Bitcoin Forum

Ember is an entirely new, instant, and feeless cryptocurrency, designed to live up to the term and be a currency. Our goal is to enable payments between anyone, anywhere. We don’t believe in shouting buzzwords or centralization. We believe in providing the best tech possible (instant, feeless, trustless, decentralized, secure), for the best currency possible, focusing only on elements that improve the currency itself. We started this journey, and have gotten this far, with:

• No ICO.
• No Corporate Backing.
• No Venture Capital.

For a quick summary, all Ember transactions are stored on a DAG, allowing non-latent transactions, yet a blockchain also secures the network, providing heightened security via Proof of Work. The two work together according to the brand new Merit Caching Consensus Mechanism, designed and written for Ember. Ember also offers data transmission, yet makes sure that transactions will always be prioritized over data.

Our purpose in this announcement is to start building the Ember community and acquire new members for our core team! If you are interested in developing Ember, and have the skills to contribute, please get in contact with our lead developer at lukep@meroscrypto.io.

• Name: Ember
• Symbol: EMB
• Block Time: 10 Minutes
• Block Reward: Not finalized.
• Total Supply: Not applicable.
• Mining Algorithm: Argon2d (CPU only)
• Signature Scheme: Ed25519 (DAG Entries) and BLS (Verifications)
• Address Format: Bech32
• Premine: The equivalent of 2 weeks of the block reward at launch. Then, 1 more week every 6 months, for a total of 7 weeks.

How far along is Ember?
Ember has been in development for over 5 months now. We currently are running a Developer Testnet, which means it's public to anyone who can compile the Node.

How is Ember instant if it uses a blockchain?
This is due to the Merit Caching Consensus Mechanism. The Merit Caching Whitepaper is linked above, yet to summarize it:

• All transactions are published to the DAG.
• Verifiers submit Verifications, which are valid as soon as they are received.
• A transaction is confirmed when it gets 50.1% of the weight.
• The blockchain archives these verifications.

How is this PoW if there’s Verifiers and weight?
The blockchain is mined via Argon2d. Mining the blockchain earns weight, which is used to verify entries on the DAG. Verifications are then archived on the blockchain, and new EMB is distributed based on those Verifications.

Why does Ember have data transmission but not a smart contract engine?
Data transmission enables a smart contract engine, yet we believe that is a separate project than a currency, best left to a second layer. We will offer a BTC style scripting engine though.

How does Ember handle spam?
Typically, transaction fees stop spam. Since Ember doesn’t have those, we have an adjustable spam filter where users must ‘spend’ CPU cycles to prove their transaction isn’t spam. Data transmission has a separate spam filter, which is how we make sure transactions will always be prioritized over data.

Why is the total supply not applicable?
In order to continue to reward miners, when there’s no transaction fees, there will always be a block reward.

Why are you using two different signature schemes?
Ed25519 is simply a better algorithm than the ‘traditional’ SECP256k1 algorithm. That said, BLS allows signature aggregation. This means we can have one signature for hundreds, or even thousands, of Verifications, and verify them all at once.

Why are you doing a premine and not an ICO?
A time-locked premine means we only make money if we deliver a working product and the coin succeeds. An ICO means we make money for having a great marketing team. It’s fairer to the community to do a premine.

When will Ember be launched?
Once Ember’s protocol is finalized, we’ll create a public testnet, and have the codebase audited. While this happens, we’ll build an Explorer and start work on mobile wallets. When the testnet is proven secure, the Ember mainnet will be launched! This is planned for the first quarter of 2019.

Nice thing that there is No ICO, but can you give as more information
about total coin supply and premine?

Great project, great main dev.
Supporting 100%.

There is no total supply, just like Ethereum. That said, the block reward will decrease over time, yet the details on how aren't finalized.

The premine is equivalent to 7 weeks of the block reward. 2 weeks are unlocked at launch, and 1 week is released every 6 months after.


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Thanks for the support, Memnon and gkhang!

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Since Ember is a brand new codebase, no existing pool software is compatible with Ember. We will make sure to build one before we launch. That said, as pools increase centralization, we do have some on chain features to decrease centralization.

When a block is mined, you earn 100 units of weight. You can pay out these 100 units to any one. You can take all 100, or distribute all 100. This means pools can give voting power directly to the participants, and not become a centralized monolith threatening the system.

Is there a connection to the already existing EMBER (EMB)?

Not at all. Their original dev team left/scammed the community. The community has continued the coin, but only under plans to swap to a new coin called Atheneum. As soon as the swap is over, both the original team, and the revival team, will have left Ember, and there will be no community.

When we picked the name, I didn't know of any project called Ember. I did find Ember Coin a few weeks after, but thought it was dead/the revival team already did the coin swap. Only a few weeks ago did I realize they were still preparing for the coin swap.

By the time of the testnet, they'll likely have swapped. If this proves to be an issue, we'll pick a new name.

Interesting, it looks like a mix of NANO with other mined cryptos, but it's not fork so it's something new. I'm following this project ...

res

Kayaba is a great dev, a real star in the making.

Check out a few more bits of information on Ember from his Token Tv Developers corner interview.

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

I will certainly be keeping a close eye on this one

We did get a lot of inspiration from Nano, yet we aim to provide better security, more decentralization, and faster transaction handling (via a mix of better technology and incentivizing consensus participants).

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Thanks for posting the Token TV interview!

We did publish our 6th Biweekly Update today. It should be an interesting read for anyone who's just hearing about Ember! https://medium.com/@EmberCrypto/ember-biweekly-update-6-38b7b568911f

Meaning, your supply is infinite?
Also, are you going to provide us your block explorer?

Correct.

We don't have an explorer yet as we've been focusing on the coin itself. When we do have one (if it is 'us' who makes one), it will be fully open source.

Looks like an interesting project.  What is your strategy to keep someone from spamming the network with transactions given that there are no feeds? 

We have an adjustable spam filter. It's the same process as mining, but much much less intensive. There are some other projects which do the same.

Sounds like a great project. EmberCrypto, can you PM me. I was not able to PM you since I have newbie status and your setting don't allow messages from newbies. Thanks.

you should have named it as [Pre-Ann] because a lot of thing need to be done and it seems you are still trying to figure out how to make it based on your coin specification.
also, i think you need to check this out ; https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=4799548.0 (your competitor)
you and them are doing the same thing, feeless and instant payment. i ever used their network once or two, and they were doing it very good.
it was very fast and did not require any fees when i tried to send it from my wallet to another wallet.

P2P: PMed. You can also email us, PM us on Twitter, or join our Discord though!

DaMut: Fair enough! We should've used "PRE-ANN".

About x42:

• They are not instant. They have a 60 second block time (on their main chain).
• They offer side blockchains, which splits up the network, We use a DAG and a singular blockchain, which work together.
• They premined 25%. We have a premine, which after 3 years (the amount of time it's supposed to last for), will be 4.5% of the total supply.
• They offer smart contracts. We have a personal belief that smart contracts shouldn't be layer one objects.

I would not call them a competitor (of course, all cryptocurrencies are competitors).

I would try to build without theses 4.5GB of deps to download and install before compiling. Are you the first to use this dev framework stack ?

Our dependencies, besides the common things like GCC/G++, are "Nim, Nimble, GMP, Chia's BLS library, and LibSodium". The only unusual ones there are Nim/Nimble and BLS.

We are the first to build a cryptocurrency with Nim. We aren't the first to build a cryptocurrency node in Nim. That credit goes to Status who built an Ethereum node with Nim. We picked it because it compiles to C/C++, has full interop, and is very elegant. If you want to know more, I talked about it on the previously linked podcast.

We are one of the first cryptocurrencies to use BLS. That said, ZCash, and I assume ZClassic, also uses it, and it is in the Eth 2.0 spec. I do not know what specific lib ZCash uses though. We use the one from Chia.

The Nimble packages are:

• A GMP wrapper.
• A BLS wrapper.
• A WebView wrapper (GUI).
• A Nim event-based programming module that we wrote ourselves.
• A Nim cryptography lib (SHA and so on).
• A RocksDB wrapper (currently unused).

Finally, we do ship Argon2 inside the Ember repository. A couple of other cryptocurrencies use that, and there's pretty much one lib for it.

Looks like a promising project, good work

When are your sites and block explorer released and available?

We're aiming to have a website in a few days! A talented community member has stepped forth to work on it.

The Block Explorer will not be in development until we at least have a public testnet planned. At this time, we do not have a public testnet planned.

so, has public testnet begun?
I hope your mainnet can be launched in the first quarter of 2019 as you say.

It has not started and we do not have a plan for one yet. We aim to have one by the end of the year.

We plan for a Q1 or Q2 mainnet launch.

You are creating a coin and you don't inform yourself if the coin is already existing?? Lmaooooo
Like if you wanna create a new AUDI A3 AHAHAHAHAHAH  really funny

sound great so far. joining discord

1) The other coin goes by Ember Coin, primarily.

2) When we picked the name, our GitHub repo was under my personal account, and its name was "Currency". I thought it was great, and continued development (what matters). Only weeks later when we did the 'rebrand' (repository name change) from "Currency" to "Ember" did I realize Ember Coin existed.

3) I thought they had already done their coin swap.

4) A few weeks ago I saw news about Ember Coin, and realized they were still in the swap process, and have been for months. They should abandon the name shortly, and if they don't, or this continues to be problematic, I'll change the name.

5) This coin isn't already existing. A coin with effectively the same name exists. Ember is written from scratch.

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Thanks geostation! Happy to have you!

joined discord! will contact you there.. Really like the project, looking forward for things to come!

sometimes on the forum there are very strange users. in general, if you have some kind of token in your portfolio, then there is no better option than in their group in the telegram or the discord. otherwise, the team can make an announcement and you just do not have time to react.

Due to the recent influx of community members, we are currently working on building a stable (here meaning relevant for more than a few days) testnet. It will be aimed at developers, not the end user, but it should be a promising proof of all the work we've put in.

Hello,

Any telegram community?

There is currently not a Telegram community. We did create a group and tried to bridge it to our Discord, but Telegram's API is very finicky (in the name of 'privacy'), and wouldn't let us. Since we couldn't bridge it, we do not feel like pursuing it at this time.

reserved

We have launched our new website (https://embercrypto.io/)! It offers a description of Ember, our story, a roadmap, and answers some frequently asked questions.

Now, we can promote our project further. This will be useful as we prepare for our upcoming Developer Testnet! If you would like more info, or want to participate, please join our Discord (https://discordapp.com/invite/nZmdWGA).

Kudos for my man Kayaba, such a great project could have only come from his hands. Really keeping an eye on this one ;D

We've just released our 7th Biweekly Update! https://medium.com/@EmberCrypto/ember-biweekly-update-7-b95bf758b65

As a summary:
We've been preparing for the Developer Testnet. It's currently planned to launch on Saturday.
We finished Verifications.
We added Minting.
We built a Miner.
We added Syncing.
We hired a new Community Manager.

please post recent updates in your OP dev. not all users want to use discord channel. we have a lot of things to read already. so it's better to publish updates in your OP so whenever we have time, we can always check it.

That's why I also post them here. That said, editing the OP is a good idea, and I will also do that.

Following, looks interesting!

im agree there should be not only one news channel but several. after all, not everyone is sitting only in a discord or telegram. communication at this stage is very important and exceeds the rest for the project.

We actively update our Twitter, Medium, and BTCTalk. Our Discord updates are mainly links to the Biweekly Updates (Medium Posts) or things we also cover in the Biweekly Updates. We make sure to post the Biweekly Updates on Twitter and here as well.

how about that launch of testnet

The Developer Testnet is alive and running ;)

We made a quick reply earlier to the user who asked, but here is our blog post about the testnet's launch. https://medium.com/@EmberCrypto/ember-developer-testnet-c308b29f6781

We've just published our next Biweekly Update (https://medium.com/@EmberCrypto/ember-biweekly-update-8-f0b5c8876cbf)! This one is a bit short due to the holidays/hardware issues.

If you want to get your updates in an audio medium please check out the Monthly podcast which focuses purely on EMBER updates with the lead Developer or Core team members, the first episode is available now, on Youtube, spotify and google play music.

https://twitter.com/Smartreach1/status/1071344184488091648
https://youtu.be/yjAqZGncor0

Enjoy, and hopefully the person responsible for this thread will add this to the OP.

Thank you for posting our new Monthly Podcast! As Crypto_si said, they'll be monthly and provide updates on Ember and it's future.

We have added it to the original post ;)

We've published our 9th Biweekly Update and grown the team a bit! https://medium.com/@EmberCrypto/ember-biweekly-update-9-9def6d032b7e

In preparation for our next monthly podcast, we're collecting questions from the community! If you have any questions you'd like answered in the next podcast, please, let us know!

We've released Biweekly Update #10! Not only does it describe the work we've been doing, but it goes over our Testnet Schedule! https://medium.com/@EmberCrypto/ember-biweekly-update-10-a8052e8868

Our second State of the Project (monthly podcast) episode is live! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ey48KpsorjE

Those who listen will be able to learn more about the tech behind Ember, our recent work, our progress with exchanges, and info on upcoming test nets.

We've just published our new Biweekly Update! https://medium.com/@MerosCrypto/meros-biweekly-update-11-d7df204df6bb

In this Biweekly Update, we cover how we are rebranding from Ember to Meros. We were going to try to keep Ember, but the problems around the name became too great. The original post on this thread has been updated with the new links, yet we'll likely create a new thread soon under this account.

We'll also be hosting our next testnet within a few days. If you'd like to participate, please join our Discord (https://discordapp.com/invite/nZmdWGA).

Our new testnet is live! We'll write up and publish a new blog post on Monday, once we've collected the needed info.

Our testnet has succeeded in exposing what we need to work on, and because of that, we are extending it to last more than one day, which means we will not be uploading a blog post on Monday, but instead be uploading one when the testnet ends.

We've just published our summary of Developer Testnet 1D! https://medium.com/@MerosCrypto/meros-developer-testnet-1d-summary-a44dbc09894e

Please give information when you are planning the launch of testnet. Good luck to devs :)

@PuertoLibre
We've already done two testnets and made sure to announce them in advance on BTC Talk, both times.

That said, to be eligible to join the testnets we've done, you have to compile the software yourself. The node isn't ready for the end user, so it's a test to prove you know your way around a computer. We will do testnets where anyone can join, just by downloading the wallet, but we're not there yet.

following

Our new State of the Project, a monthly podcast we do to provide updates, is live! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M6Ej6k7sG9g

Our next Biweekly Update is live! It actually covers a three week period, yet due to the testnet summary we published last week, we really only had a week of work to discuss.

https://medium.com/@MerosCrypto/meros-biweekly-update-12-474ba7f64240

Our new update is live! https://medium.com/@MerosCrypto/meros-biweekly-update-13-af4f40b1b939

Our new Monthly Podcast is live! https://youtu.be/f8NuNl5AhJs

Our new update is live! https://medium.com/@MerosCrypto/meros-triweekly-update-14-a80bbddb0cb7

Our new Monthly Podcast is live! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9tmOXTHVA9o