To bitcreditscc, thanks for the thumbs-up and keep us
informed about the project. The delegate system is very unique
with special strengths, so I'm excited to learn how it will
integrate with your framework.

To all: I have now started working on the next update (I decided to
turn down some paid work to reserve time for this). I estimate
we will have new version by August. The new main features
will be

- stronger anonymity in the form of stealth addresses
- a new user category/role : besides delegates, there will be also vendors
- splitting of delegate transactions to make tracing payments more harder.

Plus a whole lot of other stuff. Stay tuned and stay free.

Yarkol, those are exciting major features to be added. I guess that would be mouth watering for anon coin users and fans. Those added features could make the anon crowds finally pay attention to MIL.

This is a surprise. For a moment there, after delivering a working anon coin, I thought stabilizing and fixing some issues will be the only goal for MIL. It looks like you have many more features in store for MIL.

If ever there will be few remarks/posts/comments here regarding the development of MIL, I hope you'll continue the weekly updates. In that way new investors can see what's happening to this coin and what the plans are for future updates.

What has been described above when completed will be extremely interesting. As we have said before "New Ground for Crypto".  What I find most interesting is "multiple delegates" and "Tor Marketplace". Both features will make MIL standout.

I cannot wait to test the marketplace. The possibilities are endless.


Yes Joe and YarkoL I am excited.

So far it seems you made a good investment JoeCoinman. I remember reading when you bought your MIL. Quite adventurous. Exciting things are highly probable for MIL now. After a year of hard work, Yarkol is still at it and this time with  more features and improvements.

Can't wait for 3rd and 4th quarter. I hope Santa comes early. I'm dreaming of this coin doing a CLAM move but much much bigger.

M I L L E N N I U M C O I N
Saturday Night
 Bulletin #2




Now that we have a skeletal web publishing and browsing
system, the integration of stealth transactions has begun.
Stealth addresses, as I'm sure many of you know is a very
elegant cryptosystem, where recipient of coins creates a stealth
public key, and the sender derives "ordinary" one time MIL
address from that. So with this no one can connect the derived
address to you.

Actually, this is pretty much the same what delegates already do, so why
stealth addresses? Is that an overkill? Or - just a pretty but
irrelevant, cosmetic feature to pull in some investor money, right?

Well, no. If it were simply a feature to paint over the wallet, I could
do this much quicker by just pulling the code from Github and compiling and hey
presto, we have a pretty nifty darknet market application. But I intend
to make every layer of the MIL3 play synergistically together to bring
about something novel.

I'm going to talk about this much more in the coming weeks, but here's
a first bird's eye view of the entire concept. So far, the absolute killer
app that has been based on cryptocurrency - the one that has the best
chance to break out from the money-game ghetto of Bitcointalk forum
and actually get some real users has been the darknet market (DNM).
Many DNMs model themselves after the centralized model of Silk Road,
which has caused problems, as the users can never tell if the owner of
the market is going to vanish with all the BTC. As this has happened a
number of times, there has been a growing demand for decentralized
marketplaces.

Recently we have seen some decentralized marketplaces emerge, such
as Open Bazaar. These have teams of very gifted devs and often substantial
funding too, and it is the latter aspect that kind of sabotages their chances of
success. The reason being, Investors don't want to be seen funding a new
Silk Road, even though that is clearly more in demand than the "decentralized EBay"
idea that they are trying promote in order to be "respectable".

But our MIL is small and under the radar, and therefore well equipped to employ
the window of opportunity. Usability has been very high on the list of design goals from the
start, and if done well, it will attract users.

However, there is of course an ethical problem here, and one that I've given much
thought to. Do I want to make an application that allows people to trade anything,
however reprehensible to myself? And I think I have made a small advance towards
a solution by introducing a new way to do anon transactions that I call the "Glass Onion",
something that combines partial transparency with strong anonymity. That is, no one
can see who is trading with whom, but the delegates will see what is being traded and
they can refuse transferring the funds if they do not appreciate the trade (or the vendor or
the merchandise). As a result, if the majority of users do not like the vendor, he has
much harder time establishing business on the network compared to someone whose
list of merchandise is more non-controversial.

All this is to be implemented in a trustless and decentralized manner and this
is no easy task. But it is just this challenge what motivates and inspires me. Not the money,
although of course I'd like my tiny stash of MIL to appreciate in value. So this is the reason why I don't just slap
stealth addresses into the existing codebase and be done with it. They will function as building
pieces in the Glass Onion Market that I've described here and this takes a little more.

So that's all from me now. This missive became a little lengthier than usual, but I thought
it would be nice to get the cat - or sizable portion of the feline at least - out of the bag at this stage
already.

See you soon,

Yarko


 

Does this imply that there will be a waiting period before a transaction can be completed because a delegate has to approve it first?

It's understandable that no one wants his program to be used on something that is reprehensible to him. However, there are some tools that were designed for good but that can be used for evil if a user wanted to. Our common physical money can be used to buy anything that can be helpful to others (food, housing, etc.) or it can be used to buy things that can kill (guns, chemicals, etc.) or even destroy the world (nuclear weapons). A knife can be useful for preparing food but it can also use to kill. The same with power tools. These facts don't prevent us from using money, buying knives or using power tools or carpentry tools.

The idea of the "glass onion" concept is laudable but couldn't  the dark market vendor easily bypass the delegates refusing his transactions by simply setting up his own delegates?

I think the anonymity feature of any digital coin will always cause it to be used in ways that are not acceptable to its programmers.

No, the transfer by delegate is automatic and there
will not be a manual approval. Instead, a person running an advertised
balance may choose to inspect what is being offered in the market
and put vendors to an ignore list. (similar to the "ban score" that is in
the standard peers list)


The transaction is split among at least three delegates, some of which
are picked by buyer, and some by vendor. This is not a fool-proof system
but I try to make it very hard to bypass the default delegate selection process
without altering the code. And if they do alter the code, they lose the security
benefit of random delegate selection, as using the same set of delegates over
and over will potentially risk an exposure.


Well it actually matters little what I personally find acceptable. The
idea is to allow the user community to arrive into some kind of
consensus over how the market is to segmented into tiers of
"acceptability"

And in the coming release, vendors can set their fees individually,
so vendors with controversial merchandise may entice delegate by offering
higher fees. So market forces come into play here too.

These are very good points and I'm glad you took the time to
bring them up.

This is one of the places where MIL and BCR differ, I have decided to tie Escrow to ownership of a Banknode and a given minimum balance.  This will encourage serious users and service providers to be economically active on the chain, i am also working on a floating fee rate , much like tx fees. All this is to encourage growth of the ecosystem , we have even lowered the entry level.

I hope i can figure out inter-blockchain transfers soon , it would be great if users could easily swap between MIL and BCR to settle finances using either or a combination of both. The overall security would be amazing.