Spectrecoin

United Kingdom Based Exchange

XSPEC/BTC

South Korea Based Exchange

XSPEC/BTC

South Korea Based Exchange

XSPEC/BTC

Cyprus Based Exchange

XSPEC/BTC

Hong Kong Based Exchange

XSPEC/BTC, XSPEC/ETH, XSPEC/XQR

Argentina Based Exchange

XSPEC/BTC

Netherlands Based Exchange

XSPEC/BTC, XSPEC/ETH, XSPEC/XLR
*Uses SPECTRE stealth addresses

Netherlands Based Exchange

XSPEC/BTC
*Uses SPECTRE stealth addresses

P2P Decentralized Exchange over Tor Network

XSPEC/BTC

Community OTC Trading

Trade XSPEC or SPECTRE for various cryptocurrencies

You can buy Spectrecoins on various exchanges. Currently the exchange with the highest Spectrecoin (XSPEC) volume is Livecoin.

1. You need to access the chosen exchange's offical website and register there. Take precaution to avoid phishing scams.
2. When you enter the exchange's front page after registration, use the search function to find XSPEC among the listed coins and choose a suitable trading pair, i.e. XSPEC/BTC (traded for Bitcoins) XSPEC/LTC (traded for Litecoins).
3. After choosing a trading pair for Spectrecoin you will need to transfer chosen trading pair coins (LTC or BTC) to your account. Find the 'Deposit' option in the Wallets, Account, Portfolio, or Profile section, depending on the exchange.
4. Take BTC for example as your coin to trade for Spectrecoin (XSPEC). You select BTC among the list of coins and tokens and the exchange will generate for you an address (wallet) to transfer your trading coins from your own wallet address or exchange account that you already control.
5. Once you have deposited funds in your wallet, go back to the 'Markets' or 'Exchange' section to find XSPEC and choose the suitable proposition among ‘Sell Orders’ prices as well as amount you want to buy.
6. After you have agreed to a certain price and amount you press ‘Buy XSPEC’ and wait for the trading operation to complete. If you offer a bid below the current price, you will have to wait to see if your order gets filled. If you choose a price from the 'Sell' or 'Asks' orders, that XSPEC would appear in your ‘Balances’ immediately.
7. After that it is highly recommended to transfer your new coins off the exchange to your Spectrecoin Wallet to secure them and receive additional XSPEC staking rewards.

4 Types of Transactions

The Spectrecoin software allows 4 different types of transactions and it is important to understand the difference between those. We need to remind you that the network has two coins, ‘normal‘ XSPEC, much like Bitcoin and associated with ‘normal‘ UTXOs and where transactions can be linked to each other. Then we have the anonymous SPECTRE, a different type of coin that can only be spent using ring signatures and where transactions cannot be linked and where the sender / receiver cannot be determined.

XSPEC > XSPEC : These are ‘normal‘ transactions, much like Bitcoin, where the transaction is visible on the blockchain and can be traced from sender to receiver by the public keys but not to your real life identify or IP address.

XSPEC > SPECTRE : These transactions create anonymous SPECTRE coins that can subsequently be used for anonymous transactions. The balance of SPECTRE coins will show in your ‘PRIVATE’ balance.

SPECTRE > SPECTRE : These are fully anonymous transactions using ring signatures and these transactions send SPECTRE from a ‘PRIVATE’ balance to another ‘PRIVATE’ balance using a stealth address only. The ring size for all transactions is set at 10, ensuring strong privacy.

SPECTRE > XSPEC : These transactions generate XSPEC from SPECTRE and spends anonymous outputs to generate new coins. These newly generated XSPEC have no transaction history.

How to Conduct an Anonymous Transaction

As mentioned above, an anonymous transaction is created when you send an amount of SPECTRE from your ‘PRIVATE’ balance to another ‘PRIVATE’ balance using a Stealth Address. In these types of transactions anonymous coins are sent using ring signatures and there is no way to link the sender to the receiver or what exact amount is being sent (in most cases).

