Welcome to the July + August 2019 Spectrecoin newsletter. Given that the holiday season is upon us this will be the last newsletter for the summer unless something comes up that needs to be shared. The next newsletter will be out first or second week of September. In this issue we will elaborate a bit more around how we see the development of the Spectrecoin mobile platform and there are couple of other news stories.

Spectrecoin Mobile

We are fully aware that we need to deliver a mobile platform for Spectrecoin and work is already underway to offer this to potentially millions of users that do not have access to a desktop or a laptop computer. The challenge we face is to implement a completely decentralised, anonymous and privacy maintaining mobile solution equivalent to the current desktop solution. This means that any interaction with the blockchain must be done from the Spectrecoin mobile app itself and not via any centralised node or server. Current algorithms such as the ‘mixin‘ picking solution are complex, and any simplified solution or any implementation errors on the mobile side might compromise the anonymity of a transaction.

Therefore, our approach to building the first Spectrecoin mobile platform is to have a C++ core library which is shared between any client. This allows us to guarantee the same level of anonymity on any platform, including mobile. Initially this means that the complete blockchain must be synced on mobile, but we will later improve with a THIN mode for XSPEC and SPECTRE. The goal therefore is to have a native mobile app which uses the C++ library for blockchain interaction.

The benefit of the shared C++ library is mainly that we can reuse 90% of the code instead of having to rewrite everything for Android and iOS or other platforms. A further benefit of not having to rewrite everything is security. The mobile and desktop wallet will behave in exactly the same way. We have already made a lot of progress on building with a mostly identical toolchain and the dependencies for Android are already built.

We expect an Android version to be released first followed later by an iOS version of the Spectrecoin mobile wallet. We will make further announcements as we get closer to release.

Discord – Panda Bot

We recently added ‘Panda Bot’ to our Discord server. This provided us (…and you) with the opportunity to tip, rain & sprinkle Spectrecoin to the community. Panda Bot also serves as an XSPEC wallet and has a built-in stake pool for XSPEC. You will find more information and chat about this in the ‘PANDA BOT’ section on our Discord server. See the link below for more information as well.

https://discordbots.org/bot/479147589363826688

If you don’t own the private keys, you don’t own the XSPEC (you trust someone else to hold your coins). Use these third party services at your own risk.

Marketing

Over the last month there has been a marketing effort for Spectrecoin by Jeff Kirdeikis (Uptrennd) and Dan Bainbridge (Publish0x) to raise awareness of the unique features of Spectrecoin.

The marketing has been a sequence of posts on various social media, such as Facebook and Twitter and also on blogging sites and Reddit. The timing of the marketing has been exceptionally challenging as we have seen Bitcoin have another bullrun and most other cryptos have bled out in red double digits. Spectrecoin has been no exception and so in an apparent irony, the price of XSPEC has dropped as we have launched the biggest PR push so far. It does seem very likely however that in spite of a price drop, we have increased awareness. In most other trade cycles over the last few years we have seen cryptos recover from the red so we can only hope that Spectrecoin will catch up and shine again once Bitcoin has figured where it wants to go.

As part of the marketing campaign we have a video with an interview with Jason Dixon (@Titorelli) who has taken on the role of Spectrecoin representative for videos, podcasts and other visual media.

The video has been posted on Uptrennd along with an article and also on YouTube.

The link below will take you to Uptrennd where you can comment and discuss on this video.

https://www.uptrennd.com/post-detail/the-value-of-privacy-w-spectrecoin~MjM5MTA=

The latest version of the Spectrecoin software is 3.0.11 and was released on 30th June 19.

https://github.com/spectrecoin/spectre/releases/tag/3.0.11

From the Spectrecoin team, have an excellent summer!

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