xx network — Telegram QUIZ and AMA — March 4
On Wednesday February 19, we had the pleasure to welcome to our Telegram chat:
Jim Dolbear, President of xx network.
William Carter, Chief Operating Officer of Praxxis.
We asked them questions about the development of xx network.
Some sentences have been slightly edited for readability, but the meaning has been conserved.
Summary
In this AMA, Jim Dolbear of xx network and William Carter of Praxxis take time to break down the complex world of their revolutionary xx network, which seeks to use a quantum-secure approach to keep metadata safe and truly private. There was a quiz session where technical questions regarding the xx network architecture were answered. Under the Products section, you will find out reasons to ditch the traditional messaging apps and go in for the xx messenger.
Introduction
Q — Alexandre R from GAINS: Will and Jim, can you tell us what you did before crypto, how you got into crypto and if you’ve had any other venture in crypto previous to being involved with xx network?
Can you tell us what your role is at xx network and what the project is about in a few simple sentences? Also, can you explain a bit more how the ecosystem works; it can seem a bit confusing with the different names: Praxxis and Elixxir.
A — Jim Dolbear from xx network:
Jim Dolbear here…I’m sitting in Los Angeles and my job is to help with the marketing and strategic stuff and a bunch of administrative/management support. Will and I started working together 5–10 years ago.
I started out at investment banks (Morgan Stanley and Lehman Brothers) working on Wall Street after I got out of Harvard. I couldn’t stand the fact that people were making so much money for doing nothing, so then I worked on transportation projects for the state government before getting into manufacturing so that I could actually make things. I was a production manager and quality manager at a paper processing and office products plant.
I went into commission sales and moved to Los Angeles (from Boston) as video gaming and then the internet took off. I met David Chaum when he was working on DigiCash (first digital currency that could be issued by banks as private cash) in Amsterdam and Palo Alto.
David and I started working on secure voting technology for emerging democracies and to address U.S. election problems (voting is a lot like electronic cash).
David realized in the late 70's/early 80’s that when we were all on the digital network there were going to be problems: problems with the centralized control of data about people.
The mission of the xx network really is to address those problems… and the DNA for our blockchain dates back to then.
Here’s what David said then, in 1984:
“Information service providers and other major interests, for example, could retain control over various information and media distribution channels while synergistically consolidating their position with sophisticated marketing techniques that rely on gathering far-reaching information about consumers.”
By the way, Will is sitting in George Town in Grand Cayman.
A — Will Carter from Elixxir:
I started in the defense industry in project management. After a few years I got disillusioned with the defense space and decided to focus on tech. I worked at NASA’s JPL laboratory working on AI and machine learning for a bit before joining David Chaum and Jim in building advanced optics for the augmented reality space. About three years ago I worked with David and Jim to build out some of the privacy technology that David had been working on which turned into the xx network.
I got into crypto while at JPL actually. We were coding neural networks into hardware (FPGAs and Asics) and we decided that we could probably use that knowledge to make badass mining hardware. We ended up not pursuing that very far and focusing on our jobs… which is why I’m not a billionaire.
Q — Telegram user S.A.M. Crypto Trader: What is Elixxir and Praxxis?
A — Will Carter from Praxxis: Praxxis is developing the blockchain, consensus, money. Elixxir is developing the privacy mix network. xx network combines them.
Q — Telegram user John Ewing: Who are your business partners?
A — Will Carter from Praxxis: One of our largest investors is one of the largest corporations in South Korea. Additional investors are founders of other cryptocurrencies. We’re leveraging these relationships to build an understanding of what is required from traditionally centralized organizations to move to blockchain solutions as well as learn what challenges other blockchain projects face with adoption.
QUIZ
- What are ‘teams OF NODES’ and what do they do in the xx network architecture?
Will Carter from Elixxir:
In the xx network, unpredictably chosen teams of nodes take turns in operating Elixxir’s cMix protocol. The client encrypts messages for the final recipient and then adds symmetric encryption for each node in the team. These encryptions make it impossible for any collusion or compromise of less than all nodes in a team to tell who the endpoints are or whether a client is sending a payment, communicating with a dApp , or sending a message. Similar to a more advanced Tor or VPN, messages are passed through a “team” of nodes to ensure privacy.
