Questions & answers: https://ercoin.tech/questions-and-answers.html

Press release for the Initial Burn Offering of Ercoin, explaining its connection with BlackCoin.

Initial Burn Offering of Ercoin has been announced. Ercoin is a cryptocurrency with fair distribution, delegated proof of locked stake used as a consensus algorithm and Tendermint used as a consensus engine.

The initial distribution will be performed in a way that aims to be both fair (no entity privileged) and green (negligible CO₂ emission). Coins will be assigned proportionally to the amount of blackcoins destroyed (“burnt”) in a specific manner from the beginning of 8th of November 2019 (UTC) until the end of 7th of December 2019 (UTC). People outside the BlackCoin community will be able to participate in the Initial Burn Offering by spending bitcoins to purchase blackcoins that are already burnt, on the decentralized exchange Bisq.

Initial Burn Offering is similar in spirit to the way in which first cryptocurrencies were distributed (Bitcoin in particular), but more accessible (hardware purchases are typically not needed) and not as much wasteful. Therefore Ercoin community hopes to attract both people that are tired of ICO projects and people that are discouraged by wastefulness and environmental impact of cryptocurrencies that use proof of work as a method of distribution. CO₂ emission savings during the IBO can be estimated using an IBO visualization tool.

Besides distribution, Ercoin aims to distringuish itself by a unique set of technical and economical features. Delegated proof of locked stake is used as a consensus algorithm. This is a variant of proof stake in which voting power is proportional not only to the amount of coins owned, but also to the time for which the funds are locked (with a time cap applied). The purpose of this solution is to emphasize the role of long-term investors in decision making. Investors don’t need to perform validation themselves, but can instead delegate this duty to professional validator service providers.

There will be no inflation in Ercoin and therefore no arbitrary inflation tax. Costs of maintaining the network will be covered from fees. Fee amounts will be decided by the consensus of validators.

In place of smart contracts, Ercoin proposes transaction messages and accounts managed by multiple keys in arbitrary combinations. It is believed that these two features will cover many real-life applications like facilitation of automated services and private arbitration (via deposits managed by 2-of-3 signatures).

Besides Ercoin-specific features, there is a number of advantages coming from the usage of Tendermint, like fast confirmations and partially standarized API. Overall, Ercoin aims to be a cryptocurrency which is fairly distributed, efficient, easy to use, easy to integrate, useful in common business cases and also provides a sound economic model, contributing to the long term cryptocurrency value.

17 reasons to be interested in Ercoin: https://ercoin.tech/reasons.html

Press release for the Initial Burn Offering has been published.

Have you created an account (with non-empty label) in step 1? Which browser do you use?

Bug bounty programme has been announced, with rewards up to $1,000. Note that there is also a separate bug bounty programme for Tendermint, with even higher possible rewards.

Version 1.0.0 beta 1 has been released.

Initial Burn Offering has been announced.

In the day of climate strike it is worth to remind that Initial Burn Offering is “green” in the sense that it involves destroying virtual resources, not real-world electricity. CO₂ savings can be estimated using a tool provided by Laboratorium EE.

Since the recent removal of manual account management in favor of automatic account management and “garbage collection” (see commits c00055aa, 09a6e247 and c09f344c) this is no longer true. Now, we could theoretically create a switch in transfer transaction that says “this transaction is valid only if the destination account exists”, but it would not guarantee anything, as destination account could had been created previously by mistake and by somebody else. Therefore I’m leaning towards not implementing this, in favor of simplicity.

To do it well, we could introduce a concept of “verified accounts” — accounts from which there has been at least one transaction. However I presume that there is little demand to do it before launch…?

Wallet has been extended to allow searching transactions by hash, height and by “from” and “to” separately. Conditions can be combined using conjuctions (Tendermint doesn’t currently support alternatives). Previous behaviour of making two queries to retrieve both “from” and “to” transactions has not been preserved.

I’ve started a thread on the Bisq forum about adding Ercoin IBO as a payment method: https://bisq.community/t/best-way-to-add-an-ibo/7477 . If this ends successfully, it will allow participating in the IBO via purchasing burnt blackcoins for bitcoins on Bisq, without even installing a BlackCoin wallet.

See the announcement at https://ercoin.tech/news/ercoin-0.1.0.html for factors impacting the release date. In regard to BlackCoin, it is the first free, 100% proof of stake cryptocurrency with fair distribution. (Besides that, one of the wallets has a command for burning coins).

See also the post below.

Version 0.1.1 has been released which updates the entropy library. Launch of the test network will happen using a newly-generated genesis data which uses real entropy instead of the dummy one.

Ercoin 0.1.0 has been released. The test network is scheduled to launch at 6 P.M. UTC on Friday, 29 March. Read the full announcement at https://ercoin.tech/news/ercoin-0.1.0.html .

Below are some actions which are desired/possible to happen before announcing the IBO.

• Announcing a public testnet.
• Talking to potential exchanges (after announcing the testnet).
• Improving the website and documentation (maybe writing a whitepaper substitute).
• Waiting until Tendermint is production ready. Speaking of that, there are only 4 open issues left in the “launch” milestone (with 42 closed).

New wallet design with improved transaction creation and broadcasting is live at https://ercoin.gitlab.io/ercoin-browser-wallet/. Impressions?

It is now possible to list committed transactions in the wallet (using a simple search form). The following data is displayed:

• Block height.
• Transaction hash.
• Transaction type (transfer, account, lock, vote, burn).
• “From” address.
• “To” address (if relevant).
• Valid until / locked until (if relevant).
• Value (if relevant).
• Fee.
• Message (if relevant).

To make this work, Tendermint must be configured to index “from” and “to” tags (either set [tx_index] → index_tags to contain “from,to” or [tx_index] → index_all_tags to true).

Currently there is a discrepancy in regard to messages, as transaction creation form treats messages as strings (which are later encoded using UTF-8), but transaction list displays them as binaries. This probably should be configurable.

It has been reported that blackcoind does not build against OpenSSL 1.1.1 (included in FreeBSD 12.0-BETA3). Haven’t investigated it thoroughly, but maybe a clue of how to fix can be found in commit 0a97f97580de43d154f7158dc5a7b45f76 in s2geometry.

That’s right. An airdrop requirement is similar to a payment requirement for running a program, and at least the latter constitutes non-free software.