FIRO Coin & StealthEX AMA Recap – All You Need to Know
On October 29, 2021 we had StealthEX & Firo coin AMA Session in our Telegram Community Chat and here is a recap. Just take a little time to read through and learn everything you need about FIRO coin. Let’s start!
Today, we are going to have an AMA with Reuben Yap Co-Founder & Project Steward of Firo.
First, we will have a round of questions from Twitter with the chat turned off. In the second part, we will turn the chat back on, so you could ask your questions live.
Questions from Twitter
How does FIRO (FIROPoW) mining work? Can a person without knowledge of technology attend the FIRO mining? the platform is friendly for any user?
Sure, so FiroPoW is a mining algorithm that focuses on using the GPU. It is designed to utilize all parts of the GPU and also has a random element that changes every block that makes it hard for others to develop ASICs or efficient bitstreams for it.
As a non technical person, it’s not that difficult, depending on which card you have, AMD or Nvidia, you just download the miner, insert your wallet address in and run it with the mining pool of your choice 🙂
Takes less than 5 minutes or so.
There are also several excellent guides on Youtube as well.
How your tokens are in circulation and what is your total supply? What is the schedule for Unlocking of listen token? In short, please assist us with your structure of Tokenomics?
Firo’s tokenomics is quite straightforward, we follow Bitcoin’s emission schedule which halves every 4 years. Of course as our block times are two times faster, the block rewards are also adjusted accordingly. We completed our first halving already.
The block reward is divided into 50% to miners 35% to masternodes and 15% as a Development Fund so means that even the developers do not get a lump sum but get part of the block reward as time progresses which aligns the interest of the team with the long term success of the project.
We’ve been around since 2016 and still going strong and even better than before 🙂
We do have plans to slowly phase out the development fund and are exploring more decentralized methods of funding such as the Firo Community Crowdfunding System and also a potential MAGIC fund which you can learn more about on our forum at forum.firo.org.
Do transaction validators (miners) have access to transaction history information? If so, how do you ensure that there is no malicious miner who does not destroy this history?
No, the beauty about the system is you don’t have to trust anyone to destroy the history. History is destroyed using our very own zero knowledge proof technology called Lelantus which allows users to burn their coins and then redeem them for brand new ones. There’s no ‘retention’ of history and the only person who knows the true source of the funds is the sender. Miners or validators do not play any role in this and merely validate to ensure that the zero knowledge proof is valid.
Zero knowledge proofs are basically mathematical proofs that prove something has happened without giving any other information about it. In this case to prove I’ve ownership of a certain number of coins and will be transferring it without having to show its source.
What is Lelantus Protocol can you explain about it?
Sure Lelantus is our very own privacy protocol that was created by our cryptographer Aram Jivanyan. We were looking for a way to do privacy that provides high anonymity sets without requiring trusted setup, complicated constructions or experimental math and Lelantus was the answer to it.
There are several version of Lelantus, namely Lelantus v1, v2 and Spark. We are currently on Lelantus v1 and the Spark cryptography is currently undergoing audit.
Lelantus unlike other privacy mechanisms does not ‘mix’ or use ‘decoys’ like in coinjoin, RingCT or Mimblewimble so it has certain advantages. As for the Zerocash protocol that relies on a trusted setup and experimental math so it’s always good to have alternatives that do not have such trust requirements.
In Spark, even the 2 FIRO and address would be hidden as well. But even with Lelantus v1, source amounts are hidden along with change amount and also the source address so it already offers pretty high privacy.
Lelantus was actually instrumental in reviving interest in a whole new family of privacy technology such as Triptych, Seraphis in Monero and also Lelantus-MW in Beam so we’re very happy that our work is pushing the entire space forward.
Destroying transaction history also means that proof of payment cannot be shown which can turn into fraud at the user level. Is there any mechanism to avoid this effect? is it possible to prove that one user paid to another?
In Lelantus v1 there isn’t a way to show payment proof beyond just giving the txid to show that money was deposited in an address, but in Lelantus Spark, our upcoming protocol there are new ways to do this via payment proofs which allow you to prove you sent it. That’s a recent development and a new appendix to our Spark paper will be published shortly.
Why FIRO is better than Zec and Monero? What things put FIRO as pioneer on privacy transactions?
So this is a long answer as privacy is quite nuanced and protocols each have their own set of pros and trade offs.
