Today we are very happy to invite the core members of the HUSH team. The following dialogue is based on the content of AMA in CITEX WeChat community.
Guest:
Duke- HUSH core developer, core contributors of BTC & ZEC, and core member of the KMD team
Denio- HUSH core developer
1. Duke can you introduce yourself?
I am Duke Leto and I have been involved in Free Software + Open Source since about 1997. I have contributed to a lot of projects over the years and some I am proud to mention are Firefox, Git, Perl and Bitcoin. I have a Bachelors and Masters degree in Mathematics. At a young age I taught myself coding, starting with Pascal, Hypercard, BASIC and then C/C++, Perl and Assembly.
Perl is still my favorite language of all time and I am honored to say I have fixed a bug in the Perl 5 debugger itself, and also drank some beers with Larry Wall, creator of Perl. My early interest in Assembly led to my first coding publication in the Assembly Programmers Journal #9:
https://mattst88.com/programming/AssemblyProgrammersJournal/issue/9
According to ResearchGate https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Jonathan_Leto my 8 academic papers have over 1300 citations. Most of these are in mathematical physics but I was also involved in the publication of the Tomato genome in Nature, when I worked as a bioinformaticist at https://solgenomics.net which is located at Cornell University.
For about seven years I took part in Google Summer of Code and Google Code-In where I mentored some of the smartest students around the world in how to contribute to Free + Open source projects. I greatly enjoy mentoring motivated students who want to learn.
2. HUSH, ZEC and KMD are in the same series, is there something special in HUSH? Please introduce HUSH.
Hush is a 100% PoW Zcash Protocol coin that is focused on communications instead of purely financial use-cases.
It was one of the first Zcash Protocol coins in 2016, with KMD, ZEC and ZCL. We are now on our 2nd mainnet and 2nd genesis block, Hush has never been a chainfork of another coin. We like to do things ourselves.
Hush has the same total supply as Bitcoin (21M) and the same halving/emission schedule. Satoshi was wise in creating it how they did, and projects which deviate from that design usually do so for financial and not technical reasons. Interest in Hush exploded when I published the “Hushlist Protocol” whitepaper in late 2017 with radix42:
https://github.com/leto/hushlist/blob/master/whitepaper/protocol.pdf
This was during the rise to the ATH of BTC and this paper contributed to Hush reaching almost $20 for a short time, or about 160,000sat. Today, we are close to realizing many of the use cases in that paper. When it was first published, Zcash internals were so slow that the paper was theoretical. Recent massive performance improvements now make it all practical, even via a mobile phone. Originally HUSH was a ZEC source code fork, but the original Sprout Zcash addresses had a serious vulnerability which they kept from the community for about 1 year until they could fully fix it on their network. This was an “inflation bug” that would allow hackers to print infinite shielded funds from nothing, quite a serious bug.
In response to this bug and because of my longstanding work with jl777 and as a student of his, I decided to switch HUSH to be based on KMD. This was because of all the ways to deal with the Sprout vulnerability, jl777’s solution was best. So the new HUSH mainnet was launched as a KMD fork, which works quite well, since I work closely with jl777 to report bugs and security issues in ZEC upstream and KMD itself.
As for KMD contributions, I was first to make the KMD test suite work and have worked with jl777 directly to port his delayed-Proof-of-Work idea to many other coins. I have also been consulting with the lead dev of BLUR, Biz, for them to be the very first Monero-based coin to use DPoW, which is very exciting.
3. Duke has made important contributions to BTC, ZEC and KMD. Can you tell us when did you start HUSH and why?
I didn’t start the original Hush mainnet, which was started by Joseph Stuhlman in November 2016. Originally it was a Zcash 1.0.8 codebase fork, with it’s own genesis block. Hush is not a chain fork of any other coin.
I did launch the most recent Hush mainnet in April of 2019, where we changed our codebase to KMD instead of ZEC and mined a new genesis block.
The goal of Hush is to allow people to Speak And Transact Freely. Hush is a peer-to-peer global community of cypherpunks and privacy advocates, and our focus is private communications versus pure financial. I believe that in our current world and the near future, privacy will be one of the most rare and valuable things one can own. I work on Hush because I truly believe it is bleeding edge privacy technology that can help anyone in the world have a small bit of privacy in our surveillance world.
4. Why you choose to develop HUSH on basis of ZEC, not Ethereum, Dash or Monero?
Zcash Protocol is a core part of Hush, the support of shielded addresses, so ETH and DASH would not be options at all.
Monero lacks an encrypted arbitrary data storage mechanism in every transaction, and Hush extensively uses that memo field. Additionally, Zcash codebase is forked from Bitcoin 0.11.2 and is compatible with large amounts of existing software.
Monero forks, such as LOKI, which add in messaging, do not store it on-chain and also must add in their own encryption layer, since txExtra is transparent data. This means they don’t have censorship-resistance and you must rely on applications to encrypt/decrypt data correctly and manage that sensitive data, versus doing it at the protocol layer. The attack surface is much larger when you must add encrypted messages to your protocol later on.
5. What is the uniqueness of Hush chat function, how do you plan to push for its real world applications?
Hush chat has many interesting properties, such as censorship-resistance and proving something happened or was known at a certain time, like a digital notary. Hush chat is unique because it’s not run by a for-profit company that ismining all your metadata to sell to the highest bidder. It’s a decentralized network like Tor or I2P or Bittorrent. It will support sending files up to 200KB in size to contacts or backing them up to the Hush network for your own use. Pushing real world applications will happen via our Android app at first and then later an iOS app.
We are identifying communities and market segments that value privacy highly and will target those audiences as potential HushChat users.
We also would like to work with non-profits that would be interested in this technology, and have funds to donate to worthy causes.
6. How many coins are supported in Silentdragon wallet? In the future, can we envision coin swap inside the wallet?
SD only supports HUSH. No coin swaps inside the wallet are planned currently. Hush is currently supported by AtomicDEX that can do cross-chain swaps with many coins.
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.komodoplatform.atomicdex&hl=en
7. What are the next steps for HUSH development?
Launching various stages of features for HushChat, going full z2z (like Pirate) and halving our block time to 75 seconds.
We also are working on RaspberryPi-like device, a DragonHead, which can act as a Hush full node:
https://twitter.com/dukeleto/status/1191737316320133120
Most current work is being done on the internals of HushChat, making the GUI nice and friendly to users. We now have our wallets translated into about 3 dozen languages and more translations are in progress.
8. Can you introduce your team members?
Hush is a decentralized network of cypherpunks, where many members come and go and use various anon handles. Here is a group of core people that are always active on Discord and working on various things:
jl777 Advisor —
Duke Leto Dev — US
Denio Dev — DE
Berg Community/exchanges — US
Firemartz Dev — CA
Gilardh Dev/translations — FR
Heguli97 User support —
Thank you!
CITEX Team
WWW.CITEX.IO
