LAUNCHED Download the binaries from: http://bitnewcoin.comCheck out the source: https://github.com/cosmo9able/bitnewcoinblock explorer: http://explorer.bitnewcoin.com We wanted the best innovations of Bitcoin and these other currencies to create a coin with all of their benefits, but nearly none of their problems.
Proof of Work We really liked Tenebrix's Scrypt proof of work. Using Scrypt allows one to mine bitnewcoin while also mining Bitcoin. We humbly offer a big thanks to ArtForz for the implementation.
Premines bitnewcoin will come with 500k premined coins: just the genesis block and the first 2 blocks to confirm the genesis is valid. We believe a coin needs to be released in a fair manner. Having one person (or a group) control a large amount of coins that can be used as they see fit is against the decentralized vision of Bitcoin. Yes, it is true that without a stash of premined coins, we will not be able to afford to pay for bounties, but we believe people will see the virtue of this coin, invest in it as early adopters, and will be willing to spend time creating services to make this coin better.
Fast transactions We were impressed by the convenience of SolidCoin's fast transactions. Although we know that fast confirmations are not necessarily as secure as Bitcoin's slower confirmations, they are very convenient for small merchants who don't need transactions to be super secure. The average bitnewcoin block takes 2.5 minutes, one quarter of Bitcoin's 10 minutes. So if merchants wanted to be as safe as Bitcoin, they can wait for 4 times the number of bitnewcoin confirmations as compared to Bitcoin. But most merchants can readily accept 1-confirmed transactions for small amounts of bitnewcoins.
Difficulty retarget We will keep the retarget block the same as Bitcoin's 2016, but because blocks are found 4 times faster, difficulty will retarget about every 3.5 days. The combination of fast retarget times and Scrypt proof of work (bitnewcoin will not compete with Bitcoin for miners) means we expect to not see the sort of problem Namecoin encountered; hashing power that leaves more suddenly than it came, causing a high difficulty slog for everyone who stayed.
Coin generation Miners will generate 50 coins per block. In light of our faster blocks, to properly mimic Bitcoin's generation trajectory, we needed to change the blocks at which coin generation is halved. Bitcoin generation is halved every 210,000 blocks. bitnewcoin generation will be halved every 840,000 blocks. For those of you doing the math, bitnewcoin is scheduled to produce roughly 4 times as many coins as Bitcoin, about 84 million bitnewcoins.
Fairness
We have come up with a plan that we believe is most fair. Some previous coins were released without Windows binaries or without source code; we consider this as unfair as it is unsafe.
We released the source code and binaries ahead of time... 3 days before launch. People had time to compile the source and run the client on their machines against the bitnewcoin testnet. So people were able to make sure everything was working well before the launch. We also had a poll so that people can vote for a launch time that best suits them. At the time of the launch (Oct 12 03:00 GMT), we released the genesis hash and everyone started mining at the same time. All it took was a simple change in the config file in order to mine the real coin instead of the testnet coin.
The problem with alternative currencies is that the network hashrate is likely low when the coin starts up, making an easy target for any potential 51% attacker. With a little hope, a little prayer, a lot of hype, and due to our innovative release, there was a large hashrate from minute one. We believe this deterred any attackers from targeting this chain. As expected, there was a lot of natural orphaning of blocks, due to having so many people mining on the chain at once. With block locking at every difficulty change, we were able to avoid any attacks from succeeding. (if there were any)
Source code
The source code is here:
https://github.com/cosmo9able/bitnewcoin This is based on the latest Bitcoin code. You can either build the daemon version (bitnewcoind) or you can build the gui version (bitnewcoin QT). See the build docs.
Similar to Bitcoin, you may want to create a bitnewcoin.conf file here:
Windows: C:\Documents and Settings\<username>\Application Data\bitnewcoin
Win7: C:\Users\<username>\AppData\Roaming\bitnewcoin
Unix: ~/.bitnewcoin
Port is 2333. Open if on your router if you know how. This will allow you to have more than 8 connections.
And default
RPC port is 2332. This is the port miners will use to communicate with your client/daemon.
Sample bitnewcoin.conf file:
server=1
rpcuser=user
rpcpassword=password
#Change this if you want to use a different rpc port for mining
#rpcport=2332
#Only uncomment this if you are running bitnewcoind and want to run Bitnewcoin in the background (not Bitnewcoin QT)
#daemon=1
