I want to preface this post by saying that I am supportive of Dero and its aims and I want it to succeed. Indeed this post is motivated by a desire to see it succeed. Hence the following comments and criticisms, based on my reading of the white paper, in no particular order.
* The white paper is short on detail. Many of the specifications and goals are quite vaguely worded. I am aware of course that Dero is still very early in its development, and has more than achieved the development goals so far. However, as more people become aware of Dero, there is going to be increasing pressure to come up with more detail. In anticipation of this, I believe an amplification and extension of the white paper should itself be one of the goals in the roadmap outlined in the white paper. If possible it would also be nice to have a task force whose assignment it is to work on improving and lengthening the white paper.
This comes up frequently and perhaps it is the proper time to mention that level of detail in the whitepaper is (for now only) intentionally short of technical details. There are a few reasons for this, however, I'll stick to 2 of the main ones for now. The first being that since Dero is doing something unique it's very hard to give specific details until the developers have had a chance to code it from scratch, evaluate it, and then make a firm decision regarding whether it's suitable for the project. The second is that I personally get questions from developers in the broader CryptoNote community (every single day) asking about how Dero plans to implement these features. These are clearly large problems that require a well thought out solution. For a small development team with a clear plan it's much better to create a roadmap (or whitepaper) that doesn't generate false hope or lead others to dead ends.
The roadmap and whitepaper will see updates over time as this is already planned. * The white paper does not explain the reasons for choosing Golang as the language or why indeed the protocol needs to be rewritten at all. I assume it is because of the planned implementation of smart contracts. Still, some detail on the thought processes of the development team as to how they came to choose Golang, and its strengths for this project, would be useful.
Simply stated, C++ was no longer suitable for what Dero's development team is doing. I'm going to link an article that can explain some of the strengths of golang. I will make a point to go into greater detail at some point in the future as we get asked this often. Golang was built to work on global real world applications and is very easy for new users to pick up. https://talks.golang.org/2012/splash.article* The white paper does not explain the reason for choosing an infinite supply, with emissions steady at about 157000 per year after the first 8 years.
The 157,000 Dero per year will help provide incentive in the long term for people to secure the network and there will inevitably be people who lose Dero for various reasons. These reasons can range from human error to someone passing away without providing anyone access to their wallet and anything between.* The white paper does not explain how efficiency improvements are going to be implemented, or even how the team plans to scale the protocol up to real-world usage at a later date. One might wonder if it will be even possible to scale up the technology (all coins suffer from this problem to varying extents) so some discussion of this would be good. People will want technical information on how the energy reduction and transaction speed issues are going to be addressed.
These are critical details that the team is holding on to for now. If we look at what's publicly available in the Derosuite daemon you can already notice a significant improvement in resource utilization, sync speeds, etc over the original code.* The references supplied are all to Wikipedia (apart from a link to the cryptonote white paper) and are not technical/serious. I assume the team has done much research during the pre-development and development phases, but there is little evidence of the nature or extent of this research. Compare for example to the rich research context surrounding Cardano (which I appreciate has a massively larger team behind it). Some evidence of the technical research and specific results of that research (e.g. references to technical papers in the field) would be very useful. Not to all readers of course, but the white paper could be divided into a less technical summarising section, and a more in-depth and longer technical section.
The details regarding how a small team were going to create a new blockchain technology based off the CryptoNote protocol before the end of Q1/2018 were also questioned heavily. We definitely understand that everyone would like the answers to these questions. There is a strong development plan with a mountain of technical merit, though it's not my place to discuss that and the team has mentioned that they will release all of this information when it's time so I must honor that.* Currently the team is quite small, and to be successful and to meet its long terms goals the team must grow, and connections must be made with other teams and other projects, I think. It would be good to know what the team's strategy is for expanding the scope of work being done to support and develop Dero. I realise there is a plan to found a private company (see next bullet point) but this specific way of developing the coin must have disadvantages as well as advantages, and so far, there is no detail about what in practice it would mean.