Jim Dolbear from xx network:
Teams process blocks of transactions, sets of messages, payments and data. They exist only to process one block of transactions and then are disbanded.
2. How does the Elixxir technology allow the xx network to run a mix so quickly so that the platform can support low-latency messaging?
Will Carter from Elixxir:
Mix networks have been around for a long time but there’s a reason they haven’t been used yet, they’re slow. They require expensive encryption computations. One of the cMix innovations, and the reason we can make mix networks so fast is a concept called precomputation. We can precompute the computationally expensive encryption before the messages are received by the mix network.
This ties into why we have teams. While one team is precomputing, another team is actively doing mixing.
Jim Dolbear from xx network:
By the way, this is a BIG DEAL! Because none of the xx network would be worth anything to real people who really want to use it if we didn’t have precomputation and speed.
3. How can the xx network claim to be quantum secure? What is the basic crypto that is used to achieve this?
Jim Dolbear from xx network:
We use hash functions all throughout. Simple, basic crypto. No structured stuff to speed things up that can be broken (when you find the structure). The trick is to use really big random numbers to underpin hashes. The problem typically is that this is slow.
Will Carter from Elixxir:
Ok, I’m going to try and summarize this one. We are quantum-secure because we use hash-based cryptography to secure all consensus operations and payment transactions, this is in contrast to curve-based cryptography used by almost all other blockchains. The problem with curve-based cryptography is that it is broken by quantum computers.
Unfortunately, it isn’t easy for other blockchains to move to hash-based cryptography because the signatures are much larger than curve-based crypto, which would cause most blockchains to slow down even more than they already are. We use probabilistic finality to address this problem which basically means we only need a small number of nodes to receive a transaction to reach consensus. This allows our network to scale linearly with the number of nodes while handling large quantum-secure, hash-based signatures.
We’ve also invented a new quantum-secure, hash-based group signature which allows the clients (who are generally on mobile phones) to quickly and efficiently ensure that consensus was successful. We seed randomness with a physically generated random number that might be considered truly random.
4. How does the xx network assure that nodes are always capable and available for high speed processing of payments, messaging and data?
Jim Dolbear from xx network:
We have the teams (made up of nodes from each “BIN’), formed before they’re called upon to do the work. So they’re on deck and ready! The governance checks nodes for bandwidth/connectivity and processing power to make sure they can perform. Can’t let any old node (from a technical perspective) onto the xx network, if they’re going to slow it down!
Technology
Q — Telegram user John: What is cMix? What are its main features? What are the major requirements needed for one to set up a node?
A — Jim Dolbear from xx network: cMix is effectively a high speed, efficient mix technology that shreds metadata. There are technical requirements for nodes that were published…now being updated for Beta (we’ll be using GPU’s). Any society where companies, people or governments surveil citizens needs xx network.
Q — Telegram user Hafsy: I’m aware that xx coin will launch its mainnet soon, but why did you choose to start with the Ethereum network instead of other faster networks?
A — Will Carter from Praxxis: We decided to use the Ethereum network for this initial sale because there’s a large ecosystem around Ethereum wallets which makes it easy for early contributors who are new to crypto to participate in the sale.
Product
Q — Telegram user S.A.M. Crypto Trader: Currently, there are many Messenger platforms available like WhatsApp, Telegram, Messenger, etc! So, what’s different in xx messenger and why is it better than WhatsApp & Telegram Messenger?
A — Jim Dolbear from xx network: The xx messenger provides privacy protection including metadata shredding (and end-to-end encryption). No other messenger does this. Also, the xx network will support quantum secure high speed payment and data transfer supported by the decentralized xx network blockchain.
Q — Telegram user Bitcoin Warrior: Can you explain what XM is and what are the benefits of this type of message?
A — Jim Dolbear from xx network: XM’s really are different…the xx messenger allows users to share a set of keys. Only the user has the ability to decrypt an XM and to tell other users he’ll accept XM’s, so an XM encodes message content in a new kind of cryptographic “package”.
Q — Telegram user Crypto Investor: All current projects are concerned about the speed and number of transactions. Old projects have also improved their networks. So what else does xx network bring to investors?
A — Will Carter from Praxxis: We bring quantum security and the best privacy in the world WHILE providing speed and scalability.