Let’s talk about Monero. Monero’s tech has been around for a while and the basic idea is that you use decoys to hide your real transaction. For e.g. my classic example is farting in the lift. Monero’s approach is dragging other people into the lift with you and then farting so it isn’t clear who farted, right now the number of people they drag into fart with is 10 other ppl for a ring size of 11, but they’re increasing this to 16 soon but this isn’t that much on a transaction level.
There are also very subtle problems with how to pick which people to drag into the lift with or in the blockchain sense, which outputs you should select as your ‘fake decoy’ inputs.
This has lead to loss of anonymization and there are several studies on this which meant that huge swathes of history of Monero were deanonymized and there is a suspected problem with the current decoy selection algorithm as well that’s in active discussion in their research labs.
In this case, increasing the ring size from 11 to 16 doesn’t really mitigate these decoy selection algorithm problems as well.
There are also other types of attacks like FloodXMR, Overseer, Flashlight and Tainted Dust attacks that all attack this decoy model.
In my humble opinion, these type of problems will continue to be an issue as statistical analysis techniques combined with machine learning advance.
And the thing is blockchain is forever.
Firo’s approach with its burn and redeem model don’t have such decoy selection issues cause when you burn, you’re placing it in a common bucket where other ppl burn too and your anonymity sets can go up to 65,000 which is much much higher than 11 or 16.
I have huge respect for XMR and there’s a lot of cross-collaboration in our research teams but I do believe that our model is the way to go moving forward. The great thing that Monero has is wide real usage and a big market cap and liquidity that helps also protect their privacy.
ZEC is a different beast.
Their technology is pretty awesome. zkSNARKs while having the highest theoretical anonymity set does require trust that the initial setup ceremony was done correctly and also relies on much less proven cryptographic assumptions such as Knowledge of Exponent assumptions.
There was indeed an issue with their initial Sprout ceremony which they fixed in Sapling.
Now of course, ZEC is going to release Orchard with a Halo2 proving system which removes trusted setup but it remains untested and documentation on it is not very available so it’s hard to assess.
It’s also under a new BOSL license that also prevents anyone from using the code for a period of 12 months.
So I’m not sure this is in the spirit of decentralization, it’s moving to a more corporate model and it might take years for the rest of the academic community to catch up with the work they did with Orchard/Halo2.
They’re a pretty awesome team though but Firo offers an open source alternative that is easy to understand and provides very high anonymity at the same time with full paper documentation.
I think having multiple privacy mechanisms strengthens the overall space 🙂
So yeah there’es no ‘best’ btu i do think that FIro’s technology is among the best.
No KYC is great. There are so many scam sites saying – send your coins and we’ll send you other coins back. Without registration, what is the mechanism used to ensure the exchange happens and what recourse if the transactions get stuck?
I’m not quite sure I understand the question here. It’s not particular to Firo or do you mean the anonymization process?
I guess the user meant the anonymization process and the potential drawbacks of having no KYC.
The anonymization process doesn’t rely on sending your coins to ‘anyone’. it actually gets sent into a ‘black box’ whereby you retain a special receipt to redeem new coins. There’s no entity running the black box, it’s all math not a person.
Bitcoin doesn’t have KYC as well 🙂
Nor any self respecting cryptocurrency.
It’s the exchanges that set KYC, but anyone who falls for this ‘send coins and we’ll send more coins back honestly deserves to lose their coins hahah.
StealthEX doesn’t require KYC either 🙂
KYC isn’t all bad but requiring KYC on everything is also too much.
Also, Lelantus Spark does have features that allow you to grant access to third parties to see what goes in and what goes out. These are called view keys, meaning exchanges can disclose this if they want.
The main thing that is important is that it’s the user’s CHOICE to reveal their privacy and allows exchanges easy ways to remain compliant if they need to disclose things or send things to auditors. with centralized exchanges there shouldn’t be too much expectation of privacy.
The author of the next question wants to know what are the benefits of the current $FIRO holders?
Well, I do think that privacy is going to be really big soon. If we do expect cryptocurrencies to gain mainstream adoption, we can’t have our ‘bank accounts’ open for everyone to see. I actually have a funny story on this when someone was trying to make a joke and say send me your money and gave his Eth address, and just with a quick lookup on a explorer, I knew what he was investing in or holding. That’s a real issue! With Bitcoin it’s more complicated but with the right tools it’s not that much better.
