Anon coins—cryptocurrencies designed for extreme anonymity—are traditionally thought of as the domain of the dark web, meant for buying illegal goods and services online. On December 14, however, the NAV team hopes to bring them out of the shadows, hosting a conference at the first physical location to accept NAV Coin.
The event will take place in Auckland, New Zealand, at an Irish pub called the Dog’s Bollix. They serve delicious food and intoxicating beverages, and the first 50 guests will receive 500 NAV with which to pay for them. There are at least 35 confirmed RSVPs on Facebook, giving the NAV team a good chance to test out their mobile wallets and new point-of-sale system.
Doors will open at 7 PM local time, and an hour later (7 AM UTC) they will livestream some presentations and announcements. They will cover the basics of Bitcoin and blockchain technology as well as how NAV Coin works in detail, and give a roadmap for their future development plans. The full broadcast is predicted to be less than an hour.
The highlight of the conference is expected to be a surprise announcement during the roadmap presentation. While I cannot spoil it for you, I can confirm that it’s very interesting and will anonymize NAV even further, which has been their constant goal since releasing NAVTech into the world.
NAVTech, which went live fairly recently, is the codename for their anonymous transaction system. Instead of sending coins to one another directly, users who wish to protect their financial privacy can instead send them to a cluster of servers. This obscures the trail of coins from one person to another, whereas Bitcoin’s standard protocol allows analysts to connect the dots and piece your identity together.
The servers do this by mixing NAV together in pools one batch at a time; coin inputs from the last batch are used to pay the intended recipients of the current batch, so the coins reaching them actually trace back to random strangers. To prove the servers’ honesty, all of this is tracked on the Subchain, an encrypted sub-blockchain under NAV’s that only outgoing servers can read (but anyone can use for verification).
For now, this system requires a bit of trust. All of the server clusters are operated by the NAV team itself, making it technically centralized. Before the end of the holidays, however, they plan to have fully decentralized it, so that anybody meeting the criteria can set up server clusters of their own. It requires a bit of know-how, but rewards you with NAV tokens, not unlike being a miner.
This and other news has caused a recent price resurgence on Poloniex. Other anon coins such as Monero are known for their high market caps, and NAV is up over 600% since NewsBTC covered its pseudo-fork in July.
