Navcoin Discord AMA — Recap
Financial privacy is critical to individual freedom, yet is still non-existent for most digital currencies. Without privacy, your entire net worth would be exposed for anyone to see after just one trip to the grocery store.
Navcoin is a medium of exchange that doesn’t compromise your privacy and protects all transaction details by hiding the sender and receiver, as well as the amount of coins sent.
Moreover we are working on innovative features such as private tokens and private NFTs, bringing privacy to non-private chains.
On August 10 we hosted an AMA (Ask Me Anything) with our main developer aguycalled in our Discord community. We thank all participants for their questions and hope that the answers clarified some things!
If you were not able to participate when it happened, do not worry, in this recap you will find out about the different questions and answers.
Minor spelling errors got corrected, but no grammar mistakes. Everything is almost as it was posted in Discord; you can also join it and check the #ama channel. Questions and answers are categorised by:
- Navcoin Development/Tech
- Navcoin Products/Use Cases
- Privacy Coins/PriFi in General
- Others
Between the questions & answers you will also find some notes with further information/links that might come in handy for you.
Let’s go!
Navcoin Development/Tech
Note: If you are new to Navcoin, it makes sense to dig into our knowledge base first.
Q: Have we ever done or can we make a stress test of the network?
A: I remember someone at Encrypt-S (the NZ team who was leading Navcoin’s development back in 2018) did a stress test on a simulated network and that’s where the number of ~1000 TPS (which has been commented in online forums) is coming from.
When this stress test was done, BLSCT did not exist, so that number is not valid anymore. BLS signatures and Bulletproofs are more compute- and space-intensive than ECDSA.
A new stress test for the new fully private chain would make a lot of sense and I would vote yes for funding the task with the Community Fund.
Q: What are the development plans for the foreseeable and long term future?
A: The main focus of the core team hasn’t been modified: at the moment it is the transition to a fully private chain. Gogoex and mxaddict keep on migrating the current feature set to the new codebase. Related to this, during this first week of August, I’ve been busy drafting a specification for the xNAV POS protocol. I will share this soon publicly for feedback.
Once Binance removes our trading pair, I expect PancakeSwap to be our main trading venue and the bridge becoming a more important piece of our infrastructure. So during this week I am also spending a considerable part of my time on the bridge, optimising it for smoother deposits and withdrawals to Binance Smart Chain. I will also soon start adding support for wrapping BEP-20 tokens as Private Tokens.
I would like to integrate PancakeSwap trading and wrapping of private tokens on the Whisper wallet too.
Besides those things, which depend directly on me, there are more areas where I expect to see significant progress. Like Priverse, the NFT marketplace, or the Chrome extension, which are developed by sakdeniz.
Note: Current developments can be tracked on our roadmap.
Q: Would Navcoin be developed without you?
A: I’d assume if I’d disappear from the face of earth tomorrow, others would step in and continue the work. But it’s impossible to answer with certainty.
Q: Can we build more development teams to make the nav even more decentralized?
A: We already have other community members like sakdeniz working autonomously in their own projects (NEXT, Priverse, Chrome extension).
I would love to see that happening every time more often and with more contributors, but this is something that doesn’t depend on my will but on the own initiative of others.
Q: Any idea for a Python developer to contribute?
A: NavCash and the electrum servers are written in Python. They are both open source, there’s nothing stopping you from contributing your ideas to both repositories.
Writing an equivalent SDK to navcoin-js in Python would also be an interesting and valuable contribution.
Note: If you are a developer and want to contribute to the Navcoin ecosystem, here you go.
Q: Is there a need to change blocktime from 30 sec. to 1 or 2 Minutes because of NFT as a private token?
A: There is not a need, but it is something that might make sense to consider in my opinion.
Q: Why does Navcoin want to become 100% private? (rather than giving users a choice between public and private transactions as is the case now)
A: As a privacy coin, our goal must be to offer the best privacy we can. A mixed model causes leaks when moving from private to public or private to public, highly reducing the privacy level we can offer and making it easier to trace back transactions.
Q: Can you elaborate further on why increasing the block time could make sense?
A: We will need to stress test the network and choose a number which ensures full blocks with the new xNAV proof of stake protocol and which are only using BLSCT (which is more intensive as ECDSA) can be validated on time without excessive hardware requirements.
Q: Can you talk a bit about the benefits of a private PoS chain?
