As cryptocurrencies gain wider acceptance and the world gets more decentralized, an individual’s privacy gets heavily compromised. That happens mainly because of the way most cryptocurrencies are designed in the first place.
In many ways, bitcoin transactions are not anonymous as the open ledger offers perhaps the most transparent payment history of any financial system to date. Each and every transaction that a user has conducted can be tracked in it. While this does solve the purpose of reducing corruption and malicious practices, it completely compromises once privacy.
Is it necessary for someone to show each and every part of their life to the entire world? Is it wrong for someone to ask for a little bit of privacy? To answer these questions, FOG has come up which offer their users complete privacy.
What is Fogchain
Fogchain is a public chain in the field of privacy protection. The token of Fogchain is FOG, a well-known privacy cryptocurrency that ensures the privacy and anonymity of its users. With FOG, the addresses of both the sender and receiver are kept private on the ledger, meaning there’s also no way to see the value of a user’s wallet. The FOG network protects user privacy by utilizing stealth addresses (a one-time address created by the sender for each transaction) ring signatures (a method that uses multiple signatures as decoys to obfuscate address of the sender), and Ring Confidential Transactions, also known as “RingCT” (an improved version of ring signatures that hides the amount of FOG used in a transaction). When the receiver receives the transaction, they use their own private key to verify the signature. As such, other people (including potential malicious parties) are not able to tell which one of the public keys belongs to the sender. This gives FOG the capability of hiding the sender’s address information, making it impossible for external attackers to target the sender.
CPOC Consensus Algorithm
FOG is an innovative digital currency based on Conditioned Proof Of Capacity. It uses hard disk as the device for mining, and obtains network block reward according to the capacity of the hard disk. Given this, FOG has the three advantages in comparison with other blockchains. First, consensus algorithm is more decentralized, because every miner has the right to participate and they can make their own decision. Second, FOG network is safer and more reliable. In the future, FOG network will have hundreds of billions of hard disk physical devices to maintain the security of the entire network, and because of the characteristics of the POC consensus algorithm, the probability of 51% attack on the FOG network is extremely low. Last, FOG allows ecological diversity and multi-chain coexistence. The future FOG backbone can derive more symbiotic sub-chains. FOG can make cross-chain transfers between the main chain and the sub-chains. FOG will become the common currency in the main chain and sub-chain.
Stealth Addresses
FOG also utilizes stealth addresses to protect privacy. Stealth addresses are an important part of FOG’s inherent privacy. They allow and require the sender to create random one-time addresses for every transaction on behalf of the recipient. The recipient can publish just one address, yet have all of his/her incoming payments go to unique addresses on the blockchain, where they cannot be linked back to either the recipient’s published address or any other transactions’ addresses. By using stealth addresses, only the sender and receiver can determine where a payment was sent.
Ring Signature
A FOG ring signature is composed of the actual signer, who is then combined with non-signers to form a ring. The actual signer and non-signers in this ring are all considered to be equal and valid. The actual signer is a one-time spend key that corresponds with an output being sent from the sender’s wallet. The non-signers are past transaction outputs that are drawn from the FOG blockchain. These past transaction outputs function as decoys in the ring signature transaction, by forming part of the inputs of a transaction. From the perspective of an outside party, all of the inputs appear equally likely to be the output being spent in a transaction. FOG utilizes ring signature technology to help the sender mask the origin of a transaction by ensuring that all inputs are indistinguishable from each other.
Ring Confidential Transactions
Ring confidential transactions are another piece of the privacy excitement for FOG. Ring CT enables the FOG protocol to obscure transaction amounts. It’s important to obscure transaction amounts because a malicious third party can actually use transaction amounts to piece together a full transaction history. The use of Pederson commitments essentially encrypts a transaction so that only the sender and the recipient know the true transaction amount.
Two Sides of a Coin
Because all decoy coins must be included in a transaction, and the CT math used in these transactions is data heavy, the biggest issue confronting FOG is scalability. How this situation evolves over time depends a lot on future technologies.
However, for now, FOG continues to enjoy strong grassroots support. “Hiding” user methods are used in other anonymous cryptocurrencies: Zcash or DASH. But encryption in FOG works harder and is integrated directly into the blockchain. With sender, recipient and transactional information all privatized, the level of anonymity provided by FOG is exceptionally high. Innovation by FOG into the combination of privacy protection technologies has illustrated the team’s competent developers and strong dedication to community necessary for any project to succeed.
