Welcome to the very late June / July 2019 Spectrecoin newsletter. As you may have noticed, we didn’t publish the usual monthly newsletter in May 2019 and instead we had an extensive ‘v3 upgrade Guide‘ and a shorter ‘Stealth Staking announcement‘ after ‘Proof-of-Anonymous-Stake’ (PoAS) went live on 17th May 2019. We have since then been working hard on an updated ‘Spectrecoin White-Paper‘ and we released the latest version of the White-Paper on 17th June 2019, so the newsletter is slightly behind the usual release pattern and a bit shorter.

In this newsletter we will do a short review and a condensed summary of the new White-Paper, a short analysis of the success of PoAS so far and we also present the new roadmap for what we want to achieve in the next 12 months.

We have been working hard to prepare an expanded and updated version of the White-Paper to showcase exactly why Spectrecoin is such a unique cryptocurrency with understandable, functional privacy implementations. The White-Paper can roughly be divided into 3 main parts:

Introductions / General

We introduce Spectrecoin as a solution to the problem of public and ‘open‘ distributed ledgers such as Bitcoin. We explain that classic blockchains, such as Bitcoin, has serious privacy issues that will only be exacerbated by the evolution of digital and online technology. Spectrecoin solves these problems by focusing on private / anonymous transactions and now also private staking. Spectrecoin is also incredibly energy efficient and can be run on a Raspberry Pi. The Bitcoin network uses in the order of millions of times more energy than the Spectrecoin network. In addition Spectrecoin transaction times are faster and Spectrecoin has about the same on-chain transaction capacity as Bitcoin.

Privacy Features / Stealth / Ring-signatures

We introduce the various privacy features that make Spectrecoin unique and explain in some detail what stealth addresses are, how they work and the limitations of the privacy they can offer. We explain in detail what ring-signatures are and how they work. We also explain in detail the specific ring-signature implementation used in Spectrecoin. We explain that Spectrecoin protects the sender and the receiver privacy using a combination of stealth technology and ring-signatures.

PoSv3 vs. PoAS

The White-Paper explains in detail the workings of the PoSv3 protocol and then goes onto explain how PoAS was designed based on PoSv3 but using the ring-signature implementation to achieve anonymous staking. This main section also covers addition algorithms for splitting and consolidation of ATXOs to generate sufficient network entropy and supply of ATXO ‘mixins’.

Governance / Roadmap

The White-paper covers details of the ‘Spectrecoin Foundation CIC‘ and what advantages that bring to the project and the future and also sets out a rough roadmap for the next 12 months. The roadmap is laid out in the next section. Please follow the link below and read the full white paper:

https://spectreproject.io/Spectrecoin_White-Paper.pdf

We would welcome any constructive criticism and comments about the content and if there are any ideas around how we could improve in the future and aspects that we may have omitted.

PoAS aka. ‘Stealth Staking‘ has been active on the main-net since the 17th May and it has been a resounding success with the community and technically. At the time of writing there are 5,318,307 SPECTRE staking and having been converted from XSPEC. This represent around 23.5 % of the total money supply. The fact that 23.5% of the supply is now SPECTRE provides excellent privacy for users and a massive supply of ATXOs of all denominations for use in anonymous transactions.

We have been following the implementation of PoAS closely and from a technical point of view the protocol behaves exactly as expected and the total behaviour of the network is as expected. We have seen steady SPECTRE stakes, ATXO splitting and consolidation and transactions. We have frequent conversions from XSPEC to SPECTRE and vice versa. So far we have only had positive feedback from users and we strongly recommend for anyone who stake long term to convert your balance into SPECTRE. It’s easy, safe and quick and you can easily convert back to XSPEC if needed.

The idea of ‘be your own bank‘ is taking shape and the first stage of development is done. You can now keep your money under your control, in private and earn an interest that is higher than any commercial bank would offer. You choose who you share information with. If you are still not convinced about the need for privacy please have a look at the following link to a film about surveillance that I came across recently by Marc Meillassoux, Mihaela Gladovic:

https://vimeo.com/nothingtohide

“Saying that you don’t care about privacy because you have nothing to hide is like saying that you don’t care about freedom of speech because you have nothing to say.” Edward Snowden

Support Spectrecoin, a decentralised, energy efficient, eco-friendly & private cryptocurrency.

As we move forward beyond the release of PoAS there are other major milestones to reach, both in terms of increasing privacy and of improving network security. There is also the question of a mobile platform of course and some preliminary work has started.

Seed word backup (BIP32)

The creation and restoration of private keys using seed words (BIP32) is an excellent and secure way to backup your entire wallet. The seed words are all you need to recover your wallet in case of some kind of data loss. This could also form the basis of integration with hardware wallets and be part of a ‘cold staking‘ implementation.

Cold Staking

Cold staking allows you to assign your staked value (the value of your coins) to a cold staking node. This cold staking node can then stake on your behalf, but without being able to access or spend your coins. In other words, cold staking allows you to stake with coin values being stored offline and without giving the cold staking node operator access to your coins (usually, the operator would be the owner of the coins being staked, although this is not mandatory).This would also allow for staking pools in the future.

Android mobile wallet

We will deliver an Android mobile wallet, but the detailed specifications are not yet determined. This will be the first stage of our mobile development and should not be considered the final mobile solution.

Installers

Windows and Mac OSX installers will come.

Network security

We will keep exploring options for network security and it appears likely that the focus might be on some implementation of Dandelion++ in the future. This will further decrease the ability of an attacker to analyse network traffic.

We have added two new exchanges that trade XSPEC. Citex and Altilly.