One consistent question over the past few months as Decred’s Lightning Network has entered testnet, is on how it relates to the staking system and if they will be somehow integrated.

Now that dcrlnd, our port of the most prominent LN implementation available, is synced to the upstream work and nearing mainnet release, I feel it’s time to show one of the things that we’ve been leading up to: a plan for implementing multi-owner tickets over the Lightning Network.

The greatest benefit of this work is that once deployed, the staking system will be truly approachable by all interested parties, even those without sufficient funds to purchase a full ticket and in the future where lower stake rewards make large on-chain splits …

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Decred’s high network security is a result of its hybrid Proof-of-Work (“PoW”) and Proof-of-Stake (“PoS”) mining system. It depends on how decentralized Decred’s PoW and PoS actors are. With over 20 Voting Service Providers (“VSP”) and open-source VSP software, the PoS aspect of the network is currently the most decentralized.

Since the introduction of Application-Specific Integrated Circuit (“ASIC”) miners to the network, people looking to become PoW miners have had limited options of either joining an existing mining pool or writing pool mining software themselves. For most, the latter option is not viable. It is no surprise most miners prefer to join an existing mining pool, but unfortunately this could result in hash power …

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Decred’s privacy features and plans are ready to be revealed. The goal of our privacy features is to be simple, adaptable, and creative.

Rather than take the routes established by privacy-focused projects, e.g. ring signatures, zk-SNARKs, or Mimblewimble, we decided to take a mixnet approach, where we have integrated the mixnet with our Proof-of-Stake (“PoS”) governance system. Currently, just over 50% of all decred in circulation participate in PoS, which requires a steady flow of ticket purchases. This existing transaction flow, unique to Decred, functions as the natural basis for a mixnet. Per the approach with Decred’s PoS governance system, this yields a “many birds, one stone” scenario: stakeholders gain anonymity and they …

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In this article I will discuss my views on the existing privacy technology in use in the cryptocurrency space. Since several projects have a primary focus on privacy, I will explain the various privacy technologies, which will help in understanding the route Decred has taken and I will advocate we take. A second article will follow that goes into more detail on how Decred plans to approach privacy. The projects I will cover here are:

• Monero
• Zcash
• Grin/Beam
• Bitcoin
• Dash

Note that I will only be discussing the on-chain privacy technologies used in each of these cases, not the entire project. At the end of the article, I have assembled a table comparing the various projects and technologies they use.

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Today, Decred’s proposal system, Politeia, goes into production on mainnet. This corresponds with the development organization ceding control over the accumulated project subsidy, which is roughly DCR 570,000, currently valued at approximately USD 23 million, to the Decred stakeholders. We have been working towards this milestone for roughly 18 months, so we are very excited to put Politeia into production. That said, it is important to understand that Politeia is a very powerful tool: it can enable all manner of positive developments for Decred, but if used unwisely, it can lead to a wide variety of problems. Politeia allows Decred users and stakeholders to propose, discuss, collaborate on, and fund new projects, initiatives, and …

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