Firstly, go to the ‘Send‘ tab and select ‘PRIVATE‘ as the source of your funds. If you don’t have any coins in your private balance then use the ‘BALANCE TRANSFER‘ tab to transfer some coins into your private balance.

Next, enter the receiver's stealth address and the amount to send. Click 'Send Payment' and enter your passphrase when asked to confirm. Another dialog window will ask you to confirm the fee and payment. Confirm the transaction.

Here you can see the transaction on the Spectrecoin Blockchain Explorer.

Stealth addresses protect the recipient’s privacy, and Ring Signatures protect the sender’s privacy.

VIDEO: Starting the wallet for the first time / Encrypting and Backup

Step 1: Download and Install the Wallet Client

Download the Spectrecoin Desktop Wallet Client. The client has install packages for Windows, Mac, and various Linux versions.

Step 2: Sync your Client to the Spectrecoin Network

Next, you’ll want to ensure that your client is fully synced to the Spectrecoin network.

The icons in the upper-right hand corner of the wallet client will indicate the status of your wallet. Compare the icons below to your wallet’s icons in the upper-right corner to determine if your wallet is syncing properly. You can also hover over the icons in your client to reveal more status information.

Step 3: Send Your Spectrecoins to Your New Wallet

Now you will send your Spectrecoins to your new wallet. Navigate to the Receive screen to view your wallet addresses. By default, you will have two addresses: one normal address and one stealth address. For now, we are going to use the normal, Default Address.

Note: Never send your coins from an exchange to a stealth address. This may be supported in the future, but for now always use a normal address.

Send your Spectrecoins from the exchange to your Default Address. Once they appear in your wallet, proceed to Step 4.

Step 4: Encrypt Your Wallet

This step isn’t necessary to stake coins, however, you should do this to add a layer of protection to your investment.

Navigate to the Encrypt Wallet feature and type in a passphrase. Remember to store your passphrase in a safe place.

Step 5: Backup Your Wallet File

Again, not necessary to stake coins, but absolutely critical to ensure that you do not lose your coins. Make sure you save the backup file on multiple devices such as PC, USB, external drive, etc.

Step 6: Unlock Your Wallet and Begin Staking!

You’re now ready to begin staking! Now that we have everything set up, the last step is to unlock your wallet for staking only. The quickest way to do this is to click on the lock icon in the upper-right corner. This will prompt you to enter your passphrase. Once you have confirmed your passphrase, the lock will turn orange. If you hover your mouse over the lock icon, you will see a popup that informs you that your wallet is encrypted and unlocked for staking only.

Now, if you hover over the Spectre icon that is to the right of the lock, you will see a popup to let you know that you are staking your coins, along with other information such as estimated time to earn reward.

Note: If you see a message that says “you are not staking because you do not have mature coins,” do not worry. This message will go away in roughly 1 to 2 hours, at which point your wallet will begin staking your Spectrecoins.

That’s it! You should be all set.

To avoid losing your funds, the general rules for dealing with cryptocurrencies apply. The most important of them being:

1. Do not store large amounts of money on exchanges, but in your local wallet.
2. Encrypt your wallet, either by encrypting the wallet file itself, or by storing it in an encrypted container of some sort.
3. Do not forget your encryption password!
4. Back up your encrypted wallet to multiple places (see How to back up your wallet).
5. Keep your system secure. Use a dedicated system for running your cryptocurrency wallets if possible.

To encrypt your wallet using the inbuilt functionality, go to "Wallet Encryption" -> "Encrypt Wallet" and type in your password.

You should back up your wallet to multiple places, to avoid accidental loss.

Go to "Tools" -> "Backup Wallet" to back up your wallet.

The .dat file that you are getting contains your address book, change addresses and all the corresponding private keys in a BerkeleyDB database format.

It is a good practice to add the date of your backup to the file name, e.g. "Spectrecoin-2019-06-01.dat". If you have encrypted your wallet before, the backup will be encrypted as well.

