Welcome to the Decentralized Internet Contest!RY: Hello! I’m Reuben Yap and I’m from Malaysia. More specifically, I’m from a small city called Kuching on the island of Borneo where we are famous for our rainforests, our orangutans, and good food. I’m a huge geek with a love of anime, martial arts, and chess. I am also the head of a small Aikido school here.
Some might ask then why did I not get involved more with Monero, the OG privacy coin? It was more of an initial bad experience that I had when I announced I was going to be accepting Darkcoin payments for my VPN service and I received a bunch of messages from Monero supporters that said if I accepted Darkcoin, I was a scam and they would effectively cancel me.
It was a bit of a baptism of fire as being underfunded, we also had to deal with progressing the project forward and also being subject to hacks and attacks. As a result, I acquired a lot of experience and knowledge on the job about the subtleties of privacy protocols and their inner workings.
We then further built on the Zerocoin idea with developments of Sigma, Lelantus, and most recently Lelantus Spark. These solved many issues on Zerocoin from removing trusted setup, improving scalability, hiding amounts, and having full flexible stealth address support. These developments have paved a way for a new family of privacy protocols that were inspired by our work such as Triptych, Seraphis, and Lelantus-MW.
RY: Pure proof of work chains are susceptible to 51% attacks unless they are the dominant coin in that particular hardware class. For example, GPUs for Ethereum and CPUs for Monero or Bitcoin for SHA256 ASICs. Like its namesake, these masternodes organize themselves into groups/quorums of 400 nodes. At any one time, there are 4 of these quorums active. These quorums also are reformed every 12 hours introducing randomness which makes it difficult to pinpoint exactly which masternodes would be in a quorum. When a block is found on the network through the mining process, one of these 4 quorums will be deterministically picked to vote on the block.