the foundation for today’s DeFi protocols. Together with founder Marjorie Hernández, he is building the platform for the next wave of mainstream blockchain applications. Check out latest blog article to more know about the project: https://medium.com/kucoinexchange/5-things-you-must-know-about-lukso-f68d260e106
Serg | Satoshi Club: That’s interesting. Maybe we can have LUKSO here before the 20th of MAY? For an AMA.
Johnny Lyu(CEO of KUCoin): It would be great if LUKSO can have an AMA here!
PART 2 — LIVE QUESTIONS FROM TELEGRAM
Telegram User: What are the special features of KuMEX platform how this platform protect the traders from unusual liquidation caused by market manipulation?
Johnny Lyu(CEO of KUCoin): First, KuMEX is the only contract platform that supports Level 3 data push, and we’ve mentioned the benefits of L3 before. Also, KuMEX has a fairer index price, leading to a better mechanism to protect users’ positions. The Bitcoin Spot Index used by KuMEX is the volume-weighted average US dollar price of Bitcoin across 6 exchanges, which ensures the index price on KuMEX is fairer, avoiding the user’s contract being liquidated due to the low liquidity of the trading platform or large price fluctuations of one or two spot exchanges. Also, you may know that most futures platforms have an insurance fund, but different platforms use it differently. I know that some platforms only use like 20% or 30% of their insurance fund in a single day, which means the rest of the losses will be covered by users. But for KuMEX, all the funds in our insurance fund will be used to cover the unexpected losses. Besides, KuMEX also has a lite version which is very friendly to new futures traders.
Telegram User: Can you convince us about long-term potential increase in KuCoin token market value?
Johnny Lyu(CEO of KUCoin): Within KuCoin, the function of KCS is as many as the exchange token in other channels, pay trading fees, get VIP rights, etc., and KCS also has plenty of use cases outside of KuCoin in traveling, gaming, financing, social networking and other industries. As for the value of KCS, I think it has infinite possibilities. With the continuous expansion of the KuCoin ecosystem, the business around KCS will gradually become ecological, and the intrinsic value of KCS will be higher and higher. Along with the development of KuChain. KCS will play a more important role in KuCoin ecosystem than ever.
Telegram User: What is Pool-X Staking? Is it different from staking at other exchanges? What are the benefits of using Pool-X Staking?
Johnny Lyu(CEO of KUCoin): Pool-X is an exchange that provides liquidity for staking assets. When the user needs to redeem the staking tokens within a short time, the user can choose to transfer the staking certificates/credits in the liquidity trading market. By paying with a certain amount of POL (Pool-X native token), users who provide freely circulating crypto assets (liquidity providers) can quickly obtain the circulating tokens, and staking certificates are automatically transferred.
Telegram User: What are the advantage of being a KucoinVip?
Johnny Lyu(CEO of KUCoin): KuCoin VIP can enjoy 1 on 1 Service by Exclusive VIP Client Manager, Trading Fee Discount, New Product Alpha Test, API Request Limit Upgrade, Withdraw/Transaction Limit Upgrade, VIP Exclusive Campaign, etc. Numerous benefits of being KuCoin VIP, welcome to join.
Telegram User: What are the Fiat currencies possible to buy/sell crypto through depit card, credit card, or local banks ? And right now which fiat currency planning to open the gateway in soon?
Johnny Lyu(CEO of KUCoin): We now have supported 22 fiats like USD, GBP, EUR, VND and our goal this year is to support 100+ fiats.
CONCLUSION
Irina Kravchuk | SatoshiClub: Thank you very much Johnny Lyu for your time and answers. It took longer than we expected but we covered a lot of good topics.
Serg | Satoshi Club: And thank you for being here with us today! It was great. Do you have smth to add before we open the chat?
SatoshiClub and its community moving forward together and continue to introduce you the most interesting projects in cryptocurrencies world. Today we would like to tell you about the AMA session with our friends from Monero Enthusiasts Community. The AMA took place on June 23 and our guest was Diego Salazar.
The total reward pool was $300 and has been splitted in 3 parts.
In this AMA Recap we will try to summarise the most interesting points for you.
Part 1 — introduction
Serg: Dear community, today we will have an AMA with one of the best crypto projects according to CMC: Monero – number 15 at the moment. @ofthesalazar will be our guest today. Welcome!
Diego Salazar: yo what up?
Irina Kravchuk: Hi @ofthesalazar . Nice to meet you. How are you today?
Diego Salazar: I’m doing well. Chilling. Happy to be here to answer questions about Monero.
Serg: Please tell a bit about yourself and how did you become involved with Monero community 🙂
Diego Salazar: Sure. So to start with, a little background. Monero didn’t have a premine, ICO, and has no founder’s reward. There is no corporation, foundation, or anything behind it. Similar to Bitcoin, nobody is in charge. There are no ‘leaders’ per se (like other projects have a CEO or stuff like that).
We really are just a
decentralized group with a passion for privacy.
We do have a Core
Team, but our core team is very different than other core teams. They
aren’t ‘in charge’. They aren’t the boss of anyone. And they don’t
lead the project. Basically what they do is bridge the decentralized
world that we want to exist with the centralized world that does
exist. Let me give an example.