First, close the Spectrecoin program.
To restore your wallet backup, you must put the backed up .dat file inside the Spectrecoin "data directory".

The location of this data directory for the different operating systems is:

* Windows: C:\Users\Username\AppData\Roaming\Spectrecoin

* Linux: ~/.spectrecoin

* Mac OS: ~/Library/Application Support/Spectrecoin

You must rename your backup to "wallet.dat" and place it inside this directory.
If there is an existing "wallet.dat" file, rename that file first, e.g. to "wallet-old.dat".
After you have installed your wallet.dat file here, start the program. You should now see your addresses and funds.

Proof of stake (PoS) is a type of algorithm by which a cryptocurrency blockchain network aims to achieve distributed consensus. In PoS-based cryptocurrencies, the creator of the next block is chosen via various combinations of random selection and wealth or age (i.e., the stake).

In contrast, the algorithm of proof-of-work-based cryptocurrencies such as bitcoin uses mining; that is, the solving of computationally intensive puzzles to validate transactions and create new blocks.

Spectrecoin operates on a Proof-of-Stake version 3 protocol (PoSv3), and the differences are described below.

Proof of Stake has a fairly long history. Not to cover every detail, but cover broadly what was changed between each version to arrive at PoSv3 for historical purposes:

PoSv1 - This version is implemented in Peercoin. It relied heavily on the notion of "coin age", or how long a UTXO has not been spent on the blockchain. It's implementation would basically make it so that the higher the coin age, the more the difficulty is reduced. This had the bad side-effect however of encouraging people to only open their wallet every month or longer for staking. Assuming the coins were all relatively old, they would almost instantaneously produce new staking blocks. This however makes double-spend attacks extremely easy to execute. Peercoin itself is not affected by this because it is a hybrid PoW and PoS blockchain, so the PoW blocks mitigated this effect.

PoSv2 - This version removes coin age completely from consensus, as well as using a completely different stake modifier mechanism from v1. The number of changes are too numerous to list here. All of this was done to remove coin age from consensus and make it a safe consensus mechanism without requiring a PoW/PoS hybrid blockchain to mitigate various attacks.

PoSv3 - PoSv3 is really more of an incremental improvement over PoSv2. In PoSv2 the stake modifier also included the previous block time. This was removed to prevent a "short-range" attack where it was possible to iteratively mine an alternative blockchain by iterating through previous block times. PoSv2 used block and transaction times to determine the age of a UTXO; this is not the same as coin age, but rather is the "minimum confirmations required" before a UTXO can be used for staking. This was changed to a much simpler mechanism where the age of a UTXO is determined by it's depth in the blockchain. This thus doesn't incentivize inaccurate timestamps to be used on the blockchain, and is also more immune to "timewarp" attacks. PoSv3 also added support for OP_RETURN coinstake transactions which allows for a vout to contain the public key for signing the block without requiring a full pay-to-pubkey script.

Basically, ‘staking’ algorithm awards nodes (wallets with synchronized blockchain that are online for keeping the peer-to-peer network operational.

A node/online wallet (and user in the end) receives 5% annually on the amounts of coins it has in the wallet being online at all times (or 24/7).

5% is the rate you receive if all the Coin Supply of the network(around ~21 mil currently) are being on the synchronized wallets and online (or ‘staking’).

Bonuses are being distributed every time a new block of transactions being accepted to the block chain (or every 60 seconds).

Reward for generating accepted block is around ~2 XSPEC.

Sometimes you generate a block, but someone was faster and got their block accepted first, then your block would be called ‘orphaned’ and you won’t receive reward for that block

As in practice the amount of wallets ‘staking’ online is much lesser in the moment (e.g 7 mil instead of 21 mil Coin Supply), 5% rewards of the whole Coin Supply (around 1 mil of XSPEC) would be distributed between fewer amount of people.

