Today we reached a new milestone at Mostro: we have officially released the Beta version of our mobile app. Building censorship-resistant systems is far more complex than developing traditional systems, because our goal is to minimize single points of failure. We constantly think in adversarial terms so that what we build can withstand censorship and the persecution of citizens. Unfortunately, this affects more than 50% of the world’s population (and some studies estimate the number at 70% or more). That is why user privacy will always be our top priority.
What’s next? There is still a lot of work ahead. We are currently in a stabilization phase: finding bugs, improving the system, and at the same time working to make Mostro less centralized. Our goal is to move from a “single point of failure” to “multiple points of success”. Unlike its brother project @lnp2pbot, Mostro will not rely on a single node. We want competition between different Mostros, each offering the best possible service, so that users themselves can decide which Mostro they want to operate with.
Let’s talk about scams Over more than 4 years of experience with @lnp2pbot, we have seen many different ways scammers try to defraud users. This experience has been invaluable in hardening Mostro, but it does not make us complacent. We know new attack vectors will appear, and we must remain vigilant.
In any P2P system, a certain level of trust in the platform is unavoidable. For example, if a user opens a dispute because the counterparty is acting suspiciously, the person opening the dispute must trust that the dispute will be handled responsibly and impartially. That is why, at this stage, Mostro follows the way Bitcoiner communities traditionally operate—communities built on the trust that their creators have earned over time, we invite community creators to run your own Mostro.
We estimate that by the third quarter of the year, the Mostro rating system will be much more mature. At the moment, we have a very early version available at https://mostro.watch. The goal is to create incentives so that anyone—not only already established communities with pre-existing trust, but even an anonymous individual—can gradually attract users to their service without sacrificing privacy at the same time without putting users at risk. To achieve this, we analyze statistics derived from Mostro events themselves. We will explain this in more detail in a future post, but if you want to learn more, check out https://github.com/MostroP2P/mostro-score-web and https://github.com/MostroP2P/mostro-score. If you have ideas to improve this scoring system, we would love to hear from you 😃
None of this would have been possible without the collaboration of our team. Special thanks to Catrya, Arkanoider, Andrea, Brian, and Aylu, as well as to all the contributors who have shared code, feedback, or suggestions along the way. Huge thanks as well to our testers, who have been relentless in testing and retesting, finding bugs, and helping us make our systems more robust. And last but not least, a massive thank you for the incredible support from @HRF 🫶 and OpenSats.
Thank you all! 🧌🫶