A domain name (i.e. getmonero.org) has to be owned by someone. It can’t be owned by a decentralized community. The payment has to come from somebody’s card, and somebody’s name has to be on there.
The Core Team is comprised of seven trusted individuals that do things like this. Things that require trust. One of their tasks is managing the Monero general fund, which is entirely funded via donations (no premine and stuff remember?). The general fund has a good amount of Monero in there, and the Core Team has made the decision that having someone working full time in Monero from a non-coding perspective would be helpful, so they hired me. I work for the core team and I’m paid from the general fund. I am the only one like this. Note, I am not an employee of ‘Monero’, but of the Core Team, which, again, are just trusted individuals that handle different tasks that require trust.
Serg: what if the person who buys that website for ex will divert its initial purpose? like Roger Veer did for ex
Diego Salazar: This is a good question. The Core Team serve at the pleasure of the community for as long as the community trusts them. We have had changes in the core team before for a few different reasons (none of them due to scandal), but if an individual in the core team were to break the community’s trust, it would be much good to have them in a group that is tasked with doing trusted things, would it?
So the community
could kick away the current core team (presumably with some losses)
and continue. The website is open source, the code is open source,
and we use FOSS for our infrastructure, so everything can be rebuilt.
In other words, they hold no cards against the community.
Irina Kravchuk: How does this control from the community happen?
Serg: Yes, how can the community participate in the decission making
Diego Salazar: via the open source nature of EVERYTHING about Monero. If the core team member responsible for the domain-jacking was unwilling to give the domain getmonero.org back to us, the entire getmonero.org website is open source (https://github.com/monero-project/monero-site/) so we can simply make a new name, and as a community tell people that the old site is defunct because of the scandal and we’re under a new site. We would do this on all of our various platforms.
Note, the core team is not the admins of the telegram group, or our subreddit, or our Mattermost, etc. So they would not be able to stop this flow of information.
Irina Kravchuk: Looks solid
Serg: It’s a nice check and balances system
Diego Salazar: Ye. So to answer how I got involved, I actually found Monero before Bitcoin. 🙂 I’m a privacy enthusiast and was looking into cryptocurrency, and remembered a terrible website I had seen, and it turned out to be Monero’s. I own a small design firm, and I wanted to remake the website.
They agreed, and as
I did, I learned about Monero and what it stood for, and how it was a
pillar of quality in the, frankly, sea of trash that is the crypto
space.
So I joined up and
became a hard working community member. 🙂
(I didn’t get the
job from the core team until a couple of years in)
Serg: That’s an interesting story 🙂 We’ve collected questions from the community via our website. We have selected 5 to be discussed in the first part. Are you ready to start?
Diego Salazar: ye
Q1 from
Telgram
user @maxzerone
Who chose
Esperanto as the language from which to choose the name of the
project? Do you use Esperanto for other communication within the
project except for the naming?
Diego Salazar: So Esperanto was chosen by the founder of Monero, a random scammer. Yes, you heard that right, Monero was founded by a scammer. It’s a hilarious story, but quite long to get into, though I’d be happy to get into it a bit later if it’s desired. We don’t have contact with this scammy founder anymore (he disappeared), so we don’t know why he chose this, but it was a clever thing. The name itself was originally bitMonero. Monero means ‘coin’ in Esperanto, so bitMonero means bitcoin. It was also an inspired choice because Esperanto is a stateless language. It has no home country because it was a deliberately man-made language. In the same way, Monero is a stateless money. It belongs to no country, so it fits rather well. Esperanto is not used for communication purposes (though there are several in the community that speak it), but it is definitely used for several other names of different projects within the community. Things like Monerujo (means wallet) Android wallet, Kovri, Vendo, and more.
If there are enough
Esperanto speakers though, we’d be glad to have Esperanto channels of
communication for them.
Serg: Monero has nice stories behind it 🙂 You could create a movie 😄
Irina Kravchuk: That’s a great story. How did you get rid of him? Or her?
Serg: or it 😄
Diego Salazar: They left of their own accord. They were ignoring the community requests, doing their own thing, disappearing for a week at a time without communicating with anyone, and more. So the community decided to just put out their own code. That’s how the current Core Team got started actually. Some people heavily involved with the project just decided to do their own thing. After a while, the scammer realized that the community trusted the new Core Team more than him, so he just disappeared altogether.
So the community
hijacked a scam project (because it had actually good cryptography
surprisingly) and turned it into a community-based, legit project.
We are one of the
few projects who no longer has our founder with us. Similar to
Satoshi leaving Bitcoin, our scammy founder isn’t with us either. 🙂
Irina Kravchuk: So the good guys won?
Diego Salazar: yes. One of the few cases where the good guys win in real life.
Serg: Thanks for this interesting explanation 🙂 Ready for the second question?
