FiiiPOS - FAQ

Background

FiiiCoin is designed to "incentivize" the contributors of the cryptocurrency payment ecosystem. Today the most common problem found in the blockchain world is a lot of cryptocurrencies are built for speculative investment but rarely being used for circulation and payment. Most of the people who purchase cryptocurrency always hope for a good return of investment instead of truly support a project. I am trying my best to correct everyone mindset.

There are very few merchants who actually support cryptocurrency and truly understand what is blockchain. The following are the commonly asked questions:

Why do I need FiiiPOS since I am happy accepting fiat currency now?

FiiiPOS is an extra payment accepting tool for you to accept payment from a different target group of customers who actually own cryptocurrency. It does not meant to be replaced by conventional credit card POS terminal. We treat it as "additional option".

How can I cash out the cryptocurrency?

At current stage, we enable simple payment accepting feature only in FiiiPOS. We are in the middle of working with multiple cryptocurrency Over The Counter (OTC) service provider to implement cash out feature - FiiiOTC into our FiiiPOS, allowing you to convert cryptocurrency into fiat currency in just one button click, and you will receive fiat currency in your bank account within 24 hours. Please stay tune for our FiiiOTC service by Q2 2019.

The volatility of cryptocurrency is high, how can I ensure my today's earning is not depreciated?

FiiiLab had foreseen such problem, hence we have FiiiExchange service to be rolled out by Q2 2019 as well in order to let our FiiiPOS merchants to quickly exchange high volatile crypto with a stable crypto (normally backed by fiat currency or real assets as a reserve such as USDT, GUSD, PAX, etc).

So that, merchant can secure the received value. At the end of the day, use FiiiOTC service to cash out the stable crypto into fiat currency. At this stage without FiiiExchange and FiiiOTC service, merchant can limit accepting only stable crypto from the customers.

Why mining in FiiiPOS?

FiiiPOS mining is an extra feature to attract and educate merchant to accept cryptocurrency. We intend to create one stone two birds effect whereby the merchant is being incentivized for using the FiiiPOS, generating a little income while the FiiiPOS is idle for charging, at the same time helping in maintaining our blockchain network.

I would like to emphasize to our FiiiPOS users that this device is not a mining machine. I hope this machine is put into good use. Let the true cryptocurrency circulation really happen.

How FiiiCoin mining work?

Delegate Proof of Capacity (DPoC) rely on the hashes that was pre-calculated and stored in a storage and then these hashes to be submitted to a dedicated mining pool. Therefore, during the very beginning stage of the mining work, FiiiPOS must initialize the nonce files first. It should take about 40 minutes to initialize 100MB of nonce. Once it is done, it will begin the mining work by submitting the nonce and hashes to the mining pool. The mining reward is distributed based on the quantity of hashes submitted to the mining pool that actually contributed to the block generation work. The mining reward is released daily at 2.00AM UTC +0800 and to be credited to your FiiiCoin wallet in your FiiiPOS by default.

Please take note that due to the nature mentioned above, you must expect the mining reward is very little due to the quantity of hashes submission to the mining pool is very limited. In order to achieve full hash rate, you need about 1 month time to initialize 29GB of nonce in your 32GB SD card (29GB is the usable storage of a 32GB SD card). Our FiiiPOS program that while submitting hashes to the mining pool, it utilize the 2nd CPU of the FiiiPOS to generate nonce. Hence, you will not need to stop the mining while generating nonce. In fact, you leave the mining on despite occasionally not able to connect to the mining pool, it will still generate nonce. Once the mining pool connection is established or restored, you can get into speed in submitting the nonce and then getting more reward.

Why my FiiiCoin mining keep showing 0 H/s hash rate in my FiiiPOS?

FiiiCoin mining is actually done by submitting hashes to the mining pool. However, due to the new FiiiPOS new empty SD card has very little of hashes, therefore, it take only a few seconds to finish uploading all the hashes that it has. You will see the hash rate will show some value for a few seconds then stop and become zero. The reason is you have finished submitting all the hashes that you have in your SD card.

What is verifying status during FiiiCoin mining?

The FiiiPOS is trying to connect to the FiiiCoin mining pool, however, due to the network is congested, it failed to establish connection. Hence, the status keep showing verifying which at the background it is trying to keep reconnect. However, please leave the machine on still as it is generating more nonce despite failed to connect to mining pool. So that, you can submit more nonce to the mining pool when it is able to connect to the mining pool.

When will FiiiCoin mining open for all users?

Currently, we only open mining for our merchants due to the reason that in order to attract merchant support our cause, we incentivize and appreciate our merchants who actually done the value contribution to the payment ecosystem first, lower down their risk of cost in purchasing the POS machine, transaction fee, withdrawal fee and also crypto volatility. We shall open mining for our consumer users when FiiiPOS adoption has achieved huge availability around the world.

