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October 28, 2013, 09:57:26 PM |
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Hello, since i am currently stuck in the n00b section i thought a useful exercise would be to discuss what motivated me to register on this site to begin with.
Blakecoin is a recently launched alt coin, and while it may ultimately be just another altcoin, it caught my interest for a few reasons. While it is fundamentally just a bitcoin fork with a different algorithm, the algorithm chosen shows much promise and is thus far unique in the crypto currency community. Based on Blake-256, which was a candidate for SHA3, it offers something new to test unlike all the scrypt clones. Blake-256 is based on some heavily tested components, but arranged in a novel way. It is optimized to be easily run on fpga and asic, and there is already a fpga miner for blakecoin. While many bitcoin and litecoin miners wished to stave off or delay fpga and asic adoption, i think the time for that mentality has passed. Now that crypto currencies have proven themselves to be a worthwhile technology, we need to focus on making it efficient as possible. by making Blakecoin fpga/asic friendly, it will help create security thru higher difficulty. Of course designing and manufacturing Asics are expensive, but since blake256 is optimized for asic design the price would be considerably less then developing one for litecoin. If asics become affordable then it is clearly a better route to take than requiring gpu or cpu which consume much more electricity.
Blakecoin also has a unique reward system for mining. rather than give early adopters an unfair advantage, blakecoin gives the same block reward for ALL blocks, which is 25BLC. There will be a total of 7 billion blakecoins mined, I assume that is meant to be 1 per person on the planet. Compared to BTC or LTC this seems like an excessive amount which would dilute their value, except that due to the consistent block reward and 3 minute block time, it means it will take about 1,500 years to generate all of them. (please verify my math). Most other coins do not have mining rewards after a few years. This is how blakecoin ensures that there will always be an incentive to continue mining (or at least until it is obsolete). Slow and steady wins the race.
So presently information on Blakecoin is scarce, if anyone has more details about it please discuss them here. I am interested to see what peoples opinions are on the pros and cons of using the blake-256 algorithm for a crypto currency. Thanks!
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