Q2
from Telgram
user @marvelbounce
Do you
have any statistics that you can share about how people use Monero
(for what kind of transactions)? It would help a lot to fight the
negative view that it is used primarily for illegal stuff. Thanks
Diego Salazar: We don’t. Monero is private and fungible, so we simply can’t know what it’s being used on. But let me emphasize something. WE WANT IT THIS WAY. Financial privacy is very important. You don’t post your bank statements online for everyone to see every month, do you? Then why do you use transparency coins that have all of your transactions available for everyone to see, whenever they want, forever? It’s insane. What I do with my money is my business. That said, we can look at how cash and Bitcoin are spent, especially in their early days, and we can make guesses that Monero is probably similar. The reality is that Bitcoin is mostly used for mundane things (trading and speculating, not even commerce!), and the sad reality is that Monero is probably also used for mostly trading as well. 🙂 Another point of interest is that the dark net still primarily uses Bitcoin. Monero has been gaining adoption there, but most people still take Bitcoin rather than Monero. We think this is because of lack of education and/or convenience, but if Bitcoin is still the darling of DNMs, then they’re probably used for more illegal things than us.
Serg: I am glad you mentioned this because our next question is related somehow 🙂
Irina Kravchuk: What’s a DNM?
Serg: dark net market
Diego Salazar: dark net market, a marketplace on the dark web where people buy a variety of things, many of which are illegal
Q3
from Telgram
user @IsaacBrave
One of my
friends who works in the German anti-laundering and anti-fraud
department, said that they are able to track even Monero transfers.
He didn’t give me specifics however. Can you tell if that’s true?
What are the steps to be taken to become untraceable?
Diego Salazar: I find this extremely unlikely. Monero has a three-prong approach to privacy. It obfuscates the sender, receiver, and amount of transactions via different cryptographic methods. The sent output is protected by ring signatures, the receiver is protected by stealth addresses, and the amount is hidden by RingCT (confidential transactions modified for ring signatures). The weakest point of this privacy is the ring signatures. They aren’t impossible to break via heuristics (just extreeeeeeeeeeeemely unlikely), but in so doing you only reveal the output sent. NOT the person, and the amount and receiver are still a mystery. Only under certain conditions would this lead to any identifiable information, the biggest one being an EAE attack (which you can learn more about here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iABIcsDJKyM)
The only way to break RingCT and stealth addresses would be to break the underlying cryptography, which is used all over the internet, for many many things (such as securing your bank accounts and passwords). So if somebody found a way to break those things, they could break the whole internet, and ‘tracking Monero’ would be the least of our problems.
All of this to say, we’ve got exciting technology in the pipeline that will allow us to really bolster the privacy offered by ring signatures. Within a year or two we hope to be able to take our effective anonymity set from 10 to over 100, really destroying any heuristics that can presently be applied to try to track outputs.
Irina Kravchuk: What’s the max. value? Isn’t it 100?
Diego Salazar: the maximum ring size is the size of every output on the blockchain. Ring size just means the amount of decoys (or fake outputs) you put alongside your real output so nobody knows which is the real one that is being spent. To learn more about ring signatures (in a fun, animated video) you can go to this page: https://web.getmonero.org/get-started/what-is-monero/
Go to the bottom where the videos are, and click the arrows until you get to ring signatures (you can watch the other ones too 😉 )
Irina Kravchuk: What about transfers from exchanges that are centralized? Does this security measures apply to them also?
Diego Salazar: this is a good question. At this point, the exchange is the sending party, so they know both the receiver (the address anyways, not the name), the amount, and the sender (because it’s them). So by using an exchange you are giving them all of the identifying information for one transaction. BUT!! This isn’t the end of the world.
Monero is like cash. I can go to the bank and pull out one hundred dollars. The bank now knows who I am, and that I have one hundred dollars. But after I leave the bank they have no clue what I do with it. Six months later, they don’t know if I still have it, or if I spent it all, or any combination of the two.
With Bitcoin, it’s
not like this. When you take out of the exchange, they can follow the
Bitcoin across the blockchain. Maybe they see that you donated it to
a non-profit, or you spent it at a website, or anything. It’s as if
the bank can watch what you do with the cash after you leave their
building. So really, Monero doesn’t care if you buy from a KYC/AML
exchange. It’s not damning evidence, like with Bitcoin and its
derivatives .
Serg: you can use 2 transactions, right? by sending them again to your wallet
Diego Salazar: sure. You can send a transaction to yourself after it leaves the exchange, and the plausible deniability increases by a lot. This is a process called “churning”. It’s not bulletproof, and there’s still a little bit of leaked metadata, but it can help if you want to be super sure that you’re getting good privacy.
Q4
from Telgram
user @iulya_i
In the
last AMA with Ghost, it was claimed that Monero, Zcash and other
coins are good but beside sending transactions, you don’t have more
utility. What do you have to say about that? Thanks!
Diego Salazar: Do one thing and do it well. Money can just be money. Is your cash good for more things besides spending it? In my opinion, making your money an application for many different things increases the attack surface astronomically. We see this all the time where with ‘smart contracts’ that are implemented incorrectly, the end result is a loss of money. Monero is just interested in being money. Nothing more, nothing less. But money has a lot of utility. Some might say the utility of money is higher than anything else, since we use it for pretty much everything.
