As we come closer to the major release date of v3 as well as the hardfork, that will introduce stealth staking on the Spectrecoin network, I wanted to have a closer look on what other significant changes we will see too.



The fork time for v3 is pretty much set in stone on Friday, 17. May 2019 20:00:00 GMT. In order to be prepared with the appropriate production release, that will support the fork, you will be able to download the right binaries from the official GitHub on 25th April 2019.





The upgrade from v2 to v3 is as easy as:

Downloading the right v3 binary according to your system

Shutting down the v2 wallet

Extracting the new wallet to the preferred folder

Starting up Spectrecoin.exe

Let the wallet load & reindex (the wallet will close automatically once reindexing is done)

Restart the wallet.

Have in mind, to backup your wallet.dat file, before any of these steps. As well, the reindex process will take a while, up to several hours, in order to prepare for stealth staking to work.



Now let's have a look at what exact changes we are facing. I created a small comparison chart for the biggest changes on the Spectrecoin network.





While comparison charts are easy to analyze, I will be going into a little bit more detail, explaining what each change means.





Stealth staking

It is probably the most asked implementation and was a wish for many Spectrecoin supporters since 2017. Stealth staking will finally become reality with v3. Everyone familiar with Proof-of-Stake cryptocurrencies knows, network support will pay out in stakes of the currency. However, while normal coin stakes can be tracked on the block explorer, stealth staking offers the unique ability, to stake without anyone knowing.



The open ledger is a great invention. As well it offers no privacy for funds. Every normal blockchain balance can be examined by being visible for everyone. With the unique invention of stealth staking, people can rely on true privacy again, as not everyone can trace the owned balances and stake rewards.





Staking reward

From Spectrecoin's inception until the hardfork with v3, we saw a 5% yearly payout of stakes, if the wallet was supporting the network 24/7. This has always led to discussions, if it is too much, or not. These discussions are over with v3. The inflation rate will decrease as the stake rewards of XSPEC and SPECTRE are going to be fixed. Since both (XSPEC/SPECTRE) offer different fixed staking rewards, the inflation will vary, depending on the fact, how many people will stake XSPEC and how many will stake SPECTRE. Which leads to the following theoretical calculations after 20 years.



Min inflation rate = 1.88 % - Min supply = 34,883,000 XSPEC/SPECTRE

Max inflation rate = 2.40 % - Max supply = 41,124,500 XSPEC/SPECTRE



Old inflation rate = 5% - Old supply = 56,603,684 SPEC/SPECTRE







Block time

Due to the added workload towards the Spectrecoin blockchain, the block time will increase from 64 to 96 seconds. This will result in a smooth method of staking SPECTRE. Bitcoin itself has a 10 minute block time, just as a comparison.





Ring sizes

With v3 the used ring sizes will be fixed to 10. Older versions offered the risk, making use of lower ring sizes or even set it to 1, which offers no privacy layer. Ring size of 10 makes use of 9 other anonymous outputs, to cover one owns transaction amount.





Default block size

The increasing block size from 250k to 999k will offer 4 times more capacity for transactions.





Base fee SPECTRE

Since SPECTRE wasn't used as much as XSPEC for transfers, the base fee was overseen, as it was rarely used for anonymous transactions. An adjusted base fee, with lowering SPECTRE fees equally to XSPEC fees, transactions will become a lot cheaper than they used to be.





Stake maturity

450 blocks are going to be the new maturing rule. It used to be 288 blocks & 8hrs. This change will benefit smaller bagholders, as bigger whales will be needy of a longer maturing period.





Max. anon output

The maximum anonymous output (ATXO) was as high as 10,000. A growing price increase of XSPEC and SPECTRE will make it less likely for anyone to own above 10,000 coins in coming years, which means that actual transactions with this amount of coins will take place rarely. With that in mind, the anon output size is lowered to 1,000 SPECTRE. As a result, the anonymity pool will increase. For a more detailed in-depth documentation, check out Spectrecoin's whitepaper.





Mixin algorithm

As the mixin algorithm has seen major improvements and changes, it cannot easily be compared from v2 to v3. The V2 mixin selection algorithm was completely random which allowed detecting the real output with high probability under certain circumstances. V3, on the other hand, mimics real user behavior, by making sure that 1/3 of the mixins are used from the last 2700 blocks and 2/3 of are older than that. For readers with a deeper technical understanding, I added the mixin changes that can be found on GitHub.





Conclusion

The coming changes will influence the network and usage heavily. Spectrecoin wants to improve every little detail towards a pure privacy cryptocurrency. And its approach of staking anonymously (PoAS - Proof-of-Anonymous-Stake aka Stealth staking), is another step into the right direction to secure users privacy. With that in mind, I think I can say, that Spectrecoin is a rock solid crypto project, preparing to disrupt the privacy coin sector. And will most likely succeed.



We will happily welcome you in Spectrecoin's official Discord.

For questions or suggestions, please comment below.

Thank you for reading.