The DigiByte Summit sponsored by Vertbase took place in Amsterdam on Friday 19th April, with key members of the project and community present to discuss the successes so far and plans for the future.

The event was attended by many of DigiByte’s new partners including Block 30 Labs, V-ID and Antum ID.

Two important developments from DigiByte though come in the form of privacy enhancement and decentralisation of mining.

Dandelion

Dandelion is a planned improvement to enhance users’ privacy. The idea was presented by Josiah Spackman all the way from New Zealand in the very early hours of the morning through a live video.

Spackman explained the current issues with privacy on the DigiByte blockchain. As of now, it is possible to view who is sending DigiByte tokens and where. Through certain technologies, this could make it possible for transactions to be traced through your IP address, letting people know you have a large holding of DigiByte tokens. Obviously, this isn’t ideal for safety.

However, these issues are soon to be solved through the privacy-enhancing Dandelion project. Dandelion has already made an appearance on Zcoin in September 2018.

As Spackman explains in this Medium post:

“With Dandelion, you start by creating the ‘stem’, and send your transaction to just one other person who then relays the transaction. This second person has a 10% chance to ‘flower’ the transaction and send it off in to the world, kind of similar to if you were to blow a dandelion and watch the fluff flying out into the world. If they don’t flower the transaction, they add to the stem and send the transaction on to just one more person. This is how the stem is created, as the transaction is expected to hop between a number of people, hiding the original IP address in the process. This way, should somebody malicious look at the IP address used, they won’t be able to get any information about you.”

Josiah Spackman went on to explain that there are downsides to Dandelion but that these are minimal, including a slightly slower transaction time.

Dandelion is an interesting implementation on DigiByte that will enhance users’ privacy, and it will be a welcome addition to the cryptocurrency.

Odocrypt

The second interesting announcement was Odocrypt. Announced by the founder of DigiByte Jared Tate, Odocrypt aims to further enhance DigiByte’s decentralisation in regards to mining.

Odocrypt is an attempt to prevent ASIC mining on the DigiByte network. DigiByte already runs five different mining algorithms in an effort to enhance the decentralisation of mining. Odocrypt will attempt to improve this further by having a hashing algorithm that will change itself once every ten days to make ASIC mining impossible on the network.

With the hashing algorithm changing every ten days, it will become extremely difficult for any ASIC miners to work on the DigiByte network. ASIC resistance is becoming a common theme in cryptocurrencies, with both Monero and Siacoin also attempting to prevent them.

The new mining algorithm will help to ensure that GPU and FPGA miners are favoured and ensure the security of the network.

More announcements

There were many more announcements from the DigiByte Summit in Amsterdam. Stay tuned to Coin Rivet this week for further updates including Block 30 Labs, V-ID and Antum ID announcements!