I’m going to be 100% honest, the vast majority of you people that consider yourself crypto-savvy are probably not great at threat modeling and subsequent security. You’re probably not good at analyzing attack surfaces, and, if I was to go further, you’re probably just looking at white papers trying to see if there are buzzwords that will make you money. All of this aside, ‘smart contracts’ as they stand today, are pretty much useless without working oracles. There is currently no good, working solution for the oracle problem. All of the blockchain 3.0 solutions you’re following are hilarious premature in their claims of ‘utility’, and will likely NEVER be as useful and full of ‘utility’ as they claim. I’m sorry to be the debbie downer and bearer of bad news here, but as a person who actually knows what I’m talking about, that’s the truth. 🙂 I’m more than happy to expand on this as well with reasons why. Sorry if you get mad at me because you have heavy bags. 😉
So all of this to
say, Monero isn’t trying to make big, grandiose (and ultimately
false) claims about offering any utility beyond what a trustless,
fungible, private money can offer. But make no mistake, that utility
is massive!
sorry if that took a
bit of a darker turn 😀
Serg: Nobody is getting mad about anything and we are not searching for the truth because there is no black or white things in this world 🙂 we are just trying to make a good debate
Q5
from Telgram
user @halvving
In a time
when sustainability and green energy is a focus for more and more
people, how do you comment the fact that Monero is a POW coin that
uses a lot of energy to be created and if you (the project) plan to
switch to POS or other technology that doesn’t involve that much
energy consumption?
Diego Salazar: Let’s get one thing clear right off the bat, Proof of Stake is not a proven mechanism for securing a blockchain. Proof of Work is very very simple, and the security, trade-offs, and game theory are very easy to understand. Proof of Stake is much MUCH more complex, and the attack surface is much larger. That’s not to say that in time it won’t be as well understood as PoW, but it’s currently not there yet. All of this talk of everything moving to PoS is extremely premature. It’s like talking about moving to a new building or bridge design that we THINK is not going to collapse, but we can’t prove it yet. That would be absurd. One (large) thing to note is that PoS requires weak subjectivity (i.e. trust) to get working properly. It’s just a part of the security model. PoW is 100% trustless, but PoS requires a small amount of trust under certain conditions, and in those conditions. In this way, if you want a completely trustless currency in terms of a security mode, you cannot use PoS. Going even further, PoS is incompatible with privacy (and therefore fungibility). PoS requires you to put a discreet amount for staking, and that amount has to be known so blocks can be signed accordingly. Since Monero hides amounts, this would not be possible. It is theoretically possible that somebody can create a zero knowledge proof that would be able to show a number is in a certain range without revealing the number, and work is being done on that, but it’s currently not possible for Monero.
Beyond the above, the argument of PoW not being green enough has been covered several times by several coins also using PoW. Usual arguments such as ‘taking up unused electricity spaces’, ‘forcing innovation in efficiency’, and ‘it’s not wasted if it’s providing a strong utility, unlike Christmas lights’ all apply here, but if none of these arguments have satisfied you in the past, then perhaps PoW coins aren’t for you. If that’s the case, you’ll have to be satisfied with trusted blockchains, since we currently don’t have a way to do trustless currency in an energy efficient way.
And if you dig into
the game theory, inefficiency is actually somewhat required for
reasonable security, but that’s a big topic that requires a lot of
background to understand.
Serg: Well, you really can give good arguments 🙂
Irina Kravchuk: you would be good as a preacher
Diego Salazar: Sure. 1. Monero uses several different methods for privacy, and the ‘breaking’ of one does not constitute the breaking of the whole privacy scheme. 2. PoW is the only completely trustless form of blockchain security, and Monero prizes trustlessness above all. 3. Monero just focuses on being money, but money itself is full of utility. 4. KYC/AML does not affect Monero in the same way it affects transparency coins (like Bitcoin and its derivatives). 5. Your financial privacy is very important! Ask questions about how much information you’re comfortable with sharing, and evaluate your investments based off of privacy conferred.
Part
2 — live questions from the Telegram community
Q1
from Telegram user Kath
Monero
has reached many milestones. But of all the milestones you have
achieved, which do you consider to be the most important so far and
why?
Diego Salazar: We have two big ones. Adding RingCT in 2017. Before, several more attacks were possible on Monero than anyone realized, but most of them were mitigated when RingCT was added to hide amounts. It brought Monero to a truly private coin. Second was bulletproofs. The addition of RingCT increased transaction sizes by a LOT (meaning less scaleable). Bulletproofs brought these down by over 80%, allowing us to increase the ringsize (i.e. better privacy) with much smaller transactions (i.e. more scaleable). There’s more in the pipeline, and much more that we have done, but those are the big two, and both have been quite revolutionary.
Q2
from Telegram user John Max
Privacy
blockchains have promoted money laundering and criminal sponsorship,
how do you tackle this?? What procedure will be required of me to
access a transaction information, even though I’m not a government
agency, is it even possible?
Diego Salazar: Do you know what has supported money laundering and criminal sponsorship? Cash. Dollars. Corrupt governments. I don’t want to get too political here, but some of the biggest sponsors of terrorist organization, criminals, and mafia-type gangs are our very own governments. Corrupt officials who have much to gain in this. It’s actually hilarious how the governments have spread fear among the population about the spooky boogieman of cryptocurrency, when some of the biggest criminals in the system are those same people spreading fear. This isn’t to say that no illegal things happen as a result of cryptocurrencies, or Monero specifically, but the VAST MAJORITY of money laundering is done with dollars, not Monero. Why don’t we cross this bridge when we come to it rather than saying the sky is falling when really, the sky is falling with our current, traditional system many orders of magnitude worse than the tools we’re building.j
Q3
from Telegram user Dron Kutsen
How
to use our data in the future, how will users be affected and how can
we manage to transfer as little data as possible?
