Welcome to the November 2018 edition of the Spectrecoin newsletter.  We are a bit late out this month as I was just waiting to finalise the details of a new collaboration, read more below.  I would also like to remind everyone that Spectrecoin is 2 years old on Tuesday 20th November 2018 (see the end of the newsletter).  The genesis block was mined on 20/11/2016 and it’s been quite a ride from day one with both good and bad and up and down for both Spectrecoin and everyone involved.  We have now arrived at a good and stable core team with really high quality, hard working developers in @Tek and @Helix so take a moment to consider what they have done over the last few months.  Spectrecoin is on the cusp of penetrating the crypto mainstream and with further plans for the future that will be revealed, we aim for the next two years to be marked by steady high quality development and value for the project and investors.  We are very serious about our privacy tech as you will discover over the next few months. 

Source Code Review

We are very excited to announce that we have agreed a collaboration with a renowned cryptographer to work with us as an advisor over the next few months.  Dr. Nicolas Courtois, a senior lecturer in computer science and a cryptographer at University College London and his PhD student Killian Davitt MSc will complete a privacy, security and source code review for Spectrecoin with a focus on the implementation of the Ring Signatures used in the Spectrecoin anonymous transactions.  Dr. Courtois is an expert in ring signatures and stealth address technology and has authored 100+ academic publications in cryptography, being cited more than 6000 times according to Google Scholar.  They both have extensive experience with analysing cryptocurrency code and cryptography and will provide invaluable insight and will no doubt contribute to the security of the Spectrecoin code and the privacy of the anonymous transactions. 

The work will consists of three stages with a preliminary private report produced by 31/12/2018 that will cover the above mentioned aspects of the source code and give us an opportunity to decide on strategies for improving the code.  Our developers will work with the findings of the review and strengthen the code.  A final private report will be produced by 20th January 2019 and the first version of a public peer reviewed report will be published by 20th February 2019. 

This will give Spectrecoin a competitive edge in the privacy crypto space and will ensure that the technology we are working on has been implemented correctly and it will give our developers a unique opportunity to improve our code base with anonymity in mind.  Spectrecoin remains tech focused and through this, and future collaborations we will continue to develop exceptional privacy for our users. 

This was part of the reason why @Tek came to London last month and I could not disclose this until now for obvious reasons.  Me and @Tek had a meeting with Dr. Courtois and KIllian Davitt at UCL to discuss this collaboration and agree on the scope of the code review. 

We will follow up on this in future newsletters. 

CoinPulse

We are very happy to announce that Spectrecoin has been added to another exchange.  This is the first new listing for a long time and I know that many users are anxious about the lack of exchanges and feel that we should expand our reach.  Until we can hit the bigger exchanges we have been very selective with trying to get added to smaller exchanges.  I don’t believe any listing on any random exchange just for the sake of it is of value to Spectrecoin.  CoinPulse on the other hand is a bit different than many exchanges in that they do not allow bot trading.  They also have really solid tech and have the potential to be a future exchange of importance.  The trade volume is low at the moment but we aim to grow together.  This listing has come about by the continuous work of @Beachguy and numerous others in the community. 

I would urge you all to explore this potentially up and coming exchange.  We have good communication with the exchange devs as well so if there are any problems we can assist in dealing with this if needed. 

We have three markets:

https://www.coinpulse.io/exchange/XSPEC_BTC

https://www.coinpulse.io/exchange/XSPEC_ETH

https://www.coinpulse.io/exchange/XSPEC_CPEX

Continuous Integration

@Helix has just about completed the whole process of automating the Spectrecoin builds for all platforms which has been a massive task.  We are now finally in a position where we can quickly release new builds when we update the code, be it for a bug fix or a new release and ensure high quality builds.  Have a look at the ‘pipeline‘ above and see the processes gets triggered when we make commits to the code.  If you are technically minded please have a look at the Spectrecoin continuous integration website:

https://ci.spectreproject.io/

The latest pre-releases will now always be available but are marked ‘pre-release‘ and is the ‘Current state of development!’  Use the link below:

https://github.com/spectrecoin/spectre/releases/tag/latest

The latest release at the time of writing is Spectrecoin v2.1:

https://github.com/spectrecoin/spectre/releases/tag/2.1.0

We are always happy if you want to run the pre-release and feed back to us any issues you might have. 

Spectrecoin v2.2

@Tek has been working hard to update and improve the Spectrecoin codebase and we are just about to release Spectrecoin v2.2 and this release comes with some important changes that will improve privacy.  v2.2 can also been seen as a preparation for the next ‘hard fork‘ that will incorporate consensus changes that will improve privacy and may also contain changes that stem from the work done the by the two UCL scientists.  We have no set date yet for this ‘hard fork‘. 

Minimum ring size of 10 (enforced)

It is important for the future and for transactional privacy that the ring size for ALL anonymous SPECTRE transactions is being enforced at a minimum of 10.  With smaller ring sizes there is an increased risk that the sender could be identified and the network now has sufficient anonymous outputs to support this change.  Since we discontinued the large SPECTRE denominations there is no longer any risk that the SPECTRE in your ‘private‘ balance will get stuck due to a lack of inputs needed for transactions.  You can therefore safely transfer balances back and forth between ‘public’ and ‘private’. 

If you are new to Spectrecoin or you need to remind yourself, please refer back to a previous edition of the newsletter for more information on the SPECTRE anonymous transactions:

Transaction Restrictions

The new version will allow SPECTRE <> XSPEC transfers only within your own account (i.e. destination address must be owned).  There is now also a restriction on sending XSPEC to a stealth address as this undermines privacy and will not protect the sender and so may provide a false sense of security when stealth addresses are used for XSPEC public transactions.  You can only use stealth addresses to send SPECTRE to SPECTRE using the anonymous transaction system.  Furthermore, conversion from XSPEC <> SPECTRE is only allowed within your account. 

There will be updates around the way the wallet scans and accounts for ‘private‘ balances and making these changes improves the privacy of the system.  This, together with some other changes @Tek is working on will make it possible to integrate SPECTRE trading in an exchange in the not so distant future.  There are also further bug fixes and UI improvements. 

Should be release ready very soon…

Governance

We are working behind the scenes to establish a not-for-profit organisation that will secure the future of Spectrecoin development and funding and we are exploring options both in the UK and in Switzerland.  We are doing this work with the guidance of lawyers and accountants and the reason this is taking some time is the complicated tax situation around such a company.  We need to ensure that this entity is as tax efficient as it can be so that the maximum amount of funds are used for development.  We are getting closer to a resolution and further updates will come. 

We are also making a transition to more professional and audit-able accounting for Spectrecoin and the old spreadsheet will be replaced by a monthly statement that will be published with the newsletter until the accounting will be done within a legal entity. 

Spectrecoin two year anniversary! 

To celebrate the 2 year anniversary we will have a small giveaway in the Discord server on 20/11/2018 so please stay with us for further details over the next few days and chances to win some Spectrecoin. 

Until the next time….spread the word about Spectrecoin far and wide…

Regards

‘Mandica‘