With the limitation of funding and at the same time pushing the adoption, we leverage on the beauty of blockchain incentive tokenomic design to let the crypto community who are into the same belief, together achieve the mass adoption of cryptocurrency payment.

Why my country is not supported in the list in FiiiPOS and FiiiPay account registration?

We launch our product starting from our home ground which is Southeast Asia countries, attempt to build strong foundation, then stage by stage, gaining feedback, refine and enhance, then only go for mass market expansion.

During the mid or latest by end of November 2018, we will open account registration to all countries except some sanction countries.

Summary

FiiiLab strive to answer all the questions above and provide one stop solution to all our customers. We want and we will, be the world first cryptocurrency payment solution provider to everyone, then together all the cryptocurrencies achieve the same success by bringing true value of blockchain to the payment ecosystem.

Stay tune and thanks for your support!

Milestone Achieved - FiiiCoin Mining

New Milestone Achieved!

28 October 2018 is our FiiiCoin mining exact launch date. Hurray! We have deployed a patch to all our FiiiPOS terminal to enable mining FiiiCoin. Finally the FiiiCoin feature has completed one of the milestone in our road-map.

Misconception of Mining

Since our FiiiPOS has enabled for mining, I have received a lot of complaints, and yes, I have heard your voices, I acknowledged it. We are working hard on solving all the issues.

Firstly, our FiiiCoin mining pool is facing heavy network congestion. I can see thousands of active FiiiPOS has begun mining. The server unable to cope the sudden surge of concurrent connections, hence causing the mining force quit or occurrence of network error. We are in the middle of fine tuning the mining pool source code as as well increasing number of servers to solve this issue.

Secondly, base on the feedback that I have received, I find that the public has a misconception or wrong perception about "mining" in the blockchain world. The "mining" is an activity that contribute value to the blockchain ecosystem in return getting some incentive. For instance, Bitcoin, the person who contributed proof of work by competing being the first in finding the correct hash. Same concept applies to FiiiCoin.

The FiiiCoin mining reward is distributed base on the quantity of work that you had performed. Therefore, the key condition is the number of hashes that you had submitted to the mining pool. The following are the criteria that directly affect your FiiiCoin mining reward:

1. Hashes reading speed from SD card
2. Hashes submission to the mining pool base on network speed
3. Number of hashes initialized and plotted in SD card
4. The competition from other FiiiPOS

User Experience

FiiiCoin consensus is proof of capacity, hence, the mining cannot be kicked start immediately without plot files. You may read my previous article Delegate Proof of Capacity for more detail. Therefore, we enforce user to initialize 100MB size of plot files first prior to mining. It usually takes 40 minutes to 1 hour time to prepare the plot files depending on the SD card data writing speed. FiiiPOS can support up to 32GB SD card only.

Once the FiiiPOS has completed the 100MB plot files initialization, it will begin the mining at the same time plotting more files up to 29GB (32GB SD card usable space). Therefore, at the beginning of mining, you should expect very little FiiiCoin will be mined because of limited hashes contributed to the mining pool. You will need to wait 1 month time to get 29GB of SD card fully filled up with hashes. The reason is the 2 core CPU in FiiiPOS, one core will be used for mining, another core is to compute SHA3-256 hashes for file plotting.

Calculation & Assumption

FiiiCoin coinbase reward is 250 per block. Each block average generation time is 1 minute. Please take note that mining pool takes 10% pool fee to maintain the server cost and distribute to FiiiPOS referral campaign. Therefore, the reward left only 225 FiiiCoin to be shared and distributed to all the miners.

Assume there are 10,000 FiiiPOS mining at the same time and all are equal having 29GB of hashes:

225 / 10,000 = 0.0225 FiiiCoin per minute
which can generate up to 1.35 FiiiCoin per hour
which can generate up to 32.4 FiiiCoin per day
which can generate up to 972 FiiiCoin per month

The above condition is possible based on good network condition, mining pool no downtime, 24/7 FiiiPOS mining non-stop, and no new FiiiPOS join into the pool.

The early bird who participate in mining definitely earn more FiiiCoin compare to the later. When the quantity of FiiiPOS make available worldwide and all are participating in mining, the more mining reward to be shared and the gain will be reduced. You may use the same formula above to assume for 100,000 FiiiPOS.

Disclaimer

Please be informed that FiiiLab Technology Ltd does not guarantee the FiiiCoin mining reward. The FiiiCoin mining is done under user own willingness and due diligence. User is expected to fully understand the concept of FiiiCoin delegate proof of capacity consensus algorithm.

A Sad Situation

FiiiPOS is designed for cryptocurrency payment. The mining feature is to lower the risks for merchant to try accepting cryptocurrency payment. It is not easy to push the cryptocurrency adoption due to it is still skeptical to most of the people especially non-tech savvy. The mining feature can be a good start, a new concept, a revolutionary payment solution. The FiiiCoin original purpose is to ease the burden of merchant to pay the transaction fee, hardware cost and the value fluctuation at the same time help maintaining our blockchain network without additional hardware cost.

