The Merit of a Friendly Digital Currency
Digital Currency for Everyday People
“Merit aims to be the world’s friendliest digital currency, making it dead simple to pay friends, buy goods, and manage your wealth.”
Merit’s commitment to community reflects their desire to be the world’s friendliest digital currency. What differentiates Merit from many other projects, is that they regard mass adoption as a fundamental core of their project rather than as an afterthought. Their community focus is reflected in the slew of user-friendly features, specifically designed to make Merit an easy-to-use digital currency. After all, the less friction one experiences in using a platform, the more likely they will stay on and spread the word. In this article, we will look at multiple major features that makes Merit the world’s friendliest digital currency.
MeritMoney — A People Friendly Currency and Wallet
Have you ever tried to explain cryptocurrency wallets to any of your non-crypto friends? The conversation usually ends with a glazed over look in their eyes, as you try your best to explain what a public key is to them. Most people cannot relate to what appears to them as a string of random numbers and letters. It is hard enough to remember simple passwords, people forget those all the time. Toss a 30 plus digit account name at them and watch them scramble for the door. Merit allows you to choose your own account name, just like you do with your online bank, or about any other online account that you sign up for. Again, Merit had the foresight to design mass appeal into their project by allowing people to use usernames.
Mobile banking apps are popular and used by many people. The mobility and their ease of use makes them very popular. Merit has included a sleek, user friendly, mobile wallet with their project. You can set push notifications to be notified when you receive MRT, earn mining rewards, or receive invitation requests from new users.The MeritMoney function in the app allows you to send MRT tokens via a simple link. The app integrates with your contact list to make sending a MeritMoney link, via email or SMS, as easy as messaging or emailing someone. You don’t need to know the recipient’s address or their Merit alias, they don’t even need to be part of the Merit platform yet. They can claim their MRT once they join the platform!
Proof of Growth — Rewarding Network Growth
Providing incentives to grow the community of MRT users is a novel approach that has been integrated into the Merit blockchain. Similar to many other blockchains, Merit relies on Proof of Work (PoW) for the functioning of their blockchain. By providing computing power to the functioning of the Merit blockchain, miners earn MRT. However, Merit incorporates an incentive for community growth by splitting the overall mining reward between the miner and the Ambassadors. Ambassadors are members of the community who have helped to grow the user base of Merit. Currently 20 MRT are issued with each mined block, with 13 MRT allotted to the miner demonstrating PoW, and 7 split among a handful of Ambassadors. More specifically for each mined block, five Ambassadors are selected by way of a lottery where the most impactful Ambassadors receive more lottery tickets, and therefore more opportunities to receive MRT. The selected five Ambassadors receive MRT for the given block on a basis proportional to their overall ranking combined with random weighting. The end result is a novel approach to mining that places incentives toward growing the ecosystem; a healthy ecosystem in turn provides the bedrock to grow the community and the transactional use of MRT.
Merit Vaults — Ensuring Secure Transactions
Far too often you read horror stories about people losing all their cryptocurrencies because of a breach. There haven’t been any real and people friendly attempt yet to solve this problem. Merit want to solve this problem with a unique approach: Vaults.
A Vault could be compared to a savings account for cryptocurrency. There is a separate super-secret password, or key, which enables the user to reset their Vault. You can set up a list of approved addresses, to which funds may be sent. This is a great deterrent against phishing attempts, where someone tries to redirect your funds to their own account. Since their address is not on your whitelist of approved addresses, your funds remain in your account and their phishing attempt fails. In addition, each user can set their account to limit the maximum daily withdraw amount, similar to ATM limits, which will throttle any hacking attempts and insure minimal losses. Your Vault may be configured to require two or more persons to authorize any transaction. Merit looks at vaults as foundational building blocks for future blockchain security innovations, as outlined in their roadmap.
Cuckoo Cycle — Fairer and Greener Mining
To combine the security and safety of Proof of Work with the organic growth provided by Proof of Growth (PoG), Merit needed to find and put an accessible and hardware friendly mining protocol to use.
There are two major complaints when it comes to the prevailing PoW protocol:
- It heavily rewards corporate mining initiatives, leaving little for everyone else.
- It requires an enormous amount of energy to solve a block.
There is need of innovation in blockchain algorithms and protocols. Proof of Stake (PoS) is thought to be a good successor to PoW, by completely removing the energy-hungry mining aspect.
PoS is a protocol that rewards you for holding your cryptocurrency in a wallet. Creators of blocks are chosen in a deterministic way, depending on their stake (wealth) in the network. While PoS is drastically more ecologically friendly than PoW, it is less safe than PoW and it rewards the wealthy even more than PoW. The more cryptocurrency you own and store in your wallet, the more cryptocurrency you get rewarded by being assigned blocks. In PoW there’s still some luck in play, your computer could by chance solve the block, winning the race over the data centre of a wealthy corporate initiative.