And as in our example given, XSPEC owners that hold 30% of coins being staked will receive benefits as if 100% of coin supply would have been ‘staked’, effectively increasing their bonus rewards rate from staking from 5% to 15%

Spectrecoin was created in 2016 to improve on the concept of ShadowCash (SDC). The ICO took place starting Nov 20, 2016, until Jan 8, 2017. The goal was to add Tor integration to the ShadowCash codebase, and further extend the concept of an anonymous currency to target remittances via a mobile application. To release the ICO funds through an escrow, the Tor integration part was completed and submitted a few days after the ICO had ended.

Unfortunately, only few funds could be acquired during ICO, totaling to ~17 BTC (~16,000 USD at that time), which was a non-existent sum to support a serious project like this. Since then the project was almost exclusively founded by direct donations of community members that still were somewhat not enough to continue future development.

Donations are accepted in XSPEC or BTC and will be used to fund ongoing development. If you would like to fund the development of a particular feature or bugfix, please contact the developers on the Spectrecoin Discord Server before making your donation.

Team Direct Donations Addresses:

Spectrecoin (XSPEC)	SdrdWNtjD7V6BSt3EyQZKCnZDkeE28cZhr
Bitcoin (BTC)	31xGDqBbmkjwGHfkgCBH5mPrY5sDDaKSVQ
Bitcoin Cash (BCH)	188NniMchAoSTiXhXnb4BqfRSjmiDxoBm5
Bitcoin Gold (BTG)	ALDRyNRgmFqsW1RfkRzA5BiRHs3WndYoev
Litecoin (LTC)	MUVATA3Rpuwq3L2u8wAxYgW8LXXbwrCoxs
DASH (DASH)	Xq82jaBUse6fqx1vd9q6i4z1rPLJtGp2ig
Zcash	t1U5PA7KMFRmnv6dEVtJ85Bof8qAsaukC6U

In order to run a stable project professionally (multiple developers, cryptography, outsourcing, maintenance, and marketing), it requires a stable flow of funding.

In-Client Donations Slider

You can use the in-client mechanism to donate a percentage of gained staking rewards in addition to DCB's (Development Contribution Blocks) to development of the project by setting the percentage slider and pressing accept at the bottom.

We are introducing the first stage of our bug bounty program that will cover serious or critical bugs and we will later expand on this to include bounties for smaller bugs as well. We are putting up the bounties to make the Spectrecoin software better and more secure and we believe that active participation by the community will help to achieve this and benefit us all.

If you believe you have found a bug or a problem with the Spectrecoin software, submit a report (details below) and contribute to making Spectrecoin more secure. However, before you submit a bug report, please search our GitHub and other sources to see if the problem has already been reported / discovered. If the issue has not been described anywhere, then follow the instructions at the end of this document for how to submit the bug you have found.

Please do not report critical vulnerabilities publicly.

Bug Bounties and Rewards

• £1000 – Deanonymise Spectrecoin (SPECTRE <> SPECTRE) transactions. (Proof that a protocol is not anonymous, i.e. a flaw in the implementation of ring signatures or the stealth address technology).


• £1000 – Deanonymise TOR as implemented in Spectrecoin and real IP address leakage. (Proof that you can identify a real IP address on the network). This relates to the implementation of TOR in the Spectrecoin software ONLY and not bugs in the TOR software.

The bounties will be be paid out in XSPEC to the equivalent value at the time of a submission.

All the bugs / errors found need to relate to and identify faulty source code (in the ‘master’ branch), not just reported issues that you experience without being able to relate this to specific code.

Contact the developers privately by sending an e-mail to [email protected] or DM the developers directly on Discord (@Tek or @Helix) with the details of the issue. Do not post the issue on GitHub or anywhere else until the issue has been resolved.

Ideally you would create a pull-request on GitHub in the proper repository with the necessary fix and make the developers aware.

Many cryptocurrency wallets can connect to other nodes on the network through Tor, yet the other nodes can still be identified by their IP address as the user routes the traffic through several relays on the Tor network, including one entry and one exit node.

