WHAT IS BURSTCOIN: AN INTERVIEW WITH THE FOUNDER

Of course, the crypto world is saturated with cryptocurrencies some with lofty proposals but none stands out like BurstCoin. The team behind the BurstCoin are walking the talk and is the first blockchain based platform that will make use of that empty space on your computer hard drive for mining — the greenway. Unlike Proof of Work, which has been declared an environmental disaster due to their insatiable energy needs, BurstCoin implements a proposal that was first raised by Dziembowski and Stefan back in 2015 called Proof of Space.
Ecoin4Dummies held an explosive interview with the Founder of BurstCoin and here is what he had to say:
Why should an investor consider Burstcoin?
The Burst team does not try to persuade people to invest in our project, that decision is deeply personal, and should be made by individuals who have done their own research and, thus, convinced themselves that Burst is the project in which they wish to take part of. The core and support Burst team does not get paid, we have no developers’ fund, and we never plan to start one. We are completely volunteer-based and enjoy what we do; and to preempt this following question, the bear market has no effect on our motivation and we are not selling our shares. However, we believe that the plan laid out in The Burst Dymaxion white paper as well as Proof-of-Capacity clearly superior efficiency to Proof-of-Work will make Burst one of, if not the most, advanced chain in existence.
What security upgrades are in the pipeline for Burstcoin platform and wallet?
A very detailed explanation can be found in The Burst Dymaxion white paper. Briefly, however, we have already implemented the first hard fork, this brought with it a four times larger block size, 64 recipient multi out transactions, 128 recipient multi out transactions for payments of the same amount, and the PoC2 (proof-of-capacity 2) plot format, which eliminates PoC1’s susceptibility to Time-Memory Trade-off Attacks.
Non-hard fork related improvements include an almost complete rewrite of the core wallet code, a full miner tools suite developed by the core team, the fixing of a major bug left over from the days of the NXT fork, General Bytes ATM integration, and many other miscellaneous projects carried out by various community members.
There are two forks still to come. These upgrades include Dymaxion Layers, which can be thought of as tangles (think IOTA) on top of the Burst blockchain. This will allow near instant transaction with arbitrary throughput. We will also be adding Ring Signatures, zk-SNARKs, and a PoC3 format that will run alongside PoC2 and enable Burst plots to store valuable data that can be mined on. Finally, there are many projects still in the works that have not been announced to the public since they are not ready, but rest assured there is no shortage of development taking place. Again, for more detail, please refer to the white paper.
What strategies are in place to improve mining efficiency?
Burst mining is already many hundreds of thousands of times more efficient than PoW mining. Some projects currently underway to even further enhance efficiency are the Burst File System (BFS) as well as optimizations of plotter and miner software so miners can read their plots as fast as possible and have drives idling a higher percentage of the time. It is worth noting, that slower plotting ability is correlated to increased ASIC resistance. This is the reason plots are made using the Shabal256 algorithm; this algorithm is very I/O intensive and thus too slow for ASICs to yield any economic advantage. There are also many private experiments being done to investigate clean energy use for mining (eg. solar, wind, etc) and building machines that will mine at less than one watt per terabyte.
What is the uptake of the Burst platform by companies and Financial Institutions?
Businesses are beginning to use Burst and its chain. A variety of different businesses are coming online and we are waiting for official announcements. There are more things coming but at this time we can not disclose too much due to the announcements being part of a larger overall media campaign. But I can tell you soon you will be able to buy groceries with burst, buy day to day items, and soon I hear there may even be some gift cards coming.
How does Burst achieve efficient mining using only hard drives?
Proof-of-Capacity can be thought of as an evolution of Proof-of-Work. It is not an entirely novel idea down to the core. To mine Burst, it is necessary to first generate files called plots. The plotting process is almost identical to PoW, except that it only need be done one time. A plot is simply a file that saves the digest of the nonces a miner would generate in a PoW scheme. In PoC, plots are scanned every block and a deadline computed. One a deadline is submitted, a check is done every second to see if the block’s start time plus elapsed time is greater than the deadline, if it is, the miner has won the right to forge the block. In simpler terms, the lowest submitted deadline wins the right to forge the block.
While the actual mining of Burst is done with only hard drives, you do need to do a small amount of hashing (compared to PoW schemes, an infinitesimal amount of PoW) to generate the files to mine. There is no writing to the disk being done after the plot is generated.
What strategies are in place to navigate forking and any such developments? What is the uptake rate of Dymaxion Layer payment channels?
It is, and always will be a priority of the Burst team to reach consensus on any proposed forks. It is our express stance not to proceed with contentious forks. The pre-Dymaxion hard fork had over 90% support and saw nearly every node, miner, and pool switch over, and within the next month, all laggards had either realigned with the fork, or dropped off the network. Dymaxion layers are not live on the network yet.
Burstcoin also facilitates smart contracts. How do miners execute smart contracts?
Burst uses the transaction and transaction process model. Smart contracts are executed with the transaction that initiates the smart contract. Each contract is executed by each node when the transaction is processed.
Conclusion
The road towards perfection is still a work in progress. In coming months, the platform plans on further steering their core through PoC3 Protocols, building a multi-lingual and flexible wallet and marketing the platform on a commercial scale. You can buy BurstCoin at UpBit, Bittrex, Poloniex, and others. For safety, download and install the official BurstCoin wallet.
This post was first published on https://ecoin4dummies.com/what-is-burstcoin/