So Firo is undoubtedly one of the leaders in building privacy protocols and having a private cryptocurrency with DeFi integrations along with a team that has the expertise to maintain it is a big deal. This combined that you can hold Firo in 1000 FIRO amounts and host masternodes that yield about 12% per annum at the moment.
We soon will have even more ways for users to do things with their Firo but really if you do believe in the importance of privacy especially as non private cryptocurrencies get more increasing surveilled, I do think you’re in good hands with Firo 🙂
We are soon also going to be building our liquidity on atomic swap DEXes making us much more difficult to censor or stop.
And you can even use Firo to do cool things such as use it as collateral to get USD loans with MyConstant or Coinrabbit or even pay for your hotel room/trip in 2 million + places around the world with Travala or buy stuff on Particl’s decentralized market place 🙂
But stay tuned 🙂 We really believe that privacy cryptocurrency is really the OG use case for cryptocurrency. Even Satoshi’s whitepaper had a section on privacy but obviously the tech then was not sufficient to provide it.
You can also provide liquidity on BSC on Pancakeswap and earn yield there too.
We’re on to our last question from Twitter and then we will turn on the chat, so you can ask your questions live.
Some projects started as decentralized but later they abandoned this and started to become more centralized. How much Firo team is dedicated to keep being decentralized?
Great question, well I think that having a development fund we are not that decentralized yet but we believe it is necessary to lay out the foundations of Firo such as building stuff like Lelantus Spark which is not easy.
We do however have monthly community meetings and ensure that all major decisions go through our community such as in our forums where you can see quite lively discussion there.
However we know that eventually we have to step away from this esp as Firo gets bigger and more scrutinized and that’s why we launched the Firo Crowdfunding System to allow other people to get funded for tasks for Firo and also a proposal to setup a separate MAGIC fund that would allow a separate committee appointed by the community to fund things. We really see ourselves as caretakers of the project till we are ready to remove the trainer wheels hence my role as a Steward rather than a CEO or anything like that.
Also every 2 years there’s a check-in with the community as to whether the development fund should continue so it also keeps us honest 🙂
Nice seeing the community taking such a major part in the project development and setting the course! That’s the way to go, in my humble opinion.
Now, I am opening up the chat for the second portion of live questions.
Live Questions
How did you increase the level of protection of your blockchain after the last hack?
So a 51% attack is technically not a ‘hack’ since it’s following consensus rules. For e.g. if Bitcoin is 51% attacked, it’s as per rules not really a flaw in code.
However we know that this needs to be resolved and Chainlocks basically protects against 51% attacks by having the masternodes form quorums to sign blocks so that no reorgs can happen after the block is confirmed. This means that blocks are final the moment they are confirmed and 51% attacks can not happen unless Chainlocks is disabled which means masternodes have to be brought down or taken over which is a huge and costly attack.
NFTs is hot trending now, Do you have a play to have NFTs in your platform? If so, can you tell us yhe plans of your project in NFTs?
Well we are a privacy coin that is all about fungibility so Non Fungible Tokens are kinda the opposite of what we’re trying to do. Rather than jumping on the bandwagon to be something we’re not, it’s not really our focus.
However we are potentially working with some other NFT projects to build privacy themed NFTs that would also give back to privacy organizations which we would feel bring more awareness to privacy and giving good CSR points.
But no, while I do like NFTs I don’t think every chain should do it 🙂
What is your top 3 things for priorities in 2021? Could you share some plans for the upcoming year?
Well 2021 is closing off so I’m assuming you mean next year. The last 2 months of this year is mainly improving the usability of our technology such as native mobile wallets with Lelantus support along with Elysium our tokenization layer that allows people to launch their own tokens with Lelantus privacy.
We are also working on ways to reduce our blockchain size by stripping MTP proofs to speed up syncing along with privacy preserving light wallets to allow quick syncs without sacrificing on privacy or relying on centralized infra.
We also are in the midst of building liquidity on an order booked based DEX that uses atomic swaps that allows much more efficient capital allocation compared to AMM models and much harder to stop given it’s decentralized infrastructure as well. Stay tuned on this 🙂
As for next year, our main focus is really Lelantus Spark and work is already starting here with the audits having started.
Is your project only for elite investors, what about others with small funds, is it open to everyone?
Really it’s open to everyone, anyone can buy any amount. Masternodes are also not that unaffordable now. However we are looking at alternative consensus mechanisms that won’t rely on fixed large amounts of Firo.
