Re: Zipper (Turn your smartphone into a blockchain powerhouse)
 

The parts visible in the video are isolated from the main OS anyway, its done like that for security reasons so its like a minimal OS container that hosts the blockchain stuff

Re: Zipper (Turn your smartphone into a blockchain powerhouse)
 

Yes, people should read the white paper. The hypervisor is such that the Zipper system is able to take over control of the framebuffer to display it's content and interact with the user, without a rogue app on Sailfish or Android being able to bypass it's security.

Re: Zipper (Turn your smartphone into a blockchain powerhouse)
 

The fact of actually getting paid for your data or renting out your hardware is nice, as is the idea of cryptocurrency-made-easy.

But I'm not too keen on the fact that it uses its own token. It looks like yet-another-ICO, and a company of hoping to get at the center of a large economy. I have become wary of companies trying to lock me perpetually into their product, in an all-or-nothing-style, without alternatives. (One of the reasons I'm not using Facebook or any of its products, for example) Open standards are needed, community-driven, for the sake of progress, not profit.

Re: Zipper (Turn your smartphone into a blockchain powerhouse)
 

This is a really valuable point, I would not have any interest in working on something like this if it was not open. I can't speak for Carsten, but his track record speaks for itself as far as openness and community is concerned.

Re: Zipper (Turn your smartphone into a blockchain powerhouse)
 

Interesting read.
However, "secure" is difficult to make bullet-proof. I can be very well designed (like it seems in that case), but there are still some non-controlled attack surface.

From what I understand from the Image 2 (page 12 in https://zipperglobal.com/whitepaper.pdf), both are on top of the same linux kernel (I don't see the use of the hypervisor by the way if that is not a mistake in the image).
From talks of Greg Kroah-Hartman himself, we can see how much of the code in Android's linux kernel is out of tree (millions of lines), and never reviewed. Root exploits are well known.
On other platforms, there is said to be 2 and half kernel below the hypervisor in recent talks (the famous Intel ME case), so the hypervisor may not be the lowest level depending on hardware, and a lot can go wrong below it.
A lot of modems integrated in mobile chips have direct RAM access (which give Neo900/Purism solutions a selling point), and probably contain backdoors or at least vulnerabilities.

On another side, this container files are on the same disk as the Android/Sailfish system is, so there can be also exploits in filesystems drivers that can leak things there.


So, it is probably the best solution possible so far, and Stskeeps is someone I could trust on this, but I always take with a pinch of salt all things that are marketed as "secure" (macOS was probably presented with a "secure" login screen a few days ago :D).

Nice to see you back, Stskeeps. Good luck with this project !

Re: Zipper (Turn your smartphone into a blockchain powerhouse)
 

It all comes down to the threat model and who's your attacker. You don't necessarily want to have a Swiss Bank like security for most operations. It's not necessarily devices for a cypherpunk. It's meant to be for everybody and get people on a 'secure enough' setup. You want to make sure people don't needlessly lose money in scams, through stolen phones, or through bad actor apps.

As a comparison, contactless credit cards seem totally crazy security wise. But, actually, when I do transactions below some amount, I don't get asked for PIN. And it's very very convenient in shops. Despite the flaws.

Re: Zipper (Turn your smartphone into a blockchain powerhouse)
 

I'd like to say on my part that a major part of the reason I left Jolla back then was to pursue the idea of combining blockchain and mobile. We were toying with IPFS, Ethereum nodes on Android and Sailfish, Qt-based wallets quite early on. My only mistake was not to buy enough ETH back then. I think "ICOs" are terrible.

However. They show that people will finance ideas happily if they get a stake in it. We try to do things a bit more orderly - gauging interest, have people commit funds they have time to withdraw; make people re-confirm the interest; appropriately identify who contributors are, do anti-money laundering checks; be transparent; etc. We aren't even trying to raise 180m+ USD ;)

If you read the whitepaper ( https://zipperglobal.com/whitepaper.pdf ) the token itself is not a lockup. See this section for example:

Re: Zipper (Turn your smartphone into a blockchain powerhouse)
 

And if both of you had appropriate devices you'd very easily be able to exchange basic cryptographic identity information through something like Ultrasonic networking in person.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w6lRq5spQmc

Re: Zipper (Turn your smartphone into a blockchain powerhouse)
 

Every app should have it's own sub-account of it's own separate from your regular money. You can do P2P or take-back systems if you design them to just fine - it's just another kind of token.

Albeit not that mobile capable yet (too much RAM requirements), https://z.cash/ is quite interesting technology.

Regarding the public ledger; https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rai_stones were a interesting historical precedent.

Re: Zipper (Turn your smartphone into a blockchain powerhouse)
 

******** bingo is awesome.

This is far from being such a project. I fully agree that the current state of things is crazy and this is part of the reason why we're doing a project to genuinely make it a proper out of box experience. I even get confused with some of the setups needed - I even randomly found 250 EUR worth of Bitcoin I had totally forgotten I had. It's like the amount of manual work to get mobile internet working back in the day.

How about you send me a private message on here and we'll have a more real-time conversation on some medium (Telegram? IRC?); and then gather our thoughts and differing views into a post for the rest?