Been in MOIN for a couple of years now so I'm really hoping that 2019 is the year we finally start to see MOIN shine. Its good to see the community stick with this project for all this time even though it has become quiet in this thread this past year but on discord the community is super active which is great to see and I will always support MOIN as it was one of my first ever coins to buy. Thanks for all the updates through out the year Jookly and KingCapper and lets hope 2019 is a better year for MOIN and crypto in general. Happy Holidays!

Low market cap crypto with high growth potential which has been around for the long haul with active development throughout. Extremely professional looking HTML5 interface with the coin itself being moved over to the open-sourced PARTCL blockchain.

To sum it up briefly, Particl is a privacy-focused blockchain/P2P hybrid ecosystem that will host a decentralized and anonymous marketplace as well as an array of apps using a native cryptocurrency. This can lead to fully decentralized and anonymous marketplaces which allows buyers and vendors to securely transact between each other without the need to ever interact with a third-party. It also encompasses a fully anonymous messaging system built similarly to BitMessage. The platform is currency and protocol agnostic. MOIN's full utilization of this code is still being worked on and from what I've heard our main dev is compiling something that no other coin currently has. File verification is my bet. We're still in the early stages, and what makes this coin so exciting.

While MOIN is mainly a privacy-focused project, the use of a public token (default token) is very important in terms of management, integration, and security. One of the problems with exclusively anonymous currencies is that it can be hard to confirm the authenticity of the block creation process. What if an attacker had the key to generate an infinite amount of coins? What if no one noticed the hack until the attacker dumps large orders of fraudulently created coins on the trading market? These are very serious threats that are a reality with some of the 100% private coins. ZK SNARKS, for example, a crypto privacy protocol, also has this “hidden inflation problem”. In fact, the chain is initially generated from a set of master keys which could theoretically be used to generate an infinite amount of coins at any time without anyone ever noticing. This is why people say this protocol relies on “trusted setups”; you actually need to trust the party who spawned the chain would successfully destroy the master keys. There is, of course, no way to know for sure whether they didn’t keep copies somewhere or that they were not compromised during any step of the process (software, hardware, network, OS, BIOS, ME chip exploits). After all, cryptocurrencies are now worth a lot and they have become the primary target for hackers around the world.

It is precisely for these reasons that the team opted for a fully transparent coin generation process. Because all newly generated coins are public, a hacker/bug would instantly be detected and measures could be taken to fix the problem.

Additionally, since the public token is built in a very similar way as Bitcoin, it is much easier for third-parties such as exchanges, websites, and wallets (Jaxx, Exodus, Ledger Wallet, etc.) to integrate. They do not need to go out of their way and spend many dev hours without knowing if it will be economically worth it to integrate that coin. The best example I could find concerning this, in particular, is the case of Monero and Jaxx. Jaxx is a well-known multi-cryptocurrency wallet and they tried to integrate Monero earlier this year. After trying to add the coin to their wallet, they announced they would finally not do it because it was too complicated and they didn’t feel the amount of dev time required for this project would be worth it. This would not happen with MOIN as the BTC codebase is what everybody is used to working with and can integrate it without much effort.

This public token is also very useful for people who do not necessarily require a permanently anonymous experience. Fully-anonymous currencies can sometimes hinder one’s ability to effectively keep track of financial records and transactions. Some services ask for extra information (i.e. a payment ID for Monero) in order for a transaction to be accepted and there are many situations where one could forget to note that transaction ID down or lose it afterward. There’s also a lot of scenarios where one would need to go back several months into the past to see specific transaction details. In most cases, it is simply harder to keep track of things with fully private coins so having one that does possess great accountability tools is definitively a plus.

On top of this, a transaction using any privacy coin is generally going to cost more in fees than a public transaction on a non-bloated BTC codebase currency as it typically involves more data movement and computation. A “public user”, one that does not necessarily want to be anonymous, should not have to pay for privacy features he does not need. By making the public token the default coin, this ensures that only users seeking privacy options will use the privacy token, while the public users (which will probably end up being the majority of MOIN users if the platform becomes mainstream) default to the public token. This also has the non-negligible effect of putting less stress on the network (as public transactions are more lightweight and do not fill blocks as much as private ones), keeping the network efficient.

MOIN’s private token has a variable degree of privacy which can be adjusted by users according to their preferences. In fact, when making a private transaction, it will be possible to send it using Confidential Transactions or RingCT (which is a blend of ring signatures and Confidential Transactions). It is noteworthy to mention that this is the first time both these protocols are being implemented on the Bitcoin codebase. While a few coins use Confidential Transactions as their privacy protocol, only one uses an implementation of RingCT on their main net: Monero.