Too many projects promise magic but never release any working product or prove any revenue, Within a short/long time of release. Is your project also like this? If not can u tell us, What makes your project different from other projects?
I think if you take a look at our roadmap we have continuously delivered on our roadmap promises along with sometimes over delivering such as Lelantus Spark which is a brand new privacy protocol that wasn’t originally on the protocol.
Our currency is fully working and I’m pretty proud of our team. We’re definitely not vaporware 🙂
Do you guys feel satisfied by seeing your progresses and achievements till now, when you look back to the day when you have started this project?
Firo or as we were then known Zcoin had really the worst of starts which would have killed any other project. A co-founder that ran away with all our seed money, a huge hack, a toxic seed investor that wanted to turn our project into a MLM scheme….we survived them all and in fact got stronger and stronger.
There are of course some regrets for e.g. sometimes we spent too much time developing things that weren’t our core competencies such as our MTP mining algorithm when we could have been spending more time and effort on privacy.
But hey we’re still around and strong as ever and I’m really excited about what Firo has to offer today 🙂
Where can I buy your tokens now, what are your current contracts address and how can I buy them and what are the benefits?
So we’re not a token but actually our own blockchain. You can buy Firo from Stealthex or Binance, Huobi, Bittrex and many other major exchanges. We do actually have a wrapped version of Firo that has official Binance bridge support on BSC in Pancakeswap.
The bridge allows people to convert Firo into BEP20 FIRO and vice versa.
you can actually also use AtomicDex but we are building liquidity there so stay tuned.
Security and anonymity are always prioritized by BlockChain projects in the development of project platforms and technologies. So, does you have any technological solutions or plans to enhance user trust in these issues?
That’s really our raison d’etre 😉 Lelantus Spark is actually really groundbreaking in many ways to the point that it’s also considered a contender in Monero’s scaling solution but we do have certain advantages given that we are more nimble and we are focusing on large anonymity sets.
Many projects have problems with UI / UX and this one turns off new users. How do you plan to improve the interaction with new users and with users outside the crypto space?
That’s a great one and something we’re actively working on. Our UI really had a huge upgrade when we released Firo-Client over the traditional QT wallet and also the mobile wallet is looking extremely sexy.
The remaining thing is really fast syncing which we are working on already 🙂
IF THE BEAR MARKET COMES will your token PROBABLY DUMP? Do you have any plan to prepared for this bear market? How will you handle the panic sell?
We have been around since 2016 and survived the bear market and a crazy toxic seed investor which dumped on us the whole year so we should be able to survive esp since he is no longer in the picture 😉
I am a professional vulnerability finder on the web, do you think Your system is secure enough from hackers? Does your project have a program that rewards individual vulnerability detection of the system??
We do have a bug bounty program for stuff that relates to our core product which is our Firo nodes/wallet code. Our website is very minimal and doesn’t have ‘interactive’ things so we don’t reward website ‘vulnerabilities’ but only for stuff that affects our wallet/nodes.
How Do you planning to promote your project in different countries, wherein English is not spoken well? Do you have a local communities for them to better understand your project?
Yes we do have language specific for example Vietnam, China, Turkish and a couple of others 🙂
Southeast Asia is a very vibrant market and there are many new platforms under development. So what do you think about Southeast Asia and do you have plans to grow there?
Well I’m Malaysian myself 🙂 I do think places like Vietnam are really huge potential along with Indonesia and we do have vibrant communities in these two countries along with local exchange listings.
While India isn’t SE Asia, we have also started pushing into that region with our partnership with FinStreet 🙂
Do you have AUDIT certificate or are you working to AUDIT your project, so that the security of the project becomes more secure and reliable?
We do have multiple audits on different components. With privacy projects we not only have to audit code but also cryptography. Our previous audits were done by Trail Of Bits and ABDK Consulting, really top notch people.
Telegram, Twitter, Discord we’re pretty active in all of this. Check the links and Firo website.
Always welcome to swap FIRO coin on StealthEX .
How To Buy Firo Coin?
Just go to StealthEX and follow these easy steps:
- Choose the pair and the amount for your exchange. For example, BTC to FIRO.
- Press the “Start exchange” button.
- Provide the recipient address to which the coins will be transferred.
- Move your cryptocurrency for the exchange.
- Receive your crypto coins!
If you have remaining questions about the StealthEX exchange service you can go to our FAQ section and find all the necessary information there.
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