We understand that the team has to grow and we agree. The development team are quiet, yet friendly and they do speak to other teams. Much like what you've seen from the project, our team tries very hard not to generate any degree of false hype or hope. Like anything else, when we have firm information we will promptly inform the community. At the moment Dero is working on a well thought out development plan that they've set for themselves while simultaneously positioning the project to incorporate and become fully transparent. Dero is engaging in the process of making their team open to the world and with that comes full transparency and a firm push to start expanding all areas of the team.* If the coin is to be taken seriously, the identities of the team members, their work histories and technical experience and so on, these things must at some point be made public. Unless the strategy is to grow the network/blockchain in such a way that it travels with its own momentum, gathering expertise and technical followers independently as it grows, as the original bitcoin did. However even bitcoin is now more or less privately controlled (by the Bitcoin Foundation), and this does not appear to be the strategy adopted by the team anyway, as the white paper mentions a future Dero private company that will be behind the network. Founding a company must mean full public disclosure of the technical team and its expertise. Why wait on this?
The team agrees that the developers must make themselves known and they've already spent a healthy amount of time and their personal money getting ready to incorporate Dero and simultaneously reveal themselves. This will include their work history which I'm personally already aware of to some degree. The development team has stated clearly on many occasions that when they incorporate they will become fully transparent. The incorporation process has started and is listed in the roadmap. As we've seen with (many) other projects, it can often take time for the developers to be in a (safe) position to reveal themselves. I can personally 100% assure everyone that Dero's team not only wants to talk about who they are, but some of them are even eager to be open as I'm sure it's a breath of fresh air. * Under 'Challenges' there are a bunch of things and it is not clear how these are incorporated into the roadmap. I find the idea of using Dero as Identity with a certifying authority quite intriguing, but it raises questions, such as: what other coins do this or plan to do this (what is the competition), realistically how would this be adopted by the wider world, and how does implementing this serve to further the overall goals of the project?
Some of them are not specifically incorporated into the roadmap yet and as Dero's development team works their way through the current roadmap they will be able to update coming quarters. For now they want to focus on what's immediately in front of them before they put something in concrete for 9-12 months down the road. As stated above, we're looking to expand the team when the appropriate time comes, and we're working very hard to get to that point every day as it's advantageous for everyone.* There are issues that are not discussed, for example regulatory issues. This is probably going to be the biggest topic in the crypto space in 2018. What is Dero's strategy? Cardano for example does seem to have a strategy worked out for this; it plans to be "regulatory compliant" in a way that is built into the foundations of the network. But Cardano is not a privacy coin, and the issue of privacy/obfuscation raises further challenges in the context of regulation. It would be great to see what strategy the Dero team has in place for dealing with this, and what the gaps in the strategy are that we need to think about. It is hard to over-emphasise the importance of this topic, as it touches on almost every other .
I will have to let Captain speak to the specific technical details regarding this, however, it's possible to allow a particular group or organization to become some type of certifying authority that can verify the identity of the wallet holder. In places where KYC compliance is at its strictest levels, trades would not be possible without pre-authorization from the appropriate authorities. On an individual level, you can choose who you certify your wallet with at your discretion. I would personally recommend a private wallet with no certifications and one with certifications for maximum privacy. There will certainly be a lot of discussion needed regarding the best way to tackle this issue.
Julio Faura, Chair of the Enterprise Ethereum Alliance said "one of the key features we need for a blockchain to be used in enterprise settings is privacy.". J.P.Morgan, one of the largest banks in the world published that quote directly to their own website which helps to publicly acknowledge and convey the dire need for real privacy on the blockchain before enterprise scale solutions can be utilized.
Dero is working to solve issues like this from the ground up, starting on day 1. Again, there will need to be a lot of discussion in all areas of development but Dero's strategy is to look at the broad picture, the real world requirements, and the future. To that end, they've proposed the Dero Project and we're working to quietly develop practical solutions to global problems.These are just a few of my thoughts for now. These are intended to be constructive criticism, with the aim of helping and furthering Dero. I hope they will be taken in that spirit!