Diego Salazar: This is such a big question. It’s so important. The average person has ZERO IDEA how much their data is worth and who wants it. Literally everyone, from corporations, to governments, to various interests want your data. Your data is VALUABLE! With your personal information, people can sell to you better, arrest you, threaten you, intimidate you, give you better gifts, make you happy, take away your happiness, or much more. PLEASE PROTECT YOUR DATA! Not just your financial data, but ALL data. Once your information is revealed, it cannot be taken back. Let me repeat. Once your information is revealed, IT CANNOT BE TAKEN BACK! If you don’t know my name, then it’s up to me if I tell you or not, but once I tell you, I cannot untell you. This is why privacy (and Monero) is so important. If you transact stupidly on a transparent blockchain, there can be massive consequences, even if you did nothing wrong. Let me give an example: Let’s say you own a tshirt selling business. You accept Bitcoin for your shirts. Somewhere two bad guys do a drug transaction with Bitcoin. Later, one of the guys buys a shirt from you with the same Bitcoin he received for the drugs. Now, you can be under investigation by the authorities. They’ll ask you “where did you get this Bitcoin? Did you know it was part of a drug transaction? Were you a part of this?” You did nothing wrong. You sold a tshirt. But now you have a dirty bitcoin. Take your privacy seriously, financial and otherwise. There can be real consequences. In the first world, perhaps the worst you suffer is targeted ads, but in many other places, lack of privacy can lead to loss of money, freedom, or life.
To finish up that
same question, how to transfer as little as possible? Choose the
correct tools. Choosing Windows will send a lot more of your personal
data to Microsoft than using a Linux distribution. Using Bitcoin will
reveal a lot more info than using Monero. Etc. Being privacy
conscious can be a pain, because it’s constant choices and it is
definitely the road less traveled, but it’s something well worth
exploring.
Q4
from Telegram user Harsha
Do
you have any plans to attract non-crypto investors to #monero
and how? What are the actions to increase awareness around #monero
in non-crypto space?
Diego Salazar: We have many many many translations for most of our resources. Our website has been translated to many different languages with more on the way. And yes, we have different communities for the different languages spoken in the community. We have Spanish podcasts, Russian podcasts, YouTube channels from many languages, interviews, and I personally have gone to several conferences all over the world as a speaker. If Monero doesn’t have a translation for a certain language (or a community) and you want to make it happen, then please let us know. We’re all about making Monero accessible to everyone.
Q5
from Telegram user Alejandro Urich
• Apart
from hiding our identity and making private transactions, what added
value does Monero have? What use does it have in daily life?
Diego Salazar: Fungibility. You’ve heard me say this word a few different times already in this AMA. It’s about time I explain it. Fungible is when one of something is the same as another of that same thing? Confused? Here’s an example. You have one dollar bill, and I have one dollar bill. We exchange bills. I now have your bill and you now have mine. Even though we exchanged bills, we both still have one dollars worth of dollars, because 1 USD = 1 USD. They are fungible. The same is NOT true of Bitcoin or other transparency coins (i.e. literally almost all of them). I know people like to say 1 BTC = 1 BTC but it’s not true. In the previous question I gave an example of someone obtaining dirty bitcoin by selling a tshirt. In many cases, if the individual were to put that Bitcoin on an exchange, their account would get shut down. There are many many stories on the internet of people’s coinbase accounts getting temporarily closed for review, or binance, or many other exchanges, because they unknowingly put dirty cryptocurrency in their accounts. Seriously. Google for these stories. There are so many. What this does is mean that some Bitcoin is different than other Bitcoin. If you have 1 BTC and I have 1 BTC, and we exchange BTC, unlike dollars, there may have been an exchange of value. If I gave you a dirty BTC and you gave me a clean one, then I get the better deal, because I can use my BTC in more places than you can. So maybe you’re willing to get rid of your BTC at a discount to compensate for it. Bitcoin is not fungible. Transparency coins are not fungible. Opt-in (optional) privacy also doesn’t help. Because if you use an optionally private coin (most others except for Monero) then what people see is that you mostly use transparent transactions and then suddenly you use a private one. Wait. Why did you need privacy there? It stands out. But if everyone is private, all the time, then everyone looks the same. There’s no way to distinguish a history of a coin. Those people who did the drug transactions will not affect your tshirt business. Monero is fungible. But fungibility is unlocked by mandatory privacy.
So really, it’s less about hiding your identity. Monero isn’t about being sneaky, avoiding taxes, or being a hacker or criminal. I am a squeaky clean guy. I don’t do drugs, or hacking, or criminal activity. But I need Monero. Because otherwise, somebody who DOES do those things will ruin my reputation for something I’ve never done (like the tshirt example). Monero isn’t for criminals. It’s for everyone. Ye. Done. 🙂
Irina Kravchuk: How are you? How was it?
