The Ghost cryptocurrency is currently the focus of many discussions as it was launched by John McAfee and has been live on the mainnet for a few days.
The cryptocurrency uses a PoS (Proof of Stake) consensus system and its key strength is to provide maximum privacy to its users.
The presentation of the project immediately aroused a lot of criticism because it isn’t a real new cryptocurrency, but rather a rip-off since almost 90% of the whitepaper seems to have been copied from PIVX, a privacy-focused crypto that was born from a Dash fork.
Ghost would thus be a sort of fork of the PIVX project and this could lead to significant problems in the future, especially legal ones.
Anyway, getting into the details of how the cryptocurrency works, in order to manage this asset efficiently it’s necessary to use a dedicated wallet, the Ghost Wallet, which is currently being tested and therefore it’s not recommended to use it until the new version will be released.
However, we can already see what it looks like.
Upon first startup, the system requires to accept the Licence Agreement.
Afterwards, a wallet is required to connect to the Ghost network and this can be done via the simple interface where it is possible to restore a wallet through the Recovery Phrase.
One interesting aspect of this blockchain is that it is possible to block funds but not to stake them because, as highlighted by the same whitepaper, anyone could remove the funds from staking and steal them.
For this reason, the proposed system is called Cold-staking: funds are delegated to a fund and only the fund can perform staking.Â
This procedure is easy to perform with the wallet: just click on “Cold Staking Node” and then enter the public key.
As far as staking is concerned, it does not require a minimum amount of tokens and by doing it, users immediately start to get a feel for the fees generated by this blockchain.
To become a Ghost Veteran it is necessary to stake a minimum of 20 thousand GHOST, which at the current price is a little more than 20 thousand dollars. For the moment the annual rate is 7.74% but it is subject to change.
Bear in mind that each produced block (8Mb) – 1 every 2 minutes – generates 12 Ghosts that are divided into 6 for Ghost Veterans, 4 for those who have staked the tokens, and 2 go into a pool dedicated to the development and growth of the project.
As far as supply is concerned, we currently have 13.5 million Ghost in circulation and a maximum of 55 million for the total supply.
As a cryptocurrency, Ghost wants to achieve a high level of anonymity by:
- Using stealth addresses: new keys are randomly generated with each transaction;
- Hiding the sender: the signature of the transaction is blurred and this is allowed through the Ring-Signature;
- Hiding the total sent: the Ring-Signature is combined with the RingCT (Ring Confidential Transactions).
We can clearly see this type of transaction distinction from the wallet.
Another interesting aspect is the presence of a peer-to-peer marketplace, that of Particl, which allows buying and selling products within the network.
Another function is the introduction of aliases to which stealth addresses are linked to simplify transactions and exploit a privileged channel. It is expected that these types of transactions will have a fee cost of 5 Ghost.
There are plans to release a browser wallet as an extension that will take the name of MetaGhost in order to facilitate fast operation instead of installing all the relevant software.
How anonymous is Ghost really?
Ghost has compiled an overview of the most interesting crypto assets in the privacy domain, putting it in first place. When it comes to privacy, it claims to be first in its class. Next come Particl, Monero (XMR), PIVX, Dash and in fifth place Zcash (ZEC).