However, most of the individuals who purchase our FiiiPOS is to mine FiiiCoin. It has defeated our original purpose to create FiiiPOS. It is sad to see many FiiiPOS units have been kept in a warehouse just for mining. I hope every FiiiPOS owner please use it to circulate cryptocurrency. Only circulation can bring value to the ecosystem, not mining. I wish FiiiCoin will not be abused to become another speculative investment coin.

What's Next?

Our next target now is to solve merchant daily cash out problem, hence will begin our next milestone development - the FiiiOTC service to be included into the FiiiPOS and FiiiPay. We want to let our users and merchants to be able to convert cryptocurrency into fiat in just one button click.

FiiiLab strive to serve blockchain community with the best cryptocurrency payment one-stop solution in the world! Stay tune! And, thanks for your support!

Delegate Proof of Capacity

Today's topic is about the consensus algorithm - Delegate Proof of Capacity (DPoC) which we developed for FiiiCoin.

History

Proof of Capacity (PoC) or also known as Proof of Space (PoSpace) is a consensus algorithm originated from Burstcoin which is somehow similar to Proof of Work (PoW) that you can find in Bitcoin. However, PoC uses storage instead of computing power to perform proof of work. Burstcoin is the first cryptocurrency that uses PoC consensus in year 2014. 

Why PoC?

We like the idea of Burstcoin which is energy efficient for mining and the concept is just nice to fit into our FiiiPOS terminal to enable for mining. We all know that the hardware spec of a POS terminal is similar to a mobile phone. Mining a PoW crypto which is power hunger using mobile phones are unfeasible, considering the weak CPU, the heat generation and the battery lifespan will be shorten quicker than usual, also trying to compete with ASIC using mobile phones is a crazy idea.

How PoC Work?

PoC is a consensus where miners make use of their device storage to keep the pre-computed hashes prior to the mining process begun. Every miner need to allocate a desired amount of storage for mining, then the mining script will plot the hashes to the allocated space and also group the hashes into scoop.

Image credits to Burstcoin Whitepaper

Once the hashes have been plotted into the allocated space. miner connects to the Node to get mining work which contain the block producer signature, base target and next block height. The miner then determines which scoop to look for the hashes, then start scanning the hashes in the plot file to look for the correct nonce. At this time, there is no CPU involvement at all. The plot file reading speed and the number of hashes in the allocated storage space determine the mining success rate.

Every account generates a unique different set of hashes base on unique account ID and nonce value. And, the miner just need to pre-compute the hashes once and save into the storage, then these hashes can be reused multiple time even though there is a block being successfully mined.

The PoC concept is a bit different compare to the Bitcoin PoW consensus whereby the hash is generated base on the entire block data. However, in order to mine a PoC block, it is determined by finding the correct nonce within the target deadline. The Node check the last 30 blocks generation time to determine the next block target deadline in order to maintain average 5 minutes (24 blocks 4 minutes for Burstcoin) block produce time. The miner need to find the correct hash within the target deadline.

Why Not Cloud Mining?

The common question that asked by the people who have listened to our idea: Since mobile phone is unfeasible for mining, why not put it into cloud or server?

A blockchain are supposed to be meant for mining for everyone. The original intension of Satoshi Nakamoto, the founder of Bitcoin, created Bitcoin – a P2P payment system that govern and maintain by everyone, using the extra computing resource that you leave it idle. Our objective is to do the same, let everyone participates in mining, together maintain the blockchain network, while leaving your FiiiPOS terminal or mobile phone running idle and charging battery.

We do not need expensive ASIC machine to power the blockchain, wasting too much energy for little purpose. We emphasize reusability, your mobile phone is the FiiiCoin node, the more mobile phone from different individual come in as part of the FiiiCoin blockchain, the higher the security of our FiiiCoin.

FiiiCoin is specifically designed for ASIC proof, quantum computer proof, cloud mining proof, computer proof and also restricted to only FiiiPOS and mobile phones allow to participate in mining. Hence, the consensus – Delegate Proof of Capacity (DPoC) is formed.

PoW vs DPoC

Rule	PoW	DPoC
Finding hash	Real time	Periodic
Hash base	Entire Block	Device ID + Account ID + Nonce
Competition	First + Highest Difficulty	First + Lowest Target Deadline
Compute Power	CPU / GPU	CPU + Storage
Minable	Everyone	Restricted device only

Potential Exploit

Burstcoin being susceptible to time-memory trade-offs, thus allowing miners to mine using PoW and using just a small fraction of space to be at the same rate as “honest miners”. The Burst PoC2 should solve the problem and FiiiCoin is also prepared for the same potential exploit.

Secondly, in order to restrict certain device to be able to participate in mining is also a challenge since today’s virtual machine technology is mature, a PC can easily virtualize a few mobile phones to perform FiiiCoin mining.