Diego Salazar: Good. I hope it was useful.
Irina Kravchuk: Your answers were very good and interactive. Thank you so much for your time
Serg: Thank you Diego. I really enjoyed reading your answers
Diego Salazar: Sure. Thank you everyone for coming. I hope it was informative! As I said before, I’m more than willing to do a livestream to continue answering questions I didn’t get to. Sometimes it’s good to pick the brain of someone who actually knows what they’re talking about. 😉
Serg: It’s a good idea. We can talk about a date to organize this. I am more than willing to do this
PART
3 – Quiz
Results
In the final part we would like you to check your knowledge in terms of Monero. They’ve prepared 4 questions for this part, so everyone could be a part and answer. All the correct answers you will find at the bottom of this Recap. Enjoy!
Q1
What does Monero use to hide transaction amounts? A. zk-SNARKS B. Ring signatures C. RingCT D. Dandelion++
Q2
How does Monero finance it’s initiatives? A. 10% Premine B. Crowdfunding system C. Founder’s reward D. ICO funds
Q3
Who created Monero? A. Howard ‘hyc’ Chu B. fluffypony C. Satoshi D. thankful_for_today
Q4
Besides privacy, what is one other thing Monero is known for? A. Egalitarian mining secured by a tail emission B. Smart contract oracle provider C. Second-layer solutions D. Innovation with private proof-of-stake.
Part 1️: 50 USD/5 users – We’ll select 5 questions from you. Please submit your questions in the comments under this article. Max. 3 question per user.
Part 2️: 50 USD/5 users – Open chat for 80 seconds. You can post Max 5 questions. ETH Classic Team will select 5 questions and answer them.
What kind of messages will be considered good and taken into consideration?
The reason for giving activity rewards is to encourage members of our community to have meaningful and real conversations on our Telegram group @satoshi_club .
That being said, we will not consider the numbers of messages when we will choose the winners of each 10 day’s period.
Super general messages, as well as messages that does not help the community will not be counted. You are welcome to use them of course, but they will not be counted for this contest. Some examples of messages, that will not be taken into consideration are:
hi
how are you
thank you sir
well, you get the idea
On the other hand, good examples are messagest that encourage conversation. This messages includes:
Questions.
answers to other user’s questions and be helpful
share interesting ideas about crypto
talk about trading, blockchain technologies and news
in general, everything that is not posted just to count. Quality messages
Of course we don’t say you shouldn’t greet people or write short messages. We are just saying that trying to send a lot of messages without meaning will not help you get the activity rewards.
Have you ever thought about becoming a ghost online? so this project is for you. On June 21 we had the opportunity to enjoy a new chapter of our AMA (Ask Me Anything) series with our friends from GHOST. Our guest was Josh Switch and came with a lot of rewards.
Rewards: $500 Prize pool was split as follow: part 1: $100 to 5 winners, part 2: $100 to 10 winners, part 3: $300 to 72 winners
In
this AMA Recap we are trying to summarize some of the most interesting points
for you.
………………………………………
PART 1, INTRODUCTION AND COMMUNITY
QUESTIONS
Serg | Satoshi Club: Dear community, today we will have an AMA
episode with Ghost! 👻 @joshswitch
will be our guest. Welcome Josh! We are glad you came back here. 😊
Irina Kravchuk | SatoshiClub: Hi @joshswitch,
how are you? Missed us?
Josh: Hey! I’m doing great. I did! Thanks for
having me back.
Serg | Satoshi Club: Tell us a bit about your involvement in Ghost.
🙂
Josh: So I met John McAfee a few years ago. He
really cares deeply about all ideas such as crypto, privacy, freedom etc. He
came on as an advisor for Switch and 2018, and over the years as we kept
talking it became more and more obvious that we needed to put out a privacy
coin. It would work amazing with our products and our community, and there was
just no other project really doing it the way we thought they should.
Irina Kravchuk | SatoshiClub: Sounds like a great initiative 🙂
There is not such thing as too much privacy or freedom when talking about
internet.
Serg | Satoshi Club: We have collected more than 300 questions
through our website. We have selected 5 for the first part.
Q1 from Telegram user @LuisMe7
If GHOST main idea is to remain its users and
holders private, why is it listed on CEX (Centralized exchanges)? This way,
GHOST traders and holders don’t remain fully anonymous.
Josh: GHOST is a privacy coin, and everything we
are doing internally will be fully focused on privacy, security, and user
freedom. User freedom, and freedom in general is often a 2-way street where
there are often things going on that you don’t specifically love.
The
reality of where we are in this space, is most people prefer CEXs (although
that will change in the future). For now, we want to give our users as many
options as possible, as we build out towards global adoptions. Overtime, with
new products such as GHOSTX, a full atomic swap exchange we launched yesterday,
people will move more and more away from CEXs and into the types of products we
are offering. And a lot of exchanges that list ghost just do it on their own.
We don’t have anything to do with a lot of them.
Irina Kravchuk | SatoshiClub: Yes, that’s a risk.
Serg | Satoshi Club: That’s interesting. 🙂
Josh: For instance, Bilaxy, HOO, Hotbit, and 1-2
others listed on their own.
