Hi all,
First of all, the project is not abandoned. But we clearly got another way of working that the other coins. But I will try to update you as good as I can now. Also I need to catch up with all the posts so I probably need to post twice and maybe more.
First of all, a bit of the Zerocoin part:
As earlier stated Gnosis has a dayjob that pushes him much, and that is delaying the project. (But he is thinking of quiting the dayjob)
So he's code is delayed. Meanwhile, we're going to setup a "bruteforce" attack on some RSA UFOs, where whoever can contribute cpu power for attacking the UFOs. Simple saying we're trying to find the factors of the UFOs. This is an important and time consuming task. Simple saying we're testing our own security by attacking it. Gnosis also got some numbers he need to distribute to all the testing machines I and some other ppl have setup, this is just a GMP process running made by an python script. This is something we have already done, and will continue with. I can be better in announcing such.
This is also a attempt to get around the original size of an RSA UFO (typ. 20k+ bit) to multiple small UFOs, which will ultimate end with less CPU costs for verifying the ZC processing. This is something all clients need to do, even the clients that don't mine, so that's why much focus also goes to time & power consumption.
From what Gnosis told in the public anoncoin IRC channels a few days ago, he's thinking the deadline (with current life situation, dayjob) it would be one and a half month at max away from a ready implementation. While he works on the backend stuff, I've made it clear that I will make the GUI for speeding up the progress, and I will start as soon as we got any good design plans on the GUI part. (What needs to be shown of information, buttons, texts, what options, etc)
When we're at it, and we're ready to fork we should also have found a new type of algo. to run. Which, is not decided yet, so suggestions are welcome. Also the gravity well will be upgraded, but not necessarily any known patch yet.
Then, why haven't I been online on this forum? (Just saying, both I and Gnosis has replied people on IRC.) Back some weeks I realized I had really too much to do vs. time. Since I've got both a dayjob, this project, got a ISP corp. of my own (that's not the dayjob), friends and replying on questions from users. Simple saying, all the leftover time I had to not do my dayjob + critical task where gone. So I decided to logoff for a while so I could do some productive. Services for coins is often the lack that make a coin fall, and I wanted to change that for at least ANC and maybe some others.
This has resulted in me having some services to announce not far in the future. Those will accept coins as well as regular fiat payments. I can give you hints now that it's at least three services, two for regular users, and one for more advanced (not all beeing released at once). The two services meant for all people would help anonymize them more, and, for not saying too much "in some situations, bypassing some annoying you couldn't do before". I've also used a lot of time on making all this with "No point of single failure", meaning that even if a server goes down, the services should still be up and not noticeable for the user. I've setup servers both in Asia, The US and Europe for this. (Where all information would be stored _outside_ of the US because of their ... nice surveillance program). All traffic between the places is encrypted in different layers.
On the other hand, even I shoundn't use time on such, since I lack time already, I've partly disassembled DRK's hidden part of the code, looking for strange behavior or other noticeable things. And got some psudo code from some of it I'm thinking of releasing for research (About ~1800 lines), not at least some mindmaps which shows the links between the assembly segments together etc. There is a lot of code so I need to spend more time on it before I can say anything. Also, as usual, the news about the total surveillance keeps bugging me so I've unwillingly wondered if there is anything to do to stop them, but then I realized that they would probably never stop, and we would probably never stop them, and encryption is never "unbreakable", it's just about time. Then I realized misleading and "social obfuscation" is the way to go. I can't say much about it yet, because it's a shitload of money in personal information collection and this is something that would just make all that data ... invalid. (My mind don't stop yelling about privacy)