The Balance of Security, Speed, Decentralization

Every blockchain technology always grasp between the balance of decentralization, security and performance. There is no one silver bullet or one size fit all solution that can achieve these 3 characteristics. When you want to improve the security of the blockchain, you either need to jeopardize the performance or decentralization.

FiiiCoin has been designed specifically for payment ecosystem, it is a less decentralized blockchain but with better security and performance. The FiiiPOS and mobile phone mining restriction is to protect our merchants and supporters interest. With delegated PoC consensus, we can achieve higher transaction per second by letting the Super Node keep generating block with no restriction, however, it is to be confirmed later when our technical team finish the development and testing in the test net.

The Super Node responsible in producing blocks, while the normal node (wallet) is responsible in validating the block and distribute the data across the blockchain network. All the miners who wish to connect to the Super Node, they have to either own a FiiiPOS terminal or paying monthly subscription fee to enable mining with a separate mining software.

Due to the concern of a mobile phone storage limitation, it is not encouraged to install full node into the mobile phone as the blockchain size is growing overtime. However, we provide a separate lightweight wallet that only sync block headers for mobile phone.

The Death of POS Terminal

POS Terminal manufacturers are facing very tough competition in the market. There are so many POS terminal that accept credit card payment or mobile payment choices available. Payment solution provider or banks are giving out POS terminal to their merchants for free. There is transaction fee competition as well. It is just a tool for the merchant to accept payment.

Today, in order to compete with the existing market, our POS terminal – FiiiPOS need to be capable of generating revenue for our merchants even there is no transaction at all, especially in the crypto industry where not many users adopt into it yet and also without government support. Furthermore, we are into transaction fee war as well, giving lower fee compare to the bank and other payment provider. The FiiiPOS machine cost can be ROI after a period of time.

With FiiiCoin DPoC design, merchant generate free FiiiCoin out from their idling and charging POS terminal. The FiiiCoin earning can be used to offset the transaction fee as well as the cost of the machine. The FiiiCoin value is maintained by everyone who uses FiiiCoin to make payment. We are forming an ecosystem that everyone does not dump FiiiCoin to exchange for fiat currency, instead making it usable anywhere around the world with large merchant network who own FiiiPOS terminal. This is something that the existing payment solution provider cannot provide at the moment.

Summary

I believe crypto enthusiast will condemn about our blockchain design for not being fully decentralized. I would like to emphasize our priority now is taking care of our merchants and attempting to build a large payment ecosystem. It is not easy to make everyone happy unless I sell ice-cream. There is no one size fit all solution. Our goal is to distribute FiiiPOS worldwide and making it available to everyone every where, travelers able to spend crypto overseas without the need to exchange foreign currency.

I believe a crypto which is usable and acceptable by people is only considered as successful. Cryptocurrency is not supposed to be a speculative investment tool. It should not be just a technology showcase as well. No matter how good is your blockchain technology, when there is no adoption, no application, it is considered meaningless and valueless.

I am open for any comment, feel free to drop me a message in the comment section below if you have a better idea in designing a blockchain for our business model.

The Security of FiiiPay & FiiiPOS

On June 5th and 6th, me and my marketing team colleagues attended the Singapore Smart Nation Innovation / Innovfest Unbound event, setting up booth and pitch to promote our FiiiPOS and FiiiPay. We received a lot very useful feedback and comment about our product. The most frequently asked question is related to security which I would like to explain more in this post.

HTTPS

Firstly, the most common way to secure a communication channel is to use encryption. Our POS terminal and digital wallet communicate with our payment gateway API using SSL. It is to prevent user data from being leaked when users or merchants are connecting their devices to a public WiFi. You do not know there may be someone who is also connecting to the same WiFi network implanted some sniffing script to the router to monitor the network traffic. If the communication is not encrypted, the hacker can see the data flow between your POS terminal or digital wallet.

Image via contextis.com

Therefore, we strongly encourage our merchant who is using our FiiiPOS terminal not to connect to a public free WiFi hotspot, but putting up a SIM card into the POS terminal to use own network instead.

DNSSEC

All our public domain are protected with Domain Name System Security Extension (DNSSEC). It is a mechanism to prevent hackers from hijacking the DNS and faking the response data to the user, which is known as man-in-the-middle attacks.

Image credit to Michael Earls

Firewall & DMZ

FiiiPay and FiiiPOS servers are secured with perimeter network (known as Demilitarized Zone - DMZ). All the servers are protected with firewall rules that locked down most of the network port access. The common default ports are being changed to random port to prevent hackers from using brute force attack to guess remote access password.

The web and API servers are separated from the database servers where by the public access servers sit in the DMZ but the database server sit in the trusted zone or local area network which restricted to be accessed by the dedicated servers and IP addresses only.

