Firo × Binance AMA Review: From Zcoin to Firo

Odaily资深作者

2021-01-19 16:32 (UTC+8)

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At 6:00 p.m. on January 18, Reuben, the co-founder of Firo, participated in an AMA event in the Binance English Telegram group, where he interacted with users on the latest progress of the Firo project.

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Privacy Project Firo has activated a new privacy protocol, Lelantus, offering an even higher level of anonymity. At 6:00 p.m. on January 18, Reuben, the co-founder of Firo, was a guest in the Binance English Telegram group to participate in the AMA event, and interacted with users on the latest progress of the Firo project. The following is a review of the content of the AMA.

Moderator: Hello everyone, and welcome to the AMA of Team Firo! It's an honor to introduce Reuben, co-founder of Firo!

Hi Reuben, great to have you join us today, please introduce yourself in the chat and share an overview of Firo.

Reuben: Hello everyone, I'm Reuben, co-founder and project lead of Firo. I joined the team in October 2016 and am currently responsible for the overall strategic and operational aspects of the project. Before joining Firo, I was a partner in a law firm specializing in advising state governments on their institutional frameworks. I also run an aikido dojo where I am the head instructor. I am also a CMD (https://schoolofcrazymonkey.com/) of the Street Fighting Defense System licensed trainer.

Firo, formerly known as Zcoin, was founded in 2016 by Poramin Insom, who sought to provide financial privacy and enable more inclusive mining through ASIC-resistant proof-of-work.

Firo is a decentralized digital currency that focuses on the "privacy" and "anonymity" of cryptocurrency transactions through the burning and redemption mode of the Lelantus protocol. Firo is also the first coin to implement Merkle Tree Proof (MTP) for peer-to-peer mining on its network, as well as the Dandelion++ protocol, which protects user identities by preventing their IP addresses from being tied to transactions.

wallet:

website:https://firo.org

wallet:https://firo.org/get-firo/download

paper:https://lelantus.io/lelantus.pdf

Telegram：https://t.me/firoproject

Twitter：https://twitter.com/firoorg

Reddit：https://www.reddit.com/r/firoproject

Linkedin：https://www.linkedin.com/company/firoorg

Facebook：https://www.facebook.com/firoorg

Moderator: Well, now enter the first session of today's AMA. We have 5 questions for the Firo team.

Q1: What is the mission of Firo?

Reuben: We believe that the original intention of cryptocurrency is to be an alternative financial system that is not controlled by any entity and that is not censorship-proof. This is why Bitcoin was born as a response to the irresponsible and centrally determined practice of printing money, which tends to favor the rich and big corporations.

However, to be truly uncensorable and a safe way for people to transact, privacy is absolutely necessary. If someone can track how much money you have and who you trade with, your money can be controlled, for example, someone can force you to hand over your private keys, or the person you pay suddenly knows your financial history.

Our goal is to be a global digital version of cash that is not accountable to any entity, not even us. Our goal is to make money a utility and financial infrastructure.

It's a lofty goal, moving in a cashless direction. And the increased interest in government-issued central bank digital currencies, which are effectively surveillance currencies, means this is even more important if we believe in the whole vision of cryptocurrencies.

There are only a handful of blockchain privacy solutions (Zerocash, RingCT, Mimblewimble, and Coinjoin variants), and all have their own drawbacks. Our goal in Firo was to provide the strongest level of privacy without requiring trust and without sacrificing usability, relying only on sound cryptographic assumptions, so we created Lelantus!

Q2: What is Lelantus?

Reuben: Lelantus is a new privacy payment protocol, which ensures the confidentiality and anonymity of blockchain transactions, small transaction size, short verification time, and does not require a pre-trust mechanism. How it works is that it allows users to burn their coins and exchange them for brand new coins with no previous transaction history.

Lelantus just went live on mainnet 4 days ago, and you can see a sample of a Lelantus transaction here.

https://explorer.firo.org/tx/cbfc81cd42b9f080ee285075c9c9a43b22ba6ab0d2d5ccc728134536c08f4b32

As you can see, the source of funds is completely invisible and even the change amount is hidden. In the second version of Lelantus, users can even pass the right to exchange coins to other people, which will hide all amounts!

Our Lelantus protocol has also won acclaim among cryptographers and prominent blockchain privacy developers for its elegant design and high usability.

To date, Trail of Bits has audited our cryptographic library, ABDK Consulting has audited the underlying cryptographic technology, and further audits are planned where possible.

You can use this chart to see how it compares to other privacy protocols.

If you are more technical, you can also read the technical paper herehttps://eprint.iacr.org/2019/373.pdf

Q3: How much FIRO does it take to have a masternode? What do Firo's masternodes do besides help verify the validity of transactions?

Reuben: Masternodes in Firo are incentivized nodes that host Firo's infrastructure and provide additional services such as 51% mining attack protection through LLMQ chainlocks and instant sending.

To prevent sybil attacks, each masternode requires 1000 FIRO collateral backing to prove self-interest and encourage honest behavior.

In return for hosting FIRO's infrastructure and their add-on services, they earn 35% of block rewards, which is about 10% annualized at the current number of masternodes. As an incentive infrastructure, masternode holders can invest in higher specification hardware and have an incentive to keep their nodes updated and running. This helps Firo's blockchain scale and ensures a robust network of nodes.

Cool tip, if you don’t want to host your own masternode, Binance also has a product called Binance Staking that will do it for you!

Q4: What mining algorithm does Firo use?

Reuben: Firo uses the MTP (Merkle Tree Proof) mining algorithm, which is the result of our research. The idea behind MTP is to use a lot of memory while keeping authentication lightweight.

https://arxiv.org/pdf/1606.03588.pdf

Technology is always advancing, and while MTP has served its function well, keeping Firo as a GPU-minable coin, MTP has proven to be large in size.

Therefore Firo plans to switch to the ProgPoW variant in the near future. The current block reward for miners is 50% (6.25 FIRO).

We are supported by many high-quality mining pools, such as Mintpond, 2miners, F2pool, etc.

https://firo.org/guide/how-to-mine-firo.html

Q5: List an upcoming thing from Firo's roadmap.

Reuben: Among the few, chain locks. Chainlock leverages Firo's masternode network to prevent 51% attacks.

The way it works is really cool because masternodes are grouped into quorums that sign off on checkpoints on every block. This means that no chain reorganization will occur and every added block will become permanent.

Chainlocks are super important as we've seen many other coins get 51% attacked, and if we want to keep GPUs mineable, having masternodes provide an extra layer of security not only greatly increases the security of coins in transactions , also improves usability.

To 51% attack Firo with a chain lock, you need to control more than 50% of the masternodes, and you also need to control more than 51% of the computing power. This also ensures the security of the network, not just the miners, who are not necessarily loyal, but also the masternodes who have a stake in the project.

Unlike other blockchains that need to wait for multiple confirmations, with chain locks, as long as one block is confirmed, the transaction achieves finality instead of waiting for multiple confirmations. We would recommend exchanges to reduce the number of confirmations required for deposits!

Chainlocks should be coming soon, so stay tuned for announcements!
You can read the rest of the Firo roadmap here:https://firo.org/about/roadmap/

Moderator: Now enter the quiz session! The prize is to share FIRO equivalent to 3000 USDT.

rule: