The following are questions that are often asked about Neutrino, fiancial privacy and the Neutrino Foundation. If you have any other questions, please contact us.
Neutrino is a virtual currency that offers enhanced privacy and security features and is designed to make financial transactions private by default in much the same way that secure connections (SSL) are the default choice for most Internet communication and commerce.
Learn more about Neutrino at What is Neutrino?
For details on how Neutrino works, visit How Neutrino Works.
Neutrino was announced to the world on 28-Feb-2014 via PR Newswire. PR Newswire has been trusted for more than 60 years and is supported and used by major U.S. corporations such as Microsoft and Pepsi. With 49,000 international distribution points, more than 10,000 U.S. news outlets, 30 industries and more than 80 U.S. regions and niche markets, PR Newswire is the largest media distribution outlet in the world.
The original Neutrino press release can be found here.
Neutrino was launched on 31-Mar-2014 when the first block of the block chain, known as a genesis block, was mined.
Neutrinos are generated through mining, a process by which computers on the network are rewarded for solving mathematical problems.
The Neutrino protocol initially released approximately 210,000,000 neutrinos through a block reward subsidy paid to miners over a targeted 3-month period. On top of the initial supply, the total number of neutrinos will increase by 1.1% annually through an adjusted block reward subsidy, also paid to miners.
Like Bitcoin, Neutrino is a decentralized protocol that is not directly owned or controlled by anyone. Developers at the Neutrino Foundation created Neutrino’s core protocol and software and subsequent changes are implemented by consensus among users of Neutrino.
Neutrino is free to use by everyone in the world and enables free trade in all jurisdictions, especially those with oppressive governments whose citizens are otherwise restricted.
The first step in using Neutrino is downloading and installing a Neutrino wallet on your computer.
You can get neutrinos in several different ways. For more technically minded individuals, neutrinos can be mined (See How To Mine Neutrino). Neutrinos are also available to buy and sell on several virtual currency exchanges (See Where To Buy Neutrino). Finally, neutrinos can be obtained through selling goods or services to other Neutrino users.
The potential for buying and selling with Neutrino is limited only by your imagination.
For the technical specs for Neutrino, visit Specifications.
Recent revelations about government eavesdropping underscore the growing need for digital privacy, especially as society becomes increasingly reliant on information technology and the Internet. One of the most important applications of information technology is financial transaction systems. While Bitcoin revolutionized the way money is exchanged, it is not inherently private. In fact, with Bitcoin, both your digital identity and transaction history are given away by default.
Many people believe that the desire to keep financial transactions private is indicative of nefarious behavior. The Neutrino Foundation believes that private financial transactions are not inherently suspicious and shouldn’t be treated as such.
Neutrino is designed to make financial transactions private by default in much the same way that secure connections (TLS/SSL) are now the default choice for most Internet communication and commerce.
Tor is and open source network of virtual tunnels that enables online anonymity and is resistant to censorship. To accomplish this, Tor routes communication through a free, worldwide, volunteer network consisting of relays which help prevent the disclosure of a user's location or usage patterns. Tor makes it more difficult for Internet activity to be traced back to the user and is characterized by the National Security Agency (NSA) as "the King of high secure, low latency Internet anonymity".
You can read more about Tor here.
You can learn more about how Tor works here.
Neutrino directly integrates Tor, making each Neutrino node a Tor hidden service on the network. This enables a distributed, anonymous and end-to-end encrypted network that is highly resistant to third party eavesdropping and censorship.
You can read more about how Neutrino uses Tor in the white paper: Neutrino: Peer-to-peer private cryptographic currency with integrated Tor hidden services.
While Bitcoin and other virtual currencies have an option to use Tor, Neutrino has Tor built directly into its core protocol. That is to say, Neutrino cannot run without Tor. This way, users can be certain that all nodes in the network are connected with the same privacy protection.
On top of integrating Tor, Neutrino takes advantage of Tor’s hidden service protocol. Each node on the Neutrino network is a hidden service, enabling end-to-end encrypted communication between nodes while keeping each individual node’s location private.
While Tor integration allows for identity privacy and resistance to censorship, it only addresses part of Bitcoin's privacy problem and thus is an incomplete solution. Perhaps the Bitcoin protocol's most serious privacy vuerability is the manner in which transactions are linked in the blockchain
The Neutrino developers are actively developing Transaction Isolation, an addition to Neutrino's core protocol that will disassociate all transactions from their addresses.
The implementation is a joint effort between Neutrino core developers and university based cryptographic experts and will be integrated into Neutrino's core protocol in 2014. Make sure to follow us on Twitter for updates.
The Neutrino Foundation is a non-profit organization dedicated to promoting privacy and innovation in financial transactions. We believe that having the right and ability to keep our financial lives private contributes to a free and open society. Our motto is Proudly Private.
We publish and maintain Neutrino, an open source cryptographic currency application and protocol, used to send and receive value via the Internet and in person. We also plan to engage in other privacy-related efforts, such as educating the public about the need for financial privacy and building applications that make it easy to protect your financial privacy.
If you're interested in supporting financial privacy, please consider becoming a member of the Foundation. You’re also encouraged to contact us if you think there is some other way you could contribute.