The Vault

With the firewall setup above, all our cryptocurrency nodes are being protected and the nodes access are being restricted. We call it the vault as it can only be accessed by the approved staffs. The servers password are changed frequently and it is strongly type password. The cryptocurrency private key are backed up regularly.

Full Disk Encryption

All the servers storage such as hard disks and solid state disks are all fully encrypted. The servers are setup in a remote data center managed by the service provider. The servers contain the very valuable cryptocurrency private keys. In order to prevent the system engineer in the data center access to the server disks, the disks are fully encrypted. So that, it could prevent the system engineer from trying to unplug the disk and put it into another server or computer to attempt to obtain the private key.

Mobile Application Digital Signature

All the FiiiPay and FiiiPOS application are digitally signed and published to the application store. FiiiPOS application can only be installed to the POS terminal. Hacker cannot install any malware, script, key logger or applet to the POS terminal physically or remotely. So the chances of Spectre and Meltdown exploit is very low and near impossible.

Two Factor Authentication (2FA)

FiiiPay & FiiiPOS provide optional feature for the users and merchants to enable which is the two factor authentication. By default, SMS authentication is enabled. When user or merchant attempt to withdraw cryptocurrency out from the digital wallet, they need to provide the OTP from the received SMS.

We also provide optional Google Authenticator and email authentication option for 2FA in order to reduce the risk of user crypto being stolen by the hacker who has cracked the user password and gained access to the user account.

Artificial Intelligent

FiiiFinance will be equipped with machine learning capability to review all the crypto withdrawal request submitted by the FiiiPay and FiiiPOS users. It collect all the withdrawal timestamp, IP address, geolocation, device ID, operating system, withdrawal amount, crypto type, etc data. Based on the user app usage behavior, pattern and the withdrawal request history, it can raise alert to the finance team and put the withdrawal transaction on hold for human review when it detect unusual activity for a particular account. This security measurement can ensure the lower risk of the crypto to be stolen by the hacker who has gained access to a FiiiPay/FiiiPOS user account.

Payment Code Algorithm

The QR code, Bluetooth and NFC payment mechanism actually rely on HMAC (hash-based message authentication code) to generate the unique OTP which is impossible forge and brute force attack. The generated payment code is always unique to different account at different time and it will be valid for a short period of time.

Summary

Our system architecture are setup in enterprise standard. Our customer digital asset and data are the utmost important, hence we are very serious and invest heavily on system and network security. Cyber security is always the hot topic in blockchain world as we occasionally read the news about X exchange platform had been hacked and lost X million of USD worth of cryptocurrency. We ensure this tragedy will not happen in our platform.

If you are a cyber security expert or ethical hacker, please drop me a message by connecting to me at LinkedIn. We are planning for a hackathon event for our product to look for security exploit.

iOS - AppStore
Android - PlayStore

If you are interested in our multi-cryptocurrency POS machine - FiiiPOS, please drop me an email at sylvester.lee@fiiipay.com

If you are interested in our project, please visit our website at https://fiii.io

Facebook - https://www.facebook.com/fiiipay/
Telegram - https://t.me/fiiicoin

Hybrid Payment Network

Recently a lot of fans are curious about how our crypto digital wallet and payment work. Our payment solution has fasten the bitcoin payment process. As you may not know, a bitcoin transaction need at least 9 blocks confirmation in order to consider the transaction is confirmed, otherwise, the transaction has the potential to get reverted. Why the transaction get reverted if you ask, it is because your transaction in the block is being mined by a miner who has slow network connection, but another block which does not have your transaction included has been mined successfully at the same time by another miner with faster network and their block has been confirmed by majority of the peer nodes. Therefore, it is better not to assume all transaction will be confirmed in the matter of time.

Problem

Bitcoin transaction confirmation is slow. A block is propagated every 10 minutes, and to get 9 block confirmation, you need to wait 1 hour and 30 minutes to get your transaction confirmation. If you are trying to buy a cup of coffee using bitcoin, are you willing to stand in front of the cashier and wait for your payment is being confirmed for at least 1 hour? I doubt so.

Workaround, Not Solution!

Hence, we come out a workaround to solve this problem. If you understand how bitcoin work and how data are distributed among peers in a decentralized network, you should know there is a no silver bullet for the slow transaction confirmation problem. However, there is a project worth one's while to look into which has the capability to solve today's cryptocurrency common slow transaction problem: IOTA. It is a whole new solution design, it has no blockchain concept, it has no "mining" transaction confirmation concept, it uses Directed Acyclic Graph (DAG) or so called Tangle technique which rely on the network peers to co-audit and co-govern transactions with each other. The more the peers participate in the network, the faster the transaction to be confirmed and the harder the data can be tampered eventually the higher the security.

