I love the mobile wallet (released) and stealth addresses (released and open source) but have several questions:
1. All the marketing efforts seem similar to CLOAK (Cloaktalk vs. Shadowtalk, One Market vs Shadow Bay, similar websites and writing styles for press releases, etc). Is the marketing team for SDC the same as it was for CLOAK? (I know the dev team including Ryno and technovert is different).
2. While the current stealth address tech is open source (thanks!) the ZK release in beta is not. Is there a reason for this? It seems to me that by putting the beta code in GitHub, progress could be made faster and any potential problems before public release would be more likely to be found. While a whitepaper is great, the community needs to see actual (zero knowledge) code to make sure it works as designed and is safe.
Thanks in advance!
1. The marketing team is not the same as it was for CLOAK. Shadow have actually marketed the coin vastly different to the approach CLOAK took which was based on deadlines and a lot of hype. Shadow has survived all these months by letting the features they developed do the talking. In particular, ShadowChat encrypted chat, HTML5 PoS Lite wallet, stealth addresses and soon true anon in the form of zk transactions.
2. I'm not sure if the code will become open source straight away. The devs have put hundreds of coding hours into producing their zk implementation, if it was open straight away the tech will be copied into other coins pretty fast as happened with rynos stealth addresses. The code will likely be audited by someone reputable whilst closed, hopefully not too long after we will see open release. This seems a fair approach.
I agree the tech so far has been great. I also agree with you that no hard deadlines is more healthy for the coin.
My only concern is your comments about not going open source until "hopefully not too long after we will see open release" because it sounds a lot like CLOAK told people about PoSa.
I also am 99.99% that CloakTalk forms were started by the same person that started ShadowTalk forums. That is okay, because this person is knowledgeable and seems to have the best interests of SDC at heart. I just with the marketing team would be more transparent about their involvement in prior projects. Some of us like what we see but still have concerns about open source of zk project and flashbacks to promises regarding PoSA and One Market.
It would also be nice if the dev would pop in and give us more information about how the testnet is going. IRC is not always helpful in providing these details and not everyone can camp there out all day hoping to learn something when it could be revealed here, Reddit, or ShadowTalk much easier.
Thanks again!