LIVE Interview and QA: Amanda B. Johnson of DASH
- Thread starter tungfa
- Start date
stan.distortion
Well-known member
Nice interview 
There was a question in there on masternodes being able to de-anonymise PrivateSend transactions and i think Amanda said if someone owned more than half of the MNs they could do it? As far as I know the mixing process isn't susceptible to any of the 50% type conditions and even owning 99.9% of the MNs would be no guarantee of de-anonymisation, if it went through a single unmonitorable MN the trail would be broken.
Another thing mentioned was sidechains on Etherium. Tbh I've never paid much attention to exact details of how Etherium works but the whole idea of sidechains and other kinds of offshoots from a main chain are fairly simple and an easy place to start is merged mining. If someone's mining Bitcoin they can use their hashpower to secure other sha256 chains, in a sense it's hashes as a service except the miner has to subscribe to the chain rather than the chain to the miner but that stumbling block can be overcome by the main chain providing a security mechanism for other chains. There are other ways of doing it, sign something with the last winning block hash and it's an equally secure guarantee that whatever was signed existed at that time but mining is a simple way of seeing how one chain can secure another.
Not much point doing that if the other chain offers no benefit to the main one but if they're mutually beneficial it can be a very powerful option, for example the main chain doing extremely secure settlements while the supported chain handles high volumes of fast transactions, the tokens on the secondary chain being created from locked tokens on the primary with the unlocking transaction doing final settlements of balances.
Neat huh? That was suggested way back in 2012 on bitcointalk, it might have been suggested earlier but there was a discussion on it back then that hammered out many of the finer details, lots of folks involved, all kinds of ideas banged around and then just last week I read a 2015 Blockstream paper on sidechains... It was a summary of that discussion, all the finer details with the dead-ends pruned out and it was all Blockstreams own work! Not direct plagiarism, it was implied rather than directly accredited but at least one of the Blockstream devs has laid claim to ideas first proposed publicly by other parties, maybe just like minds thinking alike but now Blockstream has started applying for patents...
Anyway, rant over. There are all kinds of possibilities for sidechains, too many to list and the key area has mostly shifted to blockchain interoperability standards. It will likely result in a standards battle for a while, ERC20 is one for Etherium and there seem to be several ISO numbers aimed at the same area. As far as I know Dash is taking a back seat on that for the time being at least and it's probably the best move, the masternode network can open up all kinds of possibilities other chains wouldn't be able to handle and it will take a while for the dust to settle before any of the proposed standards show any clear signs of adoption.
There was a question in there on masternodes being able to de-anonymise PrivateSend transactions and i think Amanda said if someone owned more than half of the MNs they could do it? As far as I know the mixing process isn't susceptible to any of the 50% type conditions and even owning 99.9% of the MNs would be no guarantee of de-anonymisation, if it went through a single unmonitorable MN the trail would be broken.Another thing mentioned was sidechains on Etherium. Tbh I've never paid much attention to exact details of how Etherium works but the whole idea of sidechains and other kinds of offshoots from a main chain are fairly simple and an easy place to start is merged mining. If someone's mining Bitcoin they can use their hashpower to secure other sha256 chains, in a sense it's hashes as a service except the miner has to subscribe to the chain rather than the chain to the miner but that stumbling block can be overcome by the main chain providing a security mechanism for other chains. There are other ways of doing it, sign something with the last winning block hash and it's an equally secure guarantee that whatever was signed existed at that time but mining is a simple way of seeing how one chain can secure another.
Not much point doing that if the other chain offers no benefit to the main one but if they're mutually beneficial it can be a very powerful option, for example the main chain doing extremely secure settlements while the supported chain handles high volumes of fast transactions, the tokens on the secondary chain being created from locked tokens on the primary with the unlocking transaction doing final settlements of balances.
Neat huh? That was suggested way back in 2012 on bitcointalk, it might have been suggested earlier but there was a discussion on it back then that hammered out many of the finer details, lots of folks involved, all kinds of ideas banged around and then just last week I read a 2015 Blockstream paper on sidechains... It was a summary of that discussion, all the finer details with the dead-ends pruned out and it was all Blockstreams own work! Not direct plagiarism, it was implied rather than directly accredited but at least one of the Blockstream devs has laid claim to ideas first proposed publicly by other parties, maybe just like minds thinking alike but now Blockstream has started applying for patents...
Anyway, rant over. There are all kinds of possibilities for sidechains, too many to list and the key area has mostly shifted to blockchain interoperability standards. It will likely result in a standards battle for a while, ERC20 is one for Etherium and there seem to be several ISO numbers aimed at the same area. As far as I know Dash is taking a back seat on that for the time being at least and it's probably the best move, the masternode network can open up all kinds of possibilities other chains wouldn't be able to handle and it will take a while for the dust to settle before any of the proposed standards show any clear signs of adoption.