Back to FiiiPay payment solution, we go for hybrid. The reason is it is not feasible to just purely rely on decentralized network to achieve everything. I know a lot crypto fans out there are condemning about any cryptocurrency that has centralized service is not a good crypto and it could be a scam project which I actually disagree. If you truly understand how blockchain work, you should realize that in order to fasten the transaction confirmation, you need to sacrifice the security by increasing the fault tolerance level, the transaction audit is going to be lenient, validation work is reduced, hence it is vulnerable for attack.

Hybrid Payment Network

Firstly, we treat bitcoin and other cryptocurrency wallet as a bank account instead of a digital wallet. In order for the users to start using FiiiPay, they have to transfer bitcoin from their bitcoin wallet to our bitcoin wallet. Each FiiiPay user account will be given a unique bitcoin address. We have a separate cryptocurrency service, FiiiFinance, responsible to track the amount of bitcoin which has been deposited to the particular address that owned by particular FiiiPay user account.

The deposited bitcoin from the user will be recorded in our centralized database. From here onward, users proceed to transfer bitcoin to another FiiiPay user, or start making bitcoin payment to merchants who use FiiiPOS. All the transaction happen within our payment network. Therefore, we are no different from PayPal or Alipay.

Scalability & High Availability

Our architecture design is a distributed system design that support load balancing, it can easily scale by adding hardware to the network when the demand is getting higher. Currently, a single server can support up to 1500 transaction per second, for three servers can support up to 4500 transactions per second. Furthermore, it promote high availability by having multiple servers online at the same time.

Network Security

The API servers are only exposed to the public in strict firewall rules network zone, the FiiiFinance and KYC sensitive data servers are hosted in trusted zone which are interconnected within a secured tunnel virtual network. Our digital assets, the crypto nodes, are separately setup in different region. It is our risk mitigation strategy to avoid creating a single point of contact for hacker to access into our nodes.

Data Protection & Disaster Recovery

Since all the crypto transaction are happening within our network, our database to be of utmost importance to ensure the data are well kept and recoverable due to technical failure or disaster, and also making sure performance meet the expectation and does not affect the user experience.

Artificial Intelligent

FiiiFinance will be equipped with machine learning capability to review all the crypto withdrawal request submitted by the FiiiPay and FiiiPOS users. It collect all the withdrawal timestamp, IP address, geolocation, device ID, operating system, withdrawal amount, crypto type, etc data. Based on the user app usage behavior, pattern and the withdrawal request history, it can raise alert to the finance team and put the withdrawal transaction on hold for human review when it detect unusual activity for a particular account. This security measurement can ensure the lower risk of the crypto to be stolen by the hacker who has gained access to a FiiiPay/FiiiPOS user account.

Summary

Hybrid Payment Network is a workaround for all crypto common slow transaction confirmation problem. It enable any crypto payment to be made immediately. This solution is not new as it is commonly found in today's cryptocurrency exchange platform.

Our FiiiPay Beta version is ready for download. Feel free to share your thought at the comment section below.

iOS - AppStore
Android - PlayStore

If you are interested in our multi-cryptocurrency POS machine - FiiiPOS, please drop me an email at sylvester.lee@fiiipay.com

If you are interested in our project, please visit our website at https://fiii.io

Facebook - https://www.facebook.com/fiiipay/
Telegram - https://t.me/fiiicoin

FiiiChain

Due to the recent workload, the new post update come a bit late. Today's topic is about our customizable blockchain solution - FiiiChain.

FiiiChain is a blockchain code foundation written in C# programming language. It is a framework which can be customized base on business requirement, be it whether you want to use it to keep transaction data (like Bitcoin to create a crypto coin) or any custom format data.

When do I need to use FiiiChain?

1. You have a database which would like to be open for everyone to access.
2. You allow everyone to make data changes in the database together.
3. You want to ensure no one can modify the history of data.
4. You want everyone to take part in governing the data integrity.

If your business model do not have the above requirement, you do not need blockchain or FiiiChain. I discover that a lot of ICO projects do not actually need a blockchain solution but yet still utilizing the technology just for the sake of crowd funding. In the end, the technology does not help in the business but creating scalability issue to the business ecosystem. The situation is like using the wrong tool to solve the wrong problem.

FiiiChain Foundation

FiiiChain is coded base on layered architecture design pattern. If you are a coder and curious about what is layered architecture, feel free to read this post. In short, it is a design pattern that segregate the whole chunk of source code into a few small modules for a specific task at the same time flexible enough in making them work independently but also anytime can combine them into a 2-tier or 3-tier or N-tier solution. It is like a car as a whole, split it into multiple parts, each part play a different role. You can combine the parts to become a bicycle or motorbike or car or bus depending on your requirement.

Block Data Structure

In FiiiChain foundation, you can define your block data structure, the data format that you want. In fact, you may just treat blockchain as an encrypted database. It is not a fancy or complicated technology once you have understood it.