Q2 from Telegram user @wicksterr
There are many privacy coins in the market
right now. Since you’ve created your own, it makes me think that you have seen
flaws in that coins. Why you decided to create your own privacy coin and what
are the problems in other privacy coins that you want to avoid?
Josh: Honestly, there are a lot of privacy coins
out there with really tech, that if you use properly, you really are
anonymous…. however, what are you going to use them on? GHOST is building a
full ecosystem of products. Marketplaces, GHOSTEsim service, gambling, and a
whole lot more. The problem with a lot of the products within crypto currency
today is that you can only speculate on price.
Serg | Satoshi Club: Can you tell us more a bit about GHOSTEsim
service? I didn’t fully understand the tech behind it.
Josh: There’s no way to use the token on anything
“real”. We are going to change that.
There
is a link on the GHOST website with more info on the esim https://www.ghostbymcafee.com/ghostesim/.
The ghost esim allows you to take the sim card out of your phone, scan the
GHOST esim, and then you can use data on your phone while being 100% anonymous
and untrackable. Works in over 35 countries and we are expanding to over 100 by
the end of the year
Irina Kravchuk | SatoshiClub: How are you handling regulation issues? Given
this set of services that you have or plan to have?
Josh:
We don’t. GHOST is a decentralized team of people all over the world. We will release good secure code that allows
you to do private interactions with your money, your location, your purchases,
and more, but we are not a business or organization. There is no CEO, no
office, no information collected from anyone.
Serg | Satoshi Club: But how can I use it without a sim? Where is
the data coming from?
Josh: It’s an esim. It only works on new model
phones that can support esim technology. Think of it like a vpn for data. We
partner with local carriers all over the world, but your data is fully shielded
from them at all times.
Serg | Satoshi Club: I will definitely try it. 🙂
Josh: I will DM you an esim barcode after this ama.
You can try today and get back to your community on how great it worked. 🙂
Irina Kravchuk | SatoshiClub: But it works via carriers network, right? not
over internet?
Josh: Correct.
Irina Kravchuk | SatoshiClub: Very interesting. I didn’t know that it was
possible to have network without the small plastic sim in the phone. 🙂
Josh: It’s very cool. I’ll send you one too so you
can test!
Q3 from Telegram
user @iam12312
There has been a
talk that Ghost project has largely Plagiarized its whitepaper from PIVX? What
do you have to say about that, Any type of Clarification?
Josh: We were never a fork of PIVX. As a PR move,
we acted like we were, and released a white paper that was not plagiarized by
any means, but very very very similar to theirs. As expected, press and
everyone ate it up, and John did what John does and made it into a really nice
initial boost in traffic for us before we released our real white paper. You
can find our real whitepaper on the GHOST website. It’s awesome. Check it out!
Josh: Np! We are releasing the GHOST code base
later today publicly, and there is 0 PIVX code in there 🙂
Q4 from Telegram
user @Magoy12
The negative side
of privacy is money laundering. Do you have any safeguards to prevent money
laundering?
Josh: People will probably not like this answer,
but what is money laundering? Someone trying to keep the proceeds of money they
earned or have? Someone trying to avoid paying a tyrannical govt 1/3rd their
income? Someone selling weed online?
We
will provide secure code that allows you to be nothing but a GHOST online. What
you do is your business.
Q5 from Telegram
user @nyo_cant
Ghost Veterans –
which already must be holding at least 20,000 GHOST – are getting a 50% (6/12)
of the new GHOST tokens minted on each new block. Do you think that GHOST
accumulation in a few hands could pose short-/medium-term risks for the
project? Thanks!
Josh: This is something internally we have thought
about a lot this month. If we could that part again, the only thing we would
lower is the threshold to become a GHOST veteran. Large code changes like that
can only be made with a community vote (which will have a mechanism for soon),
and I do think one of the first proposals will be to lower that threshold to
5,000 or 10,000 ghost. However, the community will have to approve it.
Serg | Satoshi Club: Yes, I think it is a good decision to lower it
to include as many Ghost hodlers as possible.
Josh: I agree. But to be clear, you can stake with
any amount of GHOST at all. You just get increased rewards if you stake over
20k.
GHOST logo.
………………………………………
PART 2, TELEGRAM COMMUNITY LIVE
QUESTIONS
The
chat was open for 2 minutes, around 800 questions were posted by the Satoshi
Club community. Our guest chose ten of them.
Q1 from Telegram
User @biegy
Excess token
inflation is the most common problems, projects are facing nowadays… How Ghost
is overcoming from such problem?
Josh: Our inflation rate is quite low and will take
decades for the supply to 3x from where it is now. In that period of time we
will onboard so many new users, that the inflation rate via block rewards won’t
really effect anything. Also we plan to curb inflation more in the future by
making some proposals that reduce the block reward as adoption and price
increases.
Q2 from Telegram
User @Rubenl57
Will exchanges
which don’t support the swap keep trading GHOST? Therefore, will both mainnet
coin and ERC20 token coexist and keep being traded? What are the disadvantages
in case of NOT swapping?