Confidential Transactions, or CT, is a privacy protocol initially developed for Bitcoin that hides amounts sent from the public and makes it visible only to parties involved in the actual transaction. While it is very efficient to obfuscate most regular person-to-person transactions, its most interesting use case is when used in a marketplace decentralized escrow system. If the market’s escrow system worked using the public token, it would be trivial for determined attackers to detect patterns in the public escrow contracts and match them to potential users. On a long enough timeline, users could be identified with particular marketplace orders with a high degree of certainty. With the help of Confidential Transactions, this cuts off this attack vector and makes the escrow system fully anonymous.

RingCT, on the other side, is an even better privacy protocol combining ring signatures to the aforementioned confidential transaction protocol. Applied on double stealth addresses, not only transaction amounts are hidden but the sender and receiver addresses as well, making RingCT transactions completely untraceable. One useful feature of the MOIN wallet is that users are actually presented with the option to choose the privacy protocol they want to use according to their needs. Public transfer has good privacy protocol for basic privacy, but RingCT is even better as it makes transactions unlinkable. However, the latter is much more expensive in fees than the first one, and people who do not require a “paranoid” level of privacy may not want to pay larger fees.

In my subjective opinion, MOIN will offer the best privacy experience on the market as it is very flexible but makes no compromise. RingCT is considered top-of-the-line technology and it simply works fantastically in preserving one’s privacy. Some could argue that ZK-SNARKS offers a better solution, and that is rightfully debatable. They do offer an interesting privacy solution, but they do have their share of problems and vulnerabilities as mentioned above. Centralized coin mixers are obviously not to be trusted as there is no way to know the legitimacy of the website owner, and coinjoin services are demonstrably weak and exploitable by determined adversaries.

The hidden inflation problem is also one of the reasons why I believe MOIN, with its dual token system, has a “safer” (and easier to integrate) implementation of RingCT than Monero. Don’t get me wrong, there are good arguments people could make about Monero having the better integration. For example, RingCT being mandatory and by default on all transactions makes it impossible to make a basic human mistake (they do happen), but it also makes Monero a more expensive currency to use and a blockchain less likely to be able to support a huge influx of users (as transactions are heavy and would bloat the blockchain faster). This is the kind of debate where both sides have pros and cons, so I will let you make your own conclusion on this topic.

Also related to MOIN’s privacy but not its private coin, it is possible to route the wallet’s connection through TOR in order to keep your node IP address private. This is absolutely needed if you want a secure staking setup (unless you used OpenVPN with solid network rules) as broadcasting the real IP address of a staking node to the world is asking for trouble.

Another sweet feature of the blockchain is that it has a native implementation of Segwit, which I believe is a first in crypto. One small inconvenience with blockchain projects forking their chain to add Segwit is that witness blocks aren’t compatible with blocks prior to the fork. While this is not a critical problem, it sure makes things smoother and easier to have a fully compatible Segwit implementation.

Having segregated witness on MOIN gives its blockchain a couple of interesting features. Among many of these, some notable ones are the Lightning Network, transaction malleability vulnerability fixes, and block capacity/size increase.

Lightning Network is a payment channel protocol first proposed by Joseph Poon and Tadge Dryja and now scheduled for implementation on Bitcoin as well as some altcoins such as Vertcoin. LN gives interesting features to whatever coin decides to implement it such as reduced transaction fees, increased transaction speed, better privacy, and atomic swaps.

As it is becoming more and more likely as time goes by that the Lightning Network will be implemented in various different coins, its atomic swap feature is getting more relevant. Atomic swapping is the ability of an LN-enabled blockchain to be made inter-operable through multi-signature addresses and time-locks with many other LN-enabled blockchains in order to allow trust-less coin exchange between two parties (i.e. Alice can trade 100 LTC to Bob for 1 BTC in a 100% decentralized and counterparty-free fashion). This could even be used to create decentralized multi-coin payment processors or exchanges, effectively spawning a brand new and potentially breakthrough LN-focused ecosystem in which MOIN could be part of. It also seems plausible that the MOIN platform would eventually leverage this feature to allow trust-less currency exchange on its marketplace as well as other Dapps, effectively replacing Shapeshift with a cheaper and decentralized alternative, even though the team hasn’t made any statement on the matter.