As you can see, both protocols have major flaws. A new approach is needed. This approach needs to be more ecologically friendly than PoW, it needs to be as secured as PoW, and finally it needs to be accessible and fair to the general public, by not only rewarding the wealthy.
To address the issues outlined, Merit opted for the Cuckoo algorithm. Cuckoo is a Proof of Work algorithm that focuses more on memory use rather than raw computing power. Unlike normal PoW that requires maxing out the capacity of your CPU, using a lot of power and producing more heat in the process, a memory-bound approach requires enough computing power to saturate the memory of your computer.
A simple example is the following: normal PoW might use 100% of your CPU, using 70W of power in the process (note: PoW normally uses your GPU for mining instead of your CPU, making this number closer to 120W or higher). The Cuckoo Cycle only uses 54W of power to fully saturate the memory of your machine.
Both of these approaches achieve the same goal of verifying transactions, verifying the entire blockchain, and mining coins. But, Cuckoo doesn’t require you to spend and use an outrageous amount of money and power to solve a block. The Cuckoo Cycle also makes mining accessible to the public, by not requiring an expensive mining rig to solve blocks. This makes Merit’s Proof of Growth and friendly use-case very much possible.
You might think that by focusing on less powerful rigs, the Merit network and blockchain would be slower. But that is not the case. The Merit protocol auto-adjusts block difficulty such that blocks are issued every minute, making their blockchain extremely fast and quick to use. Their protocol also has a maximum throughput that’s 80x higher than Bitcoin’s throughput, so it’s not just faster and more ecological, it can support a lot more volume!
Merit Mining — Leveling the Playing Field
Merit is unique among many other cryptocurrencies; it does not stack the deck to benefit wealthy miners with expensive equipment and mining farms. As stated before, mining can be performed with a desktop CPU, including those several years old. It can be performed individually or in a pool with other miners, where resources are combined to achieve a greater likelihood of a block reward, and with payouts shared by a predefined algorithm. We were interested in the scenario of a “typical miner” participating in a pool under different conditions using real data. We wanted to find out if a “typical miner” could lose ground to a more established miner, which would contradict the Merit philosophy.
To test this, we conducted an analysis of historical Parachute pool mining data. We compared normal pool circumstances (hashrate) with a period of time where the hashrate was doubled by participation of a more established miner. This miner had a mining farm with over 200 computers contributing to the pool. The purpose of this analysis was to understand any advantage or disadvantage to the “typical miner” between these two scenarios. The Merit earnings for a typical user were expressed as Merit earned per hour over several days where the hashrate in the pool varied based on participation of a high powered miner.
The graph above shows that the typical miner earned more MRT per hour without the higher powered miner in the pool, yet these differences were not statistically significant. The awards earned per hour increased when the higher power miner was in the pool, and this difference was statistically significant.
As you can see, these findings support that the higher hashrate scenario yields more frequent payouts, while providing an average Merit/hour payout that was found to be not statistically different compared to the lower hashrate pool scenario. So, the “typical miner” doesn’t lose ground to a more established miner. This confirms Merit’s philosophy.
There is Merit in helping out
The goals Merit wants to achieve, are big ones. They aren’t exclusive to Merit, but collective goals for the crypto space: widespread adoption, safety and environment. The team behind Merit have the ambition and skills to actually achieve these big goals. Be it with a clean and easy to use platform for widespread adoption, unique Vaults for safety and a more efficient mining protocol for the environment. The key to their success though, is you. The Merit team is in need of your help and participation to their platform! So, put on your mining, testing, and community gear and start your amazing Merit adventure.
Written by Kerry C, Nathan & Crypto French edited by Wilflare, Chris & Jason
In need of an invite to start your Merit mining adventure? Read below:
If you are interested in Merit, be sure to sign up and follow them by using the Parachute Platform first. After you sign up on Parachute, head over to the mining page and follow the details on the Merit token card to start your Merit adventures. This will make you eligible to receive future PAR super trooper airdrops and take part in Merit related social events.
Merit links
Website: https://merit.me
Discord: https://discordapp.com/invite/X3v3n3b
Forum: https://forum.merit.me/
Medium: https://medium.com/merit-blog
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/MERIT-930007500532952/
Twitter: https://twitter.com/merit
Github: https://github.com/meritlabs/merit
LinkedIn: https://goo.gl/zMKhWe
YouTube: https://goo.gl/qZ3vQA
Parachute links
Website: https://www.parachutetoken.com/
Telegram: https://t.me/parachutetokengroup
Reddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/ParachuteToken/
Twitter: https://twitter.com/parachutetoken
Discord: https://discordapp.com/invite/kyrCWen
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