Now that MGW is in "late Beta" I am switching gears toward InstantDEX and NXTprivacy. They actually have a fair amount in common, also with Privatebet.
Anyway, I got tired of waiting for zerocash to get a release out, plus they dont seem very helpful at all.
So, I've been fiddling with cryptonote and actually made a functioning fork of it. Not your usual clone though, I figure if I can leverage the existing cryptonote code to implement decent privacy, why not?
I cant put this into the NXT core, but I can put it into NXTservices. I am making a special cryptonote coin that will map 1:1 to the privateNXT asset. Keep in mind that inside NXT AE, privateNXT transfers/trades are not private. However, once I get it put into MGW so that you can send privateNXT to another privateNXT acct, then when that happens outside of NXT it would be as private as a normal cryptonote payment.
I am also thinking of using the cryptonote address as the "private address", so not only will the cryptonote -> cryptonote payment be private, nobody will even know who owns the cryptonote address (not that you even see that in the first place) for either source or destination.
So, maybe it is not 100% perfect zeroknowledge magic, but practically speaking as long as there are a decent number of people using privateNXT, it will be about as anonymous private as anything out in the market.
The privacyServers will run the cryptonote servers ("mining" is just a formality as virtually all pre-mined). We also have an easy way for privacyServer hosts to offer http/https proxy services.
I am leaning toward a hub + spoke model for the InstantDEX/NXTprivacy network. Nodes that can accept incoming TCP (or UDP) automatically become hubs and they will earn more nodecoins, privateNXT fees, etc.
So, no guarantees I can actually get the cryptonote actually working, but so far looking pretty good
James