SuperNET Newsletter #4

Welcome to the SuperNET newsletter!

The past week has seen some exciting developments on the tech front, including Telepathy: James’ system for communicating so securely that even the sender doesn’t need to know who the recipient is! Since it has been a relatively quiet week in terms of new companies joining SuperNET, we want to take the opportunity to explain a bit more about the components and initiatives that make up SuperNET, knowing that many investors are still uncertain about various aspects of these. But first… a few announcements.

Topics

Chancecoin
SuperTraders
VRC funding request approved
NxtInside
SuperNET Client GUI
BTCD and SuperNET
BITS ATM
Code review and Telepathy
API calls and testing
SuperNET related links

Chancecoin

Chancecoin betting is planned to be integrated into the SuperNET GUI.

[Funds Request]

James:

whale has negotiated 25,000 CHA for 11.25 BTC, there are only 516,530 CHA total from its burn period.
chancecoin is a microcap, but with interesting tech and we plan to integrate CHA betting into the SuperNET GUI

Chancecoin is built around feedless, trustless betting, using New York Lottery Quick Draw numbers to resolve bets. Quick Draw numbers are drawn every four minutes, every day of the week. The drawing selects 20 numbers randomly from a pool of numbers 1 through 80, without replacement. A bet seen in the blockchain is resolved based on the first set of Lottery Quick Draw numbers that are published strictly after the block is mined, so it is not possible to game the system by waiting for favorable lottery numbers. Chancecoin is a coin and a casino. The casino features classic dice betting and poker.

Adding CHA to uMGW (Multigateway) is being looked into.

SuperTraders

[SuperTrader funds transfer notice]

Half of the SuperTrader funds will be transferred from BTer to Bittrex. Prices have recently dropped significantly across most of the altcoin market and this is impacting the stability of the core coins for SuperNET.

James:

The plan is to stabilize the prices with market actions and to provide inventory during supply demand imbalances. Over time, the gap between the buying and selling will also provide some gains.
(…)

In a bear market where drops of 30%+ for a lot of other crypto (including BTC itself for a time!) SuperNET is trading within 5% of the ICO price. Granted it is down from the post ICO peak but no more than all the other cryptos

I work to increase the value.
I rely on the market to eventually reflect the value
So there is no active pump campaign as that is counter to my philosophy.

When the market realizes SuperNET tech is going to work and revenues will start flowing, then the price will catch up to the value.

VRC funding request approved

The funding request announced in the last newsletter is approved.

VRC has committed to making a cloud storage GUI for SuperNET that allows users, companies and other coins to rent out HDD space to the cloud. James wants to provide a 50/25/25 revenue share from the cloud storage split between the user/VRC/SuperNET, so SuperNET users can monetise their unused HDD, VRC will create a revenue stream for their holders and SuperNET will gain a new revenue stream and increase its overall userbase.

5389.16 SuperNET assets from working capital has been swapped for 538,916 VRC, and 100 BTC is released for open market purchases to get close to the target level of 10% stake in VRC.

NxtInside

‘NxtInside’ is a Nxt initiative that aims to make the platform’s 2.0 capabilities available to other cryptocurrencies. The name was originally suggested by jl777 to reflect the development and integration of Nxt core components into BitcoinDark (BTCD), as a first example, and hopefully other coins as time goes on. SuperNET – which uses many of Nxt’s key functions, such as the Asset Exchange and services built on top of Nxt, will be the prime case for NxtInside. The approach is similar to the ‘Intel Inside’ campaign, in which other companies (including Apple) use Intel chips to power their devices, thereby extending Intel’s brand reach far beyond their own hardware.

Casual end users will get lots of 2.0 crypto features but might not even notice that it is powered by NXT. Their public coin address will be linked to a NXT address “under the hood”, so they can login just by using a link in their coin’s client. This is fully in the spirit of what Nxt is designed to be.

VanBreuk writes, ‘SuperNET is most likely the biggest initiative and the best example of development using Nxt we have currently. Other services, websites and applications like SecureAE, Nxtty or Lith, to name a few, are also examples for NxtInside branding.’

