As for practical aspects:
1. Do you expect to implement light node/wallet (this is on raiblock list) so some reuse may happen.
2. Even with zkSNARKS/etc there's still risk of leaking IP. Monero will be using Kovri for this (and they have explanation why TOR wont work), will you add this to your roadmap?
3. Distribution is still not clear, I Want to get some, either through whatever mechanism is used or through donation - can you make donation percentage allocation clear at some point soon?
Also:
How can I help? I am a SWE in one of the FANG companies with good opensource experience. I find less and less free time after working on my side project, but this looks sufficiently interesting to pause them.
Azulik people, can you please comment on this?
Hello, that is very interresting questions:
1- Light node/wallet will be our top priority, a new version of the synch system has recently been proposed on Github :
This patchset adds a new message type "bulk_pull_blocks" (0x09) which allows one to request from a
node a range of blocks (min_hash to max_hash). Alternatively, the checksum for a range of blocks can
be requested to determine if it is likely that there are new blocks in that range that need to be pulled.
Further, a limited number of blocks can be requested by specifying a non-zero "max_count" argument.
The advantage over the existing bulk_pull (I assume you meant bulk_pull, and not block_pull ?) is that bulk_pull accepts an account as a start and a block as an end, so to use it to synchronize the bootstrap database requires a lot of request-reply cycles, especially for accounts that have few transactions. bulk_pull_blocks accepts a range of blocks, so you can pull in just a set of blocks, alternatively requesting a checksum before doing the transfer to see if the transfer is likely to be needed. This mechanism brings a full sync down to under 5 minutes
We think it will really help to make very efficient light wallet and we will apply the bulk_pull.
2- It's not currently in our roadmap, for us the privacy is something very important for mass adoption. The main priority is to hide wallet balance and transaction if we want people to use Azulik in the real life. What you mentioned could be added in the future but isn't currently our priority.
3- We have updated the first page which should be more clear now about the distribution.
Regarding the help you offer, it's very interesting thank you for that we will discuss together and contact you through private message to check with you.