Some purists are bashing on incognito for selling hardware nodes which in their view can contain all sorts of loggers/backdoor that compromise the networks’ security/anonymity.
What is the best argument to dismiss such fuckery?
I must admit - I also find it odd you sell such nodes and am curious about the rationale of creating and selling them.
A bit offtopic: Would be cool to have an audit of the implementation of monero’s tech in incognito
I want to start off by saying I am just a community member so my comments are not directly indicative of the core teams. I will try to answer your questions how I understand them.
pNodes were created as a means to allow anyone to be a part of Incognito regardless of technical ability/understanding. They have made a truly plug-n-play hardware available to the masses allowing even grandparents and children to join in.
Incognito also allows users (with more technical skills) to set up their own vNodes (with code provided on GitHub) on their own hardware.
Incognito, to my knowledge, is the only project to think long term on how to include everyone regardless of price increases in crypto.
You can choose to fully stake a vNode or pNode with the cost currently being ~5,000usd at today’s prices. If someone can not afford this they can choose to purchase a pNode and stake with community-funded stake making some 35% of the payouts with no upfront cost to them (besides the cost of the pNode). Over time, after they have enough to fully stake their pNode they can switch 100% self staked and receive all the rewards.
Incognito goes one step more and allows staking of PRV without ownership of any node generating users with as little as 1 PRV, 21% apy (current rate; subject to change).
So as you can see Incognito is accessible to anyone no matter current PRV holdings. Most other cryptocurrencies that I am familiar with require you to have a full stake in order to participate.
Thank you for your response, but it doesn’t answer the issue with the integrity of pnode…
I’m pretty sure someone was doing some testing on that, looking at the packets at one point. I can dig deeper to see if I can find a thread. I’m not quite sure if it was just being talked about, or any results were posted.
Sorry about that. There was talk about making all the code that runs on pNodes open source. So in the event someone doesn’t trust what is on the pNode they could reinstall with the open source code.
Please keep in mind that it is still possible to install your own OS on a pNode but you will lose the functionality of funded stake and thus will be responsible of staking the node yourself.
You raise a difficult question but an important one. I have no reason to trust pNode on my home network. Even if incognito team has 100% pure intentions I haven’t had any assurance that an attacker wouldn’t find an exploit in it.
I am grateful for the pNode option. I know from personal experience that it brings positive attention to the project. Not all potential incognito clients are privacy champions. Most (all?) of us are interested in passive income.