IMPORTANT NOTICE: There is no NxtInside asset offered on the Asset Exchange. Any assets named ‘NxtInside’ or similar that claim to fund or benefit from this initiative are false.

SuperNET Client GUI

BTCD and SuperNET are both members of the NxtInside programme (read more on how BTCD and SuperNET are linked below). longzai1988 is currently working on the SuperNET GUI, which will be based on the NXT GUI. QT clients will have an ‘Enter SuperNET’ button, which will open SuperNET in a browser and auto-login for the user. The GUI can be customized for each coin.

longzai is currently working on integrating Coinomat features into the SuperNET client. These 4 currencies are working correctly by the time of writing: NXT, BTC, LTC, PPC. Here is a sample screenshot:

BTCD and SuperNET

Questions have been raised about the exact link between BTCD and SuperNET. The confusion is understandable given the large overlap of technology and key people working on each. SuperNET could not work without the infrastructure offered by BTCD, in the same way it could not operate without Nxt’s 2.0 functionality. Analogies are often more powerful than explanations:

Imagine a new country, spread out in front of you. Scattered around the landscape is everything you might want or need. Stores, selling anything you could ever hope to buy. Exchanges, financial services and trading posts. Casinos and other entertainment centres. News and information outlets. These are like the services offered by SuperNET. Incredibly, although the cryptocurrency world offers so many remarkable businesses, no one has thought to link them before. They are just a set of isolated organisations, operating in their own niches, or competing with each other.

BTCD is like the highway that connects everything. The infrastructure it provides will enable communication between you and all of the different services, through what it shaping up to be one of the most secure comms links ever developed. It’s like a network of roads, tunnels and bridges that enables you to go anywhere and do anything – and do so in complete privacy.

To complete the analogy, Nxt is the sophisticated engine that gets you around this network of roads and to the services you can find there. It’s a 2.0 car that’s designed to do far more than drive from A to B. NXT doesn’t just allow you to transact; it houses the Asset Exchange and many of the other services that will allow you to interact meaningfully with others on your way around in SuperNET – the whole Super Network of integrated coins and innovative services.

So how might it look in practice?

In the following example (thanks to Este Nuno and mackowski for this concept: https://forum.thesupernet.org/index.php?topic=40.msg133#msg133) you’ll need the BTCD wallet that longzai is working on to access SuperNET. The good news is: That’s it. Everything is held inside it. That’s the whole point of SuperNET – UNITY.

You’ll click a tab in the BTCD client – it will open SuperNET. From there, you can send cash anonymously using Teleport (James’ BTCD anonymity protocol), or if you’re particularly concerned about privacy, you can pass it through a Boolberry exchange first, layering Teleport with BBR’s ring signature technology. Perhaps you’ll play neoDice for a while – it’s built into the client. You might check your portfolio of assets, which include SuperNET itself and see that you’ve been paid dividends, which include both NXT and some shares in a new company that has recently joined SuperNET.

Maybe you want to exchange some NXT for BTC? You can do that instantly through the peer-to-peer exchange, InstantDEX. Or maybe you need some fiat to spend, so you cash some coins out to your SuperNET card – the anon card offered by Coinomat – in case you don’t have access to a BITS ATM, where you can just withdraw your coins as physical cash.

You browse FreeMarket for a while to see whether anything interesting is for sale. Lastly, you send an encrypted message to a friend about a joint project you’re working on. All of this happens completely securely, because privacy is built into every transaction that takes place with BTCD. Or any other coin in SuperNET.

BITS ATM

More information about the partnership with Bitstar coin (BITS) has been requested. Although BITS are not a core SuperNET coin in the way that Nxt, BTCD and BBR are, they are a critical supporting member. The idea is to add SuperNET to the BITS wallet, and to the ATM they are sponsoring.

This would allow users to access SuperNET coins from BITS ATM – effectively ‘teleporting’ cryptocurrency into fiat. Ether, who also created the SuperNET logo, is designing the main splash screens and brand identity for the ATMs. The SuperNET logo will be displayed in the ATM’s user interface. Ether’s growing number of SuperNET designs can be found and downloaded here: https://forum.thesupernet.org/index.php?topic=208.msg1415#msg1415. He is offering his time and expertise for free, so please do tip him if you like his work!