In Spectrecoin however, all nodes on the network are operating as Tor hidden services; they are not addressed by their IP address, but by their onion address which encodes a public key used for traffic encryption along with a way to find a route to that node. No exit nodes are involved, and at any point in time, the communication between two nodes is fully encrypted.

Spectrecoin comes bundled with the latest Tor software that has been included without any functional changes. It is not possible to connect to the Spectrecoin network without using Tor, as all nodes are only reachable via their hidden service address. No real IP addresses are known to any network participant except for their own, and it is infeasible for an attacker to analyse the network structure or censor the network.

Spectrecoin has inbuilt support for OBFS4, an obfuscation protocol that hides the nature of the traffic that goes through it. By incorporating OBFS4, it is possible to use Spectrecoin even in countries where access to the Tor network is censored, like China or Iran. In short, the integration of OBFS4 effectively ‘wraps’ the Tor traffic in another layer making it appear as normal internet traffic.

Privacy, security and anonymity are a basic human right; these rights are being eroded by increasingly draconian laws which seek to criminalise privacy.

Furthermore, people all over the globe use centralised remittance (money transfer) services on a daily basis by sending billions of dollars across international borders. Remittance services such as banks, Western Union, PayPal or other mainstream services are highly controlled and centralised. However, many people, especially immigrants in western countries, do not have a bank account or they lack the funds to pay the sometimes exorbitant fees.

Spectrecoin thus provides a secure, decentralised, low cost and private option to send funds to anyone, anywhere in the world.

You can use exchanges to buy and sell Spectrecoin (XSPEC) for Bitcoin (BTC). Once you register an account on an exchange and deposit some Bitcoin, you can buy and sell Spectrecoin for a small brokerage fee.

After you have purchased XSPEC from one of the exchanges you should transfer the coins to your wallet. Sending coins to someone else directly from an exchange does NOT give you the same anonymity guarantees as using the standalone wallet.

(Additionally, exchanges can undermine your anonymity or even freeze your assets if you store them on the exchange; BISQ is a decentralised exchange that operates on the Tor network and consequently avoids these issues.)

With the use of a block explorer it is possible to view the transactions that have occurred on the public blockchain; this data can be used to compile a rich list. However, any such list for Spectrecoin is inaccurate, as Spectrecoin has both public and stealth addresses, and the stealth addresses are not visible on the public blockchain.

Now that the Proof-of-Anonymous-Stake consensus has been activated since version 3 and the percentage of the network converted to SPECTRE grows, the already inaccurate rich list information is quickly becoming more obsolete.

Some people express concern that a large amount of Spectrecoin is concentrated in a few wallets and that the individuals who own the wallets may sell a large quantity of Spectrecoin at once, thus causing the price to drop drastically.

If this were to occur it would simply be a natural process of supply and demand, and under most conditions the price would correct in a reasonable amount of time as buyers purchase the Spectrecoin for a cheaper price. Additionally as the daily traded volume of Spectrecoin increases, the chance of a significant price drop due to a large amount of Spectrecoin for sale on the market decreases.

Furthermore if it were to happen multiple times, the chance of it happening again would exponentially decrease as the Spectrecoins would be distributed more evenly throughout the network, further reducing the risk of a sudden massive sell-off of Spectrecoin by any single individual.

It would also be unwise for any single individual to sell a large amount of Spectrecoins at once because they would not receive a desirable price. It would make sense for the individual to sell them over time.

Similarly, there are large holders of Bitcoin, and although the price has changed dramatically at times due to supply and demand and market corrections, it has increased steadily over time as most large holders know it would be unwise to sell all at once.

The Spectrecoin developers and community leaders aim to have it listed on more exchanges, and are in discussions with several exchanges; however the decision to list a coin is up to the exchange and is often based upon the volume that the coin generates in a given day.

Please do NOT spam the Spectrecoin communication channels by asking the question “When are you getting Spectrecoin listed on Poloniex/Bittrex etc.?”