The difference between a blockchain and a RDMS database is the data is not kept in a structured manner. There is no "table" concept in the block. You may define a JSON data structure and store in the block. The blocks are chained between each other base on the current block hash and previous block hash. The hash value is calculated based on the overall data of the block. The way how it use the hash to verify block is similar to verify a file checksum. If the block data has been modified, the hash value of the block will be changed, then the link between current block and previous block will be broken.

The blocks are stacked in a line from bottom to top, hence you will notice the keyword "block height" in the blockchain explorer. It mean the height of the block that you are looking at. The higher the block, the latest the block is and the latest data it stored.

FiiiChain can be customized to store block, transaction, memory pool data and so on into LevelDB (current Bitcoin DB) or the famous SQLite or any other lightweight file base client-side database.

Components

So for FiiiChain core component, it has been segregated into the following modules:

1. Network
2. Blockchain
3. Transaction
4. Consensus
5. Account
6. Hash Algorithm

Each module play a different role and their code logic can be changed easily in plug and play style as long as you code the component base on the interface defined in the FiiiChain foundation guideline.

Network

Once FiiiChain has been deployed into a node. It must be interconnected between nodes and must be in peer-2-peer (P2P) method since blockchain is a decentralized database, hence the only way to synchronize data is to connect and retrieve data from the peers in the same network. The more node we have, the tighter the security and data governance.

Blockchain

Blockchain is the key component of all, it responsible in following the consensus rule to identify the eligibility and ingenuity of a block passing down by the peers and chaining the block to the main chain by verifying the block hash, transaction signature and the proof of work.

FiiiChain has the flexibility to generate multiple side chain to cater for certain business scenario or solving certain problem. For example, it is possible to work on the lightning network implementation that leveraging on a side chain to create a payment channel for peers to make transaction in a temporary chain then finalize the settlement after a period of time to reduce number of transaction written into the main chain. This is considered as a workaround to solve today's Bitcoin scalability issue.

Transaction

Transaction component responsible in maintaining and managing all the transaction data in memory pool by working closely with Blockchain and Consensus component. It also backtrack all the unspent transaction output (UTXO) to calculate particular account wallet balance. It also verify the transaction hash and signing the transaction with private key.

Consensus

Consensus is the rule that defined in the blockchain to generate blocks, store transactions, create mining work. This is where you define the hash algorithm for proof of work, genesis block setting, coin supply limit, block generation time, block difficulty setting, coin base reward rules and mining fee setting.

You may define a new rule here such as Proof of Stake, Proof of Capacity or Practical Byzantine Fault Tolerance.

Accounts

In FiiiChain, it shall not be limited and not necessary must be using ECC or PGP/RSA method to generate private/public key set, as long as the method to generate account is unique, unpredictable and secured.

Hash Algorithm

There are quite a number of the hash algorithm available in the market. You can pick one base on your requirement such as ASIC counter or CPU/GPU friendly for your proof of work.

Summary

FiiiChain foundation is a highly flexible and customizable blockchain framework. Our main goal is to train up the existing corporate C# developer to pick up blockchain to solve the blockchain talent shortage problem in the world. C# is a higher level programming level which is easier to read and understand compare to C++.

We want to remove the dependency on the current available blockchain platform in the market. There are a lot of restriction that you have to play with them. Our solution promote fast code development and deployment to the market since we will have Bitcoin template in FiiiChain and programmers can easily pick up, learn and build from there.

Please follow us if you are a C# developer and would like to learn more about FiiiChain.

Facebook - https://www.facebook.com/fiiipay/
Telegram - https://t.me/fiiicoin

If you are interested about our project, you may download our whitepaper here:
English Version
Chinese Version

My LinkedIn Profile

#redefinecryptocurrency
#fiiichain

FiiiPOS

As promised, one post per week, if you missed my first post about my startup story, feel free to read from here.

Today topic is about FiiiPOS. I received a lot of questions regarding FiiiPOS. People are interested to know more about it but our official website is still under construction, hence have no other choice but to share the information through my blog here.

FiiiPOS stand for Fiii (our trademark) Point-of-Sales, it is a POS terminal that can accept cryptocurrency as payment. At this moment, we are avoiding fiat currency and limiting to support cryptocurrency payment only due to the rules and regulations about cryptocurrency is still unclear and yet to be confirmed in Malaysia, China and other country.

FiiiPOS support multi-cryptocurrency which mean not limited to Bitcoin only. We are progressively increasing more cryptocurrency support. The top 20 most popular cryptocurrency you can find in coinmarketcap.com will be supported.

The Purpose

Our main purpose of this product is to provide a platform for all the cryptocurrency available in the market to circulate and usable for transaction. A cryptocurrency value is determined by its supply and demand. If a cryptocurrency cannot be used for transaction, it is useless and valueless despite of how good the technology behind it can offer.

How It Works?

FiiiPOS is considered as FiiiPay Merchant Edition and will be used by valid merchant only. We have a KYC process for merchant and it is differ from User Edition, the FiiiPay app. Merchant need to submit valid business licence, owner detail, contact and shop location while setting up FiiiPOS for the first time.