Code review and Telepathy

James was going to submit core code to Kristov Atlas for a review (Atlas is a computer science security consultant who has worked on a number of cryptocurrency projects). However, this is delayed due to the new innovation (‘Telepathy’) that James is adding to SuperNET. ‘I just made a big breakthrough in anon level. No sense in having something reviewed that has already been improved!

James continues:

The problem I solved is the one of how to communicate to someone without ANYBODY knowing what their IP address is. I believe I have a deterministic and provable routing that isn’t broadcasting that achieves this. It was one of those nice to solve if I can figure it out, but not absolutely needed things, as there is already a lot of anon in the fixed sized, onion encrypted variable delay packets, but now being able to transact with someone just via a 64bit address that has nothing to do with the ipaddress. This I believe is quite a leap in anon level.

Privacy is fundamental to BTCD and SuperNET. The whole ecosystem is built on a platform that allows the highest level of privacy – far, far beyond anything any other coin offers, and possibly any other system in the world.

Telepathy is a very recent development James made when he was looking into ways of routing messages through a network. In a peer-to-peer network, such as SuperNET or BitTorrent, there is no central authority – this would make it vulnerable to attack (for example, Napster’s centralised look-up was its downfall). Obviously, such a vulnerability would be unacceptable for SuperNET. More recent networks use DHT, distributed hash tables, to achieve true decentralisation, along with scalability and resilience (tolerance to nodes joining and leaving the network).

The properties of the particular DHT James was looking into, called Kademlia, offer a very interesting benefit: it is possible to send a message to an address that belongs to no one, but because of the way the network is structured, you can still guarantee it will reach the intended recipient. The amazing thing is that even the sender does not need to know the recipient’s IP address for this to be possible. And clearly, this poses serious problems for any attacker!

These ideas are being written up into a white paper which will be submitted for peer review. For now, an analogy is again one of the most effective ways to communicate the basic concept:

Alice wants to send a message to Bob but does not want anyone else to know that he is the intended recipient. Instead of sending it to his house, she writes it on the side of a van and instructs the driver to drive to a random address that is in line-of-sight of Bob’s house – and 20 other houses. It doesn’t matter whether anyone owns the property at the destination, or even whether there is a property there. All that matters is that Alice knows Bob will see the van as it passes.

In reality, the process is far more robust than this. The packets will be encrypted so that only the intended recipient will be able to read them. The ‘addresses’ used to deliver a packet cannot be linked to any IP address; the packet is introduced at a random location rather than from Alice’s ‘house’. The important point is that, even in the highly unlikely event of an attacker having enough information to determine the destination of a packet, it will be impossible to correlate it to the user’s IP address – because the apparent destination has no IP address! The real recipient is one of twenty or so others who pass the packet along the chain.

Cryptocurrency is still a small slice of the economy and has gained limited real-world traction so far, but perhaps we should not be surprised at the innovation that is happening here: the crypto world contains a relative handful of people, but they are self-selected coding, security and economic specialists. Where these disciplines overlap, great things happen.

API calls and testing

SuperNET’s functionality will be available via a series of API calls: https://forum.thesupernet.org/index.php?topic=196.msg1349#msg1349. Ultimately these will be accessed through the GUI. For now, we need more people to test them using the SuperNET-enabled BitcoinDark client. This can be installed on a home computer or VPS. The more network nodes the better: Reliable testing requires at least 50 and ideally 100. The nodes needed to bootstrap the network will be funded by the staking income from the BTCD paid during the ICO.

If you are able to, please install the client, start testing the API and add your thoughts and comments to the documentation: https://forum.thesupernet.org/index.php?topic=154.msg1387#msg1387. Remember: James has offered a 1,000 BTCD bounty if you can find a way to deanonymise telepods. Good luck!

There will no doubt be more questions about the components of SuperNET and the roles they play. Please do ask them and we will do our best to answer. We would also encourage you to join the SuperNET forum for more information and updates.