Sounds Interesting!

For some background and further information, you can read a post to the Erlang mailing list. In case of questions, feel free to ask.

Hi, what is fair distribution for you? Happy to see more PoS coins hitting the market. They are better for the environment And easier for anyone to get started with.

How will people get the coins? Through airdrops?

What is distribution plan for this coin looking forward to know more in details. What is idea behind this project on which thing you will focus to promote this project. How many coins will be available for distribution.

Sound's well.

There will be a time window (for example, blocks 1,800,000 — 1,850,00) scheduled during which people will be able to destroy their blackcoins to obtain initially distributed ercoins, proportionally to the destroyed amount. Total coin supply is not chosen yet. Marketing is yet to be worked out, though I suppose it will concentrate on features, efficient economic model and simplicity.

Interested in this. You will set a date for when we should burn blackcoin and then ercoin will be set to wallets or something?

Looks interesting

Glad a PoS currency with no max cap was choosen for this project to initiate distribution!

I'm a big Blackcoin fan but the concerns you raise are valid. Some proof of burn coins use multiple coins for the distribution and limiting it to one coin does warrant scepticism.  

The advantage of burning from multiple coins is competition. The weakness though is that the added complexity of multiple coins gives more means for manipulation. A big whale could pick a coin with the lowest volume and drive down his own entry point to get access to the burn coin. That's much harder to achieve with a single point of entry.  

Bitcoin itself is not actually that well spread. The amount of active users may be much higher but there are huge whales amongst them.  

The main reason why Blackcoin is the suggested source, as laid out in his blog, is because the protocol of Ercoin is nearly identical to Blackcoin. It's the same PoS, it's the same launch principles, the same protocol. It's practically Blackcoin written in Erlang. And this makes sense because Blackcoin is a very pristine coin in this ecosystem. There's no premine, no ICO, no developer fees on transactions or on the staking, the distribution has been completely fair and transparent.  

The reasons for using Blackcoin seem pretty obvious, but if I were an outsider I would too wonder why specifically this coin. I think it also leads to the question what exactly makes Erlang so much more valuable that it warrants a new coin. This may be personal ignorance but the added value at this moment seems quite abstract.  


Technically there is a cap, that of Blackcoin. Though practically saying any real practical cap that would be (much) lower than Blackcoin would be bad as it would create lots of opportunities to leverage the launch. Making the potential cap go as high as it's burn source is legit, especially on a coin that's well distributed. 

BlackCoin is the first free, 100% proof of stake cryptocurrency with fair distribution. It is still easier to obtain BLK than to buy mining hardware needed to participate in Bitcoin distribution.


I don’t see how initial coin distribution via burning multiple coins could be reasonably done. Let’s say that one user burns 10 BTC and another burns 10,000 BLK. How do we compare these two values?


From a coarse perspective, there may be some similarities, but mechanisms are fundamentally different, starting from the fact that there will be no concept of unspent transaction outputs in Ercoin.


Erlang in itself may not justify making a new coin, but it has some features which make it an attractive language for such purposes. Among them are:

• Great support for concurrency. A cryptocurrency network is a set of many nodes that send themselves messages asynchronously. This can be naturally modelled in Erlang. (Actually in case of Ercoin Tendermint mostly takes care of concurrency).
• Libraries for creating state machines. A cryptocurrency is basically a decentralized state machine.
• Bit syntax, making it easy to handle protocol messages.

Erlang is a functional language and there are other languages compiled to Erlang’s virtual machine, like LFE and Elixir (LFE is actually used in Ercoin). It is also praised for its fault tolerance and ability to achieve high uptime (with hot code reloading), which may have some significance for maintaining network nodes.


Roughly speaking, to have a working network suitable for pre-production testing:

• a few missing things need to be implemented;
• there are some changes needed in Tendermint;
• NIST should publish a new API for their entropy beacon.