Prior to the user make payment to the merchant using FiiiPay app, firstly both party must come into a mutual agreement of selecting which cryptocurrency for payment. FiiiPOS has a series of cryptocurrency choices to pick, however, the condition is merchant must be willing to accept the particular cryptocurrency.

Payment

Once both party agreed upon using one particular crypto, for example: Bitcoin, merchant setup from the FiiiPOS by choosing Bitcoin, then enter the local fiat currency amount (we make it easy fiat-2-crypto conversion calculation), then choose the payment acceptance method. FiiiPOS support 3 payment methods so far:

1. QR Code
2. Bluetooth
3. NFC

Step 1: Choose Cryptocurrency

Step 2: Enter local fiat currency amount and it will instantly calculate fiat-2-crypto conversion base on the price reference from coinmarketcap.com.

Step 3: Choose payment method.

Step 4: User open up FiiiPay app then scan the QR code appear on the FiiiPOS

The payment is made instantly once user scan the QR code appear on the FiiiPOS. If you wonder how does the FiiiPay app link with your cryptocurrency wallet, the answer is NO. FiiiPay does not link directly to your cryptocurrency wallet. FiiiPay is not a crypto wallet. FiiiPay does not request your crypto wallet private key. FiiiPay is just a third party centralized digital wallet, same goes to FiiiPOS. 

Deposit

Before user begin to use FiiiPay, user need to deposit some amount of crypto to FiiiPay first. Every FiiiPay newly registered account will be given a public key address for every particular cryptocurrency. The concept is similar to the cryptocurrency trading platform available in today's market.

Withdrawal

User and merchant can withdraw the collected crypto out from FiiiPay/FiiiPOS to their own crypto wallet anytime anywhere with a small charge of transaction fee.

Mining

FiiiPOS has a unique feature which other POS terminal does not have which is mining FiiiCoin (will be covered in the next few posts). FiiiCoin is a newly developed cryptocurrency by FiiiGroup using FiiiChain (proprietary blockchain framework) and Delegated Proof of Capacity (DPoC) consensus algorithm which uses FiiiPOS available storage space and CPU power for mining to maintain the blockchain network. When FiiiPOS is idle and plugged in to charge the battery, it will automatically bring up the mining page and start mining automatically. The idea is to maximize the usage of the POS machine.

The idea is to let our merchant who have purchased FiiiPOS to earn some reward in FiiiCoin which is treated as a token of appreciation in supporting our cause. At least our merchants feel compensated in another way after paying transaction fee for every received payment.

Mining hash rate is determined by the allocated storage space

Reporting

FiiiPOS is equipped with a thermal printer. When every transaction has been made, it will print a copy of payment slip for the user and a duplicate copy for the merchant.

FiiiPOS track every transaction and is capable of generating and exporting report data in spreadsheet or PDF format for the merchant. Due to the size of the FiiiPOS is small, merchant can open the FiiiPOS web edition using a PC/laptop browser to access the report and download the exported file.

Security

FiiiPOS is a restricted device. Merchant cannot install any application into the device. It is to prevent hacker from installing virus, malware, key logger, etc to the device. Hence, the Meltdown and Spectre vulnerabilities are low.

FiiiPOS is equipped with GPS, in case merchant lost the device, we can assist to detect and recover. We has a customer service team to assist user and merchant 24/7 to lock down their account or recover the device once their phone device or POS device is missing.

Maintainability

FiiiPOS is monitored by a central monitoring system. FiiiPOS software occasionally will receive patch for bug fix and security update.

We offer one year warranty for FiiiPOS device in case of any hardware failure. We have a technical support team standby in every operating country for hardware repair or parts replacement.

Hardware Spec

Processor: 4 core CPU
Memory: 1GB RAM, 8GB Flash
Display: 4.8"
Printer: High speed thermal printer, 40mm paper roll
Communication: 4G LTE/Wi-Fi/Bluetooth/NFC
SD Card Slot: 1
SIM Card Slot: 1
Device Port: 1 micro-USB OTG
Front Camera: 2MP
Rear Camera: 5MP
Speaker: Yes
Battery: Li-ion 5200 mAh
Power: Input - 100-240V, 50-60 Hz, Output - 5V/2A
OS: Android 5.X

More Photos

Collaboration Opportunity / White Label

If you are an owner of a cryptocurrency, you wish to circulate your crypto to the market and expand your merchant network, feel free to drop us an email to enquire: sylvester.lee@fiiipay.com

Whitepaper

If you are interested about our project, you may download our whitepaper here:
English Version
Chinese Version

My LinkedIn Profile

Follow us on Facebook Page and Telegram to get the latest news and update.

Facebook - https://www.facebook.com/fiiipay/
Telegram - https://t.me/fiiicoin


#redefinecryptocurrencies
#spendborderless