Auditing Gini Transactions

Before we focus on the relatively technical details associated with auditing Gini transactions, let’s review a few important principles to appreciate why Gini’s BlockGrid and privacy features work the way they do.

All Gini Transactions Are Private by Default. Regarding the transactions of all private stakeholders throughout the Gini ecosystem, there is only one thing that the general public has a legitimate need to verify: No new money is created out of thin air from any transaction. That’s it. All your other private data, including the identities of the transacting private parties, your private payment addresses, the amount of your private transactions, the purpose of your private transactions, your private IP addresses, and all other private transaction details are nobody’s business. If you want to reveal your private information to a merchant or stakeholder, that’s your choice, but your anonymity and privacy should be protected by default in all other cases.

Block Explorers Violate the Human Right to Privacy. Gini does not provide a “block explorer” or any other way to randomly spy on your transactions like the block explorer on the Bitcoin network and many other cryptocurrency networks. In fact, a “block explorer” is a naive and terrible violation of the human right to privacy. As CPUs, GPUs and A.I. become more powerful, it will become even easier than it is today for oppressive governments and corporations to map entire cryptocurrency networks and trace publicly visible crypto transactions directly to their owners.

Block Explorers Are a Dictator's Best Weapon Against Human Liberty. Without truly private crypto transactions, there is no way to purchase the goods and services that are necessary to launch any meaningful protest or resistance against an oppressive government. This has already happened in China, North Korea, several GCC nations, and it’s guaranteed to happen in many more countries as global economic conditions deteriorate. Bad economies inevitably create legitimate reasons to protest against oppressive and incompetent governments. But eliminating transaction privacy enables politicians to predict and instantly suppress any form of civil disobedience before it starts, which prevents citizens from holding politicians accountable for their policies and actions.

Block Explorers Are Not Necessary to Keep Stakeholders Honest. The “block explorer” concept is one way to encourage honesty on a cryptocurrency network, but it’s not the only way. Gini’s BlockGrid architecture protects privacy and protects the integrity of the Gini ecosystem. Remember: “If you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to fear” was the infamous quote by the Nazi Propaganda Minister, Joseph Goebbels. Anybody who says they don’t care about privacy because they have nothing to hide has no clue how essential transaction privacy is to democracy, political liberty and all human rights.

Now back to the relatively technical stuff. . . .

The Global Transaction Vault. Gini transactions are private by default, but certain stakeholders may have a legitimate reason to verify certain transactions that have been executed by certain parties. So, the Gini BlockGrid architecture accommodates several transaction verification scenarios. It accomplishes this with Gini's decentralized Global Transaction Vault (GTV). The GTV is a logically separate decentralized ledger that contains all Gini transaction details. From an end-user's perspective, the GTV works like a very restrictive block explorer, but none of the transactions in the GTV are visible without the account owner’s permission, just like in real-world auditing scenarios

Technical Notes:

The GTV segment of the public ledger is infrequently accessed because it’s only for auditing purposes. Thus, it’s relatively easy for the decentralized Dynamic Guardian nodes to host the GTV segment of the public ledger. More specifically, the performance demands for the GTV are relatively lower compared to the real-time speed and throughput requirements for the other components of the Gini architecture.

Additionally, in the future we may add a “Vault Node?” option in the Dynamic Guardian node GUI. If toggled by the user, this would cause the Dynamic Guardian node to switch to operating as a decentralized network archive node (using IPFS) with a larger storage capacity requirement than the standard Guardian nodes. This could also include different levels of ledger snapshotting corresponding to different levels of vaulting, which could be activated for each node depending on how much storage space the GTV requires over time and how much available storage capacity a given Dynamic Guardian “Vault Node” has when this option is switched on.

Based on community feedback, we might enable Gini stakeholders to choose how much privacy they want by enabling them to click a "Private Mode" On/Off switch in the Gini software GUI. If we implement this feature, we will be (grudgingly) compelled to provide a block explorer for transactions that are executed when users turn off their own Private Mode. In those cases, those particular non-private transactions will still be anonymous, but they will be publicly visible by any node running on the Gini Network just like transactions in Bitcoin, Ethereum and nearly all other cryptocurrency networks. Thus, if Gini doesn't provide a block explorer for those transactions, somebody else would eventually. So, to ensure quality control, Gini would provide the block explorer in that case.

Of course, transaction visibility in any Gini block explorer would only affect a user if they manually turn off Private Mode in their own software; it would never affect any other stakeholders. Regardless, transactions executed when Private Mode is turned on would never be visible in any block explorer and Private Mode will always be the default mode.