Re: ⋆⋆⋆ [SDC] ShadowCash | The First and Only truly Anonymous POS coin ⋆⋆⋆
I'm legit interested in this project, just do something cool and I'm here. I love proof of stake (definitely an improvement over proof of work in theory) and i love cryptonote. What do you guys have to prove that you are making advances in the space of bringing proof of stake to cyrptonote. I see a lot of promises and very little in the way of concrete advancement. Sorry for not doing exhaustive research, there are so many people promising so many things everywhere that i could never research all of the claims. A distillation in this respect would be greatly appreciated.
I'm usually here lurking and looking for ways to bash this coin, but to answer your question and to be fair, the devs have already done it to an extent.
They have put one part of cryptonote on top of the PoS SDC blockchain. The difference from a true cryptonote+PoS hybrid is that the cryptonote layer runs on top of the PoS block chain much like zerocoin would run on top of bitcoin. Here they substitute cryptonote-type ring signatures for the zkSNARKs of zerocoin. It's a good idea, actually, from a purely theoretical perspective.
Now here is the bashing part: cryptonote ring signatures cause a lot of blockchain bloat. The SDC implementation compounds this problem with the clunkiness of a zero-coin type token system. It's a great proof-of-concept, but in my opinion, it's not going to be practical. I could be wrong. Time will tell if it gets adopted, used, and is maintainable.
For what its worth, it seems like the plan is to slot in SNARKs in the future once they are fully ready and trustless. The lead dev rynomster said the reason they used anonymous tokens instead of direct anonymous outputs to ring sigs is because they are building toward that direction. Quote here:
Quote
Unfortunately I can't get to in Monero Research Lab's MRL-0001 research bulletin, but I am certainly looking forward to reading it 
Our scheme was never going to be perfect, and we have said on a few occasions that we will only be utilising a basic nizkp until zk-snarks is fully out and trustless.
I have also told people that I'm not an academic, nor a grad student.. Just your average Joe, who dropped out of school, and wants to help move things along
If this was about money, we definitely would not work as we do on a single project, and we definitely would not have open sourced on our first opportunity to do so..
The reason we opted for anonymous tokens, instead of direct anonymous outputs to ringsigs, is because we're building towards direction we're heading in. What we're striving for... Encrypted values, with perfect nizkps, proving all values of inputs are real, without revealing any information about where they come from.
We're looking at many things, like homomorphic encryption, snarks, etc...
http://eprint.iacr.org/2014/976
snarks are advancing, along with many other ideas... We are not for limiting ourselves, but for bettering our [collective] future
Our scheme was never going to be perfect, and we have said on a few occasions that we will only be utilising a basic nizkp until zk-snarks is fully out and trustless.
I have also told people that I'm not an academic, nor a grad student.. Just your average Joe, who dropped out of school, and wants to help move things along
If this was about money, we definitely would not work as we do on a single project, and we definitely would not have open sourced on our first opportunity to do so..
The reason we opted for anonymous tokens, instead of direct anonymous outputs to ringsigs, is because we're building towards direction we're heading in. What we're striving for... Encrypted values, with perfect nizkps, proving all values of inputs are real, without revealing any information about where they come from.
We're looking at many things, like homomorphic encryption, snarks, etc...
http://eprint.iacr.org/2014/976
snarks are advancing, along with many other ideas... We are not for limiting ourselves, but for bettering our [collective] future