Download the latest version of the Spectrecoin Desktop Wallet Client from the Downloads section.

The client has install packages for Windows, Mac, Linux, and Raspberry Pi.

The Desktop Wallet must be fully synced to the Spectrecoin network; the sync process should begin automatically with an internet connection.

If you wish to send Spectrecoin to your wallet, navigate to the Receive screen to view your wallet addresses. You will have two addresses listed here: one is a public address and one is a stealth address (presently you can only withdraw funds from an exchange to a Public address).

For added security it is recommended that you encrypt your wallet with a passphrase. Navigate to the Encrypt Wallet feature and type in your desired passphrase; remember to store it in a safe place (not on your computer).

To ensure that you do not lose your coins, navigate to the Backup Feature and save the backup file on multiple devices such as your PC, USB, external drive, etc.

Staking is a method to reward users in a decentralised fashion for supporting the Spectrecoin network. In order to stake, your wallet needs to be open, unlocked, and connected to the Internet.

XSPEC utilises both Proof-of-Stake Version 3 (PoSv3) and Spectrecoin's unique Proof-of-Anonymous-Stake (PoAS). Staking rewards are fixed at 2 XSPEC or 3 SPECTRE per block plus generated fees. This is a fair and secure way to maintain network consensus and to reward users who support the network by keeping their wallets open. PoSv3 and PoAS are both energy efficient consensus mechanisms that do not utilise large energy consuming mining hubs as is the case with Bitcoin and other Proof-of-Work coins.

Everyone has an equal chance of getting a staking reward based upon the amount of XSPEC and SPECTRE they hold in their wallet.

To stake, your wallet needs to be open and connected to the Internet. You also need to unlock your wallet (at least for staking) if you have set up a passphrase. The quickest way to do this is to click on the lock icon in the upper-right corner of the wallet which will prompt you to enter your passphrase. Once you have entered your passphrase, the lock will turn orange. If you hover your mouse over the lock icon, you will see a popup that informs you that your wallet is encrypted and unlocked for staking only.

The staking reward is probabilistic and can be estimated with the Spectrecoin Staking Calculator. There is no minimum amount needed to stake.

Once you have received a staking reward, after 450 blocks the newly minted coins will contribute to your stake weight on the network, and in turn increase your staking probability. (Note that not everyone is staking, so if only 50% of the total coins in existence are staking, you will forge blocks twice as often, and your total reward will increase accordingly.)

No, all you need to download is the wallet. It comes with Tor natively integrated and is intuitive and easy to use.

Without any changes, Spectrecoin will easily process 15-30 times the transaction rate of Bitcoin due to the faster block time. If we started to head in that direction, which we are very far from, then we would look at block efficiency improvements such as SegWit. We could potentially have a block size increase combined with improved pruning of the wallet, or more blocks. It’s actually quite simple and easily implemented.

The scaling problems that Bitcoin is experiencing are actually governance problems. Spectrecoin is much easier in that respect because of the much smaller team size. This means that as we continue to grow we’ll need to ensure that we can still make decisions in an efficient way. As long as we can, making changes to scale the number of transactions we can handle is easy. Of course, it’s premature to make such decisions now when our blocks are mostly empty.

1. Go to the debug console (Tools -> Debug, then the "Console" tab).
2. Type "rewindchain 1000" and hit Enter.
3. Wait for your wallet to sync.
4. Spectrecoin - Wallet stopped syncing | Corrupted Blockchain download | Rewindchain

That's because it is displayed incorrectly, your coins are still there. It's a visual glitch that has existed in this wallet since the beginning of the project. Future wallet versions will hopefully make these problems a thing of the past. You can still stake and send/receive coins, it will simply not be displayed. Sometimes restarting the wallet might help, and you can also check your balance on the block explorer here: Spectrecoin Blockchain Explorer

Please try restarting your wallet. This issue will be fixed in future wallet versions