Josh: So far it looks like these exchanges will support the main net drop and will list main net GHOST:
We
are unsure about HOTBIT at this time. GHOST will continue trading as an ERC20
token on IDEX and UNISWAP. There is no expiration date for swapping your erc20
to main net tokens. ERC20 tokens swapped
for main net will be burned and removed from the supply. The 2 biggest
advantages for swapping to GHOST main net tokens are privacy, and staking.
Q3 from Telegram
User @Albert3990
Can you tell more
about security of ghost to prevent attacks like 51%?
Josh: GHOST uses a proof of stake blockchain to
secure the network. Unless someone were to gain 51% of the entire GHOST supply,
that would not be possible.
Q4 from Telegram
User @jpsarmah
Ghost is the future
of privacy. We are coming for our top 25 spot on the charts. What main
technological features of GHOST main net will make this possible and enable you
to compete.
Josh: Software technology is being democratized.
There is nothing protectable about coded features because all the code is open
source. While GHOST is literally MONERO love privacy, and we will continue to
build and innovate in this area, our main focus is creating the most marketed
privacy coin, gaining adoption on our products, and growing a real network
effect for a privacy coin. Something that no one has accomplished yet.
Q5 from Telegram
User @huydo
What are incentives
or benefit for holding GHOST in long time for loyal investors?
Josh: GHOST has an amazing reward schedule for
users that stake their GHOST and help secure the network. There is a calculator
on our website you can check out.
Q6 from Telegram
User @bolodmia
What’s the
difference between normal stakers and GHOST VETERAN? How can we become a GHOST
VETERAN?
Josh: GHOST veterans are those that have 20,000
GHOST or more. They received an increased reward. You can find all the info on
our website in the white paper.
Q7 from Telegram
User @JoanaZ
Why do you believe
that the combination DEX+ Privacy coin can provide a full control of their
funds to the users?
Josh: When you have the ability to trade crypto,
buy and sell products, pay your bills, cash in and out to fiat, gamble and more
without submitted any documents about who or where you are, you are finally in
control.
Q8 from Telegram
User @Aleurich
If we want privacy,
there is Monero, a consolidated project. What differences does Ghost have with
this type of project? (Monero, Zcash, Zcoin).
Josh: What are you going to do with the Monero, or
Zcash? That’s the point. You can’t really do anything but hold it and speculate
on price. GHOST is growing an entire ecosystem of products and services that
you can use for real life things while keep your privacy at all times.
Q9 from Telegram
User @endtimeprophet
Kindly explain more
about the proposed SWAP PROCESS, would you have a Token bridge for swaps or
would it be only available on exchange and why did you launch initially on ETH
Blockchain?
Josh:
Here is the way the swap works
First make sure you have your Ghost ERC-20
token in a web3 compatible wallet that can peform the swap such as MetaMask,
Trust, etc.
Then download official Ghost wallet and follow
the steps to get your Ghost mainnet address.
Go on to Ghost token swap website and enter
your Ghost wallet address from step 2 into textbox.
A popup will appear to connect to your wallet
and send Ghost ERC-20 to a smart contract that will burn the Ghost ERC-20 and
log the amount of Ghost mainnet coins you will receive.
Please give the system some time to process
the swap and your mainnet Ghost coins will arrive in your wallet shortly.
Q10 from Telegram
User @DarkSoul2132
Since feeling safe
is the most important thing today, my question is: How does GHOST provide
security to its users when delegating their GHOST for staking?
Josh: Currently when staking, the network does have
to verify the amounts you have, therefore GHOST has several levels of security.
When staking, you have to expose the amount of coins you have for the network
to validate it and pay you. Once you are paid, you can do 1 private transaction
and all your coins, addresses etc are 100% hidden and no one can see where or
what happened. Also private staking is on our roadmap as well. 🙂
Serg | Satoshi Club: Thank you for this cool AMA! We were glad to
have you here as a guest. You are welcome to come here in the future as well.
🙂
Josh: Thank so much for having me! We will get one
of the GHOST main devs in here before too long to doo a more dev centric ama on
our tech and how it works! GHOST main net is tomorrow! Don’t miss it!
Thanks
again for having me!
………………………………………
PART 3, QUIZ AND INFO
As usual,
for the third part, Satoshi Club Team asked the chat 4 questions about GHOST. A
link to a Quiz form were sent into the chat. Participants had 10 minutes to
answer.
72 users with correct answers were rewarded.
Ghost Quiz Results
–
How many accounts does the official twitter for Ghost follow?
a)4
– What’s the name for holding at least 20,000
GHOST?
c)Ghost veteran
–
What protocol does GHOST use?
b)Proof of Stake
–
How many ghosts are in the ghost roadmap?
d)7
For more information and future AMAs, join our
Social Media channels:
⚠️Please post your questions in the commenting section bellow
⚠️Total Reward pool: 300$
⚠️Requirements: 👉Join Satoshi Club Telegram group 👉Join Monero Telegram group
We will have the following structure:
Part 1️: 50 USD/5 users – We’ll select 5 questions from you. Please submit your questions in the comments under this article. Max. 3 question per user.
Part 2️: 50 USD/5 users – Open chat for 80 seconds. You can post Max 5 questions. Monero Team will select 5 questions and answer them.