Finance
Q — Telegram user One Love My Life: When and how will the xx network platform generate revenue? What are the advantages to competing with other Blockchain projects?
A — Jim Dolbear from xx network: This will work a lot like existing messaging and payments and data transfer. Consumer volumes are free (think gmail), but commercial volumes and payments incur a small fee in xx coins. And the xx network is very efficient so we can process a huge amount of volume…for not too much cost, and we can scale linearly… so the network will be capable of generating real revenue.
Business Development
Q — Telegram user Matthias Müller: What strategy is being followed to master the balancing act between privacy and regulation?
A — Will Carter from Praxxis: This requires a longer answer than I can give but we’ve spoken to key players in the privacy and regulation space. The truth is, private currency has existed for centuries (cash) and the liquidity and fungibility of cash has been instrumental in establishing robust economies. Digital cash (private, fungible currencies) should be treated the same way.
Q — Telegram user Terrupi©: What is the current goal you are working towards achieving this year?
A — Will Carter from Praxxis: Mainnet!!!!
Q — Telegram user Gr Gr Gr: Technology is changing every second, are you afraid that new projects with technological advances will replace XX network? What are the advantages of xx network compared to similar projects?
A — Jim Dolbear from xx network: We went for a quantum secure approach to future proof the xx network. The xx network is designed from the ground up to work fast when processing with smartphone clients. It’s not a rehash of POW or POS, so it avoids problems with legacy solutions.
Q — Telegram user Th Va: With regards to xx network sharding, what kind of real-life application or adoption will sharding improve to help bring the mass adoption to xx network and crypto in general?
A — Jim Dolbear from xx network: We can answer this question when someone actually figures out what sharding is 😊.
Q — Telegram user Daniel Krupka: On which exchanges will you be listing? What ideas do you have to actually get widespread adoption of your technology? Like partners, for instance?
A — Will Carter from Praxxis: We aren’t ready to talk about exchanges at the moment but as for widespread adoption, one way we’re approaching this, especially early on, is by developing an SDK (the Arrow SDK) which will allow any app or dApp to leverage the privacy capabilities of our mix network.
By allowing current centralized platforms to plug into the network, we can add a user base which doesn’t even know they’re using decentralized technology. This is the key to becoming a mainstream project, getting people to use your product without having to understand it, since we know how hard it can be to really wrap your head around this tech with how fast it is changing.
A — Jim Dolbear from xx network: On exchanges, there are legal constraints on pre-mainnet trading, and we need the MainNet decentralized implementation of Praxxis consensus protocol to secure the value of the xx coin and to support trading.
Q — Telegram user ancient history: Are there any specific target markets? Maybe you are thinking of countries with huge censorship.
A — Jim Dolbear from xx network: Yes this is the idea. Some people and countries have issues with their societies and governments and there are trust problems that can be addressed by the xx network as a secure decentralized solution. I used to think that we wouldn’t need this in the U.S. (but that was pre-Trump!).
Q — Twitter user @toanpham: What are your plans to move towards a more decentralized and trustless solution?
A — Will Carter from Praxxis: We’ve developed a multi-phase rollout of the network which transitions through AlphaNet, BetaNet, and Mainnet. Through each of these phases we gradually give more responsibility and power to the nodes who are running the network. During mainnet, the users gain power by being able to vote new nodes in using David’s revolutionary governance approaches which remove centralization due to wealth or computational power by giving each user and node the same voting power.
Thanks Jim and Will for coming in and explaining what you’re doing. I believe privacy is a very important fight nowadays and going a step further than nearly everyone else by also taking care of the metadata is great. Looking forward to seeing new developments! Where can we go to follow you? — Alexandre R from GAINS
Thanks everyone! It was great to connect with everyone.— Will Carter from Praxxis
Thanks so much to everyone! We’d love to have everyone download the xx collective app for iOS and android… helps follow everything and is the way you can get access to the xx messenger. You can also visit our websites for the xx coin sale, xx network, Praxxis and Elixxir. We’re just finishing up our initial public sale.— Jim Dolbear from xx network
Follow us on social media: Discord, Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn , Reddit, Telegram, Twitter and Youtube — Caron Kramer from xx network
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