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TL:DR / OVERVIEW

Shield coin (XSH) is a contender on an already highly competitive playing field of stealth crypto-coins. By relying on functional stealth-tech, bold integration of the coin in social media, establishing an XSH marketplace and being quantum-resistant, the coin has serious potential to overcome top-dog players like Monero.

USE-VALUE

A basic feature of XSH is its use as a stealth coin. Stealth coins are vital, and will unfortunately continue to be in the 21st century. We’re living in the age of widespread digital surveillance, both by every government on the planet, as well as by corporations. The latter desire to steal every piece of information about you in order to sell it to marketers. The former aim to create a database of ‘potential sources of threats’, or whatever Orwellian language you want to use. Although I’m of the opinion that these two aspects of surveillance are just the tip of the iceberg as far as sinister dystopias are concerned, the fact of the matter is that people need the option of making transactions that are secure and anonymous.

If you care at all about avoiding a dystopic Black-Mirror-esque future, you should absolutely support projects that secure anonymity.

XSH holds this as a primary goal of their project. They aim to do this in at least two ways. TOR and Privatesend (DASH’s tech).

Privatesend works by mixing up the values of your wallet.

Example: You have 5 XSH. This 5 XSH is made up of, say, an input of five 1 XSHs. Like, you have 5 $1 bills.
Your wallet informs a masternode that you want to mix this value. Two other people tell the masternode they also want to mix 5 XSH.
The masternode mixes all the $1 bills, multiple times.
As a result, you have the same amount of money (5 XSH), but the specific inputs of that 5 XSH are now obfuscated. Nobody knows who sent who which $1 bill.

It’s the shell game, a cup and ball routine, only you get your money back.

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Wallets will be integrated in the TOR network, which will hide the user’s IP address.

I can only hope that as the project continues, the developer team for XSH will continue to find ways to establish security and privacy for transactions on the XSH blockchain.

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INTEGRATION

XSH has intelligent and bold plans on integrating it’s coin in existing social media like Twitter or Facebook. The basic plan is to utilize plugins or bots in order for users to send and receive XSH. Maybe you got lots of followers and want to reward a good comment. Maybe you’re running a marketing campaign and want an easy way to reward participants. You’d be able to send someone XSH. Integrating the coin in places that already have widespread use, like Facebook (despite obvious criticisms of the platform) can establish integration and ease-of-use of XSH. That’s really all you need for people to start considering XSH as a medium of exchange.

Obviously, sending and receiving XSH over social media like Facebook is security risks. But for those who aren’t worried about anonymity, Facebook probably isn’t the best place for you anyway.

Another plan for integration is the XSH marketplace, a place for buyers and sellers using XSH as currency. More than just offering online retail, the marketplace would further establish the coin as a means of exchange for commodities, thus integrating its use in the real world and establishing it as a store of value. By relying on the XSH community, the project hopes to promote use of the coin for exchange. This is essential for any coin’s success. The mistaken belief that cryptocurrencies should be treated like a precious metal or investment tool will lead many projects to fail. Actually using the coin as means of exchange is vital.

After the current bubble period bursts (if it hasn’t already), we’ll see lots of alt-coins fall off the map. The ones that survive will do so because of use-value.

PoW vs PoS

As it stands, XSH is PoW. Thankfully, it will move to PoS in the future. I honestly dislike PoW coins for a number of reasons.

First, PoW lends itself towards favoring those with concentrated computing power. Hence, coins like BTC are mined by factory-level operations in places like China or Iceland. This contributes to wealth-inequality in the distribution of the coins. It shouldn’t be a surprise that 40% of BTC is owned by some 1000 people.

Second, the immense use of energy required to run that mega-mining-farms is inefficient and contributes to global climate change. More power is used in a year to mine bitcoin mining than Ireland.

PoS is arguably more equitable. Yes, those with large stakes get more of a return, but anyone can participate in the process. It’s also far more energy efficient.

NOVELTY

It’s stealth. They’ll have a marketplace. They have plans for integrating the coin on social media. So what? What’s special about it?

If that’s not enough, try this. Perhaps the standing feature of XSH is that the coin claims to be ‘quantum resistant’.

Quantum what?

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Be warned: I’m no mathematician or computer geek.

The way blockchain works right now is by relying on keys, public and private. Public and private keys are linked to one another through math, basically, an incredibly large number (the product of two very large prime numbers). You get your private key, run a crazy math function on it, and then you get your public key.

Your public key is a mathematically mutated version of your private key.

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Public keys, are, well, public. People can see them whenever you make a transaction on a blockchain. Cracking the link between the two keys, at current computer power, would take longer than the current age of the universe. That link is what allows cryptocurrencies to be crypto.
Quantum computers will be far more powerful though. Whereas our computers use binary values of 0 and 1, quantum can use values between those two, called qubits. Qubits give quantum computers far more strength, so they can theoretically crack that link between public and private keys.

Crack that link, and you got the keys. Get the keys and you render the entire system insecure.

Have a quantum computer? Want lots of money? Why not hit up a crypto blockchain?

Quantum computing is an existential threat to blockchain technology.

XSH claims to be resistant to this by utilizing what’s called Lamport Signatures.

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Lamport Signatures work differently than the above mentioned link between private and public keys (linked through multiplying two very large prime numbers). Instead, private and public keys are related through a different kind of mathematical function and rely on choosing random numbers. More importantly than the math, though, is that Lamport Signatures are one way. After they’re used, the keys must be destroyed.

Lamport Signatures are a one-way road. The signature can only be used once. This was, understably, very inconvenient in the past. But, today, can be used to prevent quantum computers hacking their way into your private key via your public key.

XSH, using Lamport Signatures, would be theoretically immune to quantum attacks.

CONCLUSION

Stealth tech (including TOR), a marketplace, social media integration, PoS and quantum resistance. XSH has impressive tech behind it, and the developers rely on the community to keep the project moving forward. They didn’t hold an ICO or pre-mine. I have a preference for these projects, because their success is dependant on an organic process. The project relies on a strong community, and a strong community secures the project. IMO this lends itself towards more stable and long-term growth.

Shield is relatively new. Their roadmap is bold. Their tech is on point. At $0.04 a pop, this coin has no room for anything but growth. This coin is a long term hold as the dev team chops away at their roadmap goals.

Visit These Links to Learn more about SHIELD

Official Site = https://shieldx.sh/
Bitcoin Ann = https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=2234453
Discord = https://discordapp.com/invite/kgSXKrV
Twitter = https://twitter.com/SHIELDcurrency
Gitlab = https://git.shieldx.sh/