A: The main motivation for transitioning to a private PoS chain is removing the need for public coins, which reduces the level of privacy we can offer.
Q: On the same line, what effect do you think a private PoS chain could have on governance compared to governance on a public chain?
A: I think votes might be more genuine, as in public chains, sometimes people’s vote is influenced by the fact that their vote will be connected with their public identity, if their addresses leaked and are known.
Navcoin Trading
Q: With Binance out of the picture, what can we do to lower the entry barrier for newcomers as well as providing enough liquidity for a healthy trading environment?
A: From the development side I think that improving the experience of using the Bridge is very important so users can seamlessly continue trading NAV in PancakeSwap, which as I said, I expect to become the main trading venue for NAV.
Probably there is more to do related to this in other areas of the project, like marketing or bizdev, but here it must be others who answer the question.
Note: If you have never traded on Pancakeswap, here we published a tutorial on how to use it to trade Navcoin. Further tutorials, i.e. for AtomicDEX, are coming next week.
Navcoin Products/Use Cases
Q: With private tokens online, do we have plans to attract others or build our own wrapped private tokens for both stable coins and native tokens?
A: Yes, we should soon have the option to wrap private tokens in the Bridge.
And I think we should create technical documentations so others can implement alternative uses of the tech and the on-chain atomic trade capabilities. This should attract others to build on top of the BLSCT private tokens.
Q: If NAV is 100% privat and xNAV are stakable, can we detect a inflationbug easy?
A: If we are fully private, an inflation bug would be harder to detect than with a mixed public-private model.
Q: Will every other token on BSC/PancakeSwap be able to use NAV as a private chain? And /or can it be pooled with NAV?
A: My idea is that we will start enabling wrapping of some tokens (BUSD, BTCB, BNB) and then expand to every other token.
Q: There are plans for adding a private token equivalent to USDT or another stable coin?
A: I think what makes more sense is to start wrapping BUSD as a private token, so we would have a stable coin backed by BUSD.
Private Finance in General
Note: If you are still a newbie when it comes to the topic of private finance, feel free to read some of our articles which will help you to better understand the need of PriFi and ecosystems like Navcoin:
- The Destruction of Financial Privacy — PriFi & Navcoin to The Rescue
- How Financial Privacy Impacts Your Freedom
Q: How do privacy coins survive in an ever-increasing regulatory environment? (E.g. if the use of privacy coins is made illegal, how will Navcoin’s team continue its contributions when doing so could make them a target for prosecution)
A: I suggest to read the DarkFi manifesto, it answers this question better than I could do myself
Q: Thinking ahead to a time, where crypto transactions are more mainstream, do you envision the majority of transactions being private?
A: I fear that might be wishful thinking in the current paradigm we live in. I expect more people will want to use privacy-enhancing tools in the future, the more that personal rights are restricted.
But I also think a majority of the people tend to comply and are happy delegating responsibilities. We should be ready to be used by a majority if they need to use us, but I don’t think that mass adoption should be our main goal.
Q: Do you think the use of private transactions will increase slowly over the years through education, or will the increase be rapid and desperate following a sudden regulatory change?
A: I think at some point the use of privacy-enhancing tools will increase exponentially, maybe through a sudden regulatory change, maybe through some event like the Snowden leaks we had in the past.
Others
Q: To increase the visibility of NAV are we planning to sponsor or partner with like minded softwares or institutions or conferences etc. at any point in future?
A: I completely support this. I already expressed my opinion publicly on the marketing channel, and I also did it privately to those working on the marketing side. It depends on them to do it if they consider it to be a good idea.
Q: There are companies that do a blockchain protocol security audit…Do you think it would bring more trust and credibility by getting audited?
A: Yes, I think that makes a lot of sense. Especially for the new chain once we complete the work to transition to be fully private.
Q: Can you speak on current doa proposals/payment requests? Maybe provide details on why we should support them with a yes vote, or a no?
A: I agree with what @ML wrote, everyone should vote following their own opinion.
In general I think I’ve expressed my personal opinion already on public channels.
For the sakdeniz proposal I think at the moment he did it it was too early for a full payment — I would have supported it if it was a partial payment.
Related to the GSR payment request — I am not voting no to it yet, but I personally don’t think that it makes sense to print 3mill coins for market making without Binance or other considerable CEX.
We have conversations for listings in other CEXs at the moment, but I don’t know if they will succeed. In my opinion, our priority should be to integrate further in DEXs and not spend many resources in CEXs.
