PascalCoin V3 — Next-gen blockchain solving the scalability issue with SafeBox Technology

Published in

Game of Life

9 min readMar 23, 2018

Version 1 (V1) — How it started:

100% code written from scratch — not a clone / fork

PascalCoin was written in Free Pascal, a modern, system-level, object-oriented programming language with advanced features. By designing a new and unique blockchain using Free Pascal, PascalCoin has been able to achieve many technological advancements by writing in a high-performance, cross-platform native code. This by itself differentiates PascalCoin from all the other thousands of coins that use the same technology and code bitcoin uses or are forks of it.

SafeBox Technology — a unique PascalCoin feature

Fact: PascalCoin is the first crypto to break the 100 tx/s barier, but will soon achieve much higher throughput — 72.000 tx/s

PascalCoin only keeps the last 100 blocks of the blockchain whilst retaining the cryptographic security of the full blockchain. It achieves this by using the SafeBox to keep track of user account balances and ownership whilst simultaneously retaining the aggregated proof-of-work difficulty within the SafeBox itself.

Simply put, PascalCoin allows the chain to be “snapshotted” and later deleted, to free up space. How this works is the SafeBox saves balance information from Pascal accounts every 100 blocks, and archives it.

As a result, PascalCoin achieved “Deletable Blockchain”! While still solving the double-spend problem and considerably reducing the size of a wallet, which is now able to sync in under a minute from the first use, and dramatically reducing the environmental foot-print cause by PoW.

In fact, using SafeBox tech it is suitable to run full node even on a smartphone.

Account Block Structure

Getting money in your account is as simple as 1234–56 — that’s how an account looks. Or write your web page or company name. No more need for long hashes that no one can remember.

PascalCoin works in some regards as a bank, while still maintaining the decentralised, trustless, peer-to peer network, the coin features PAScal Accounts (i.e. PASA) which are stored in the wallet. They offer familiarity to the average user but also a lot of other functions not possible with a normal wallet.

For example, one can transfer a number of PascalCoins (PASC) into a PASA and then anonymously transfer that PASA account and it’s content to a friend or anyone’s wallet.

No ICO, no pre-mining, no centralization of coin allocation

PascalCoin was a 100% fair launch without any pre-mine, Initial Coin Offering or investment rounds.

The developers and community have worked on the project using their own resources and not money allocated from sold coins — as compared to other coins that released billions / trillions of coins

Implies several benefits: No one can run away with anyone’s money, the management team cannot dump millions of coins that lead to lowering the price,

Albert Molina — The creator of PascalCoin

Version 2 (V2) — How the tech advanced

Version 2 addresses shortcomings in account distribution model and delivers the key feature of Checkpointing, and more. The addition of Checkpointing now delivers the promise of true ”Deletable Blockchains.“ The blockchain in V2 is now permanently deletable from the Network itself without affecting Proof-of-Work validation for new nodes. This means new nodes can join the network without the need to download the infinite history of blocks. Instead, they download the latest Checkpoint and a few dozen latest blocks in order to fully synchronize with the provably most-work-chain. This paves the path towards, to what this is called, “Infinite Scaling”

In Wallet PASA purchase

Along with the built-in marketplace, the official Pascalcoin wallet also includes a real-time Blockchain explorer, active node statistics, an encrypted messaging protocol, and an account explorer. The marketplace can handle address numbers, accounts, domains registered with PascalCoin.

Investors can also use their accounts (PASA) and PASC within it to vote on community decisions via PIPs (Pascalcoin Improvement Proposals). Instead of forking new coins at each major disagreement, PIPs are an easy way to achieve consensus.

Monetized API

Due to reliable 0-confirmation transactions, PascalCoin allows a new form of decentralized application coined here as” Monetized APIs”. In a Monetized API, PascalCoin accounts serve as “ports” that listen/send “monetized-messages” to other “ports”. It’s complex, but the applications are endless — let me give you some examples.

There have been several applications of this so far, which you can check out at the following links: GetPASA.com and Pascwallet.com. These specific sites offer the possibility of a open PASA market.

Future examples of monetized APIs include: Pascal Chat (running in beta), Monetized Content (browser plugin with payment function), One-click e-commerce orders/ shops, Anonymity Mixers, Layer-2 Side-Chains and more. We have written more in depth about the monetized APIs. Please visit PascalCoin.org and the Medium channel.

What precisely lead to V3 being necessary?

Due to the competitiveness, most mining is now pooled collectively into mining pools. In PascalCoin’s case, a single pool (“Pool-X”) is responsible for 99% mining centralization — especially via dual-mining with ETH. Essentially, miners get to mine the non-memory-hard coin for free. This lead to the acute problem of centralization of mining, with one pool having over 90% of the PascalCoin miners. This lead to several issues that had to be addressed:

● Centralization of mining

● Dual-mining PASC “for free” even when unprofitable and then dumping the coins for whatever profits miners could get

● Difficult for PASC to develop own ecosystem, not determined by ETH

And then there was the problem of lack of community funds for critical costs such as getting PASC listed on more exchanges, which inevitably lead to the price being held back and unbalance due to lack of arbitrage opportunities.

Version 3 (V3) — The Kaizen Journey

PascalCoin is on a Kaizen journey — meaning a community is always seeking continuous improvements and as a consequence PIPs have been developed and encouraged.

PIPs? PascalCoin Improvement Proposals as they are known, is a PascalCoin specific methodology to propose improvements of any kind to this decentralised project. Consensus is attained by changing types to numbers corresponding to the desired vote.

The rest of the community can then vote by using their PASC and PASA. Once approved by the majority, the changes can be implemented in the code without need for disagreement or generating a completely new coin via a hard-fork.

In fact, the first PIP voting session ended recently and they will have a significant impact. Please read below about PIP09, PIP10, PIP11 and future PIPs that are in the pipe-line.

PIP09 — RandomHash

The centralization issue for PascalCoin is being addressed by PIP-0009.

After community debates among different hashing algos, it was proposed that using RandomHash is the the most optimal solution — esentially, PascalCoin will be CPU-mining friendly and will discourage GPU and ASIC mining, and the practice of dual-mining PASC and ETH in the X- Pool.

Serial hashers (CPU) are able to mine easier than parallel hashers (GPU). Serial hashers have an easier time with branching, recursion, and the caching of partial calculations of other nonces.

Parallel hashers, however, are significantly penalized by these features. The dependence on other random nonces incurs severe memory usage and subsequent waste. ASICs, specifically, would become economically infeasible if they had to support 16 hash algorithms and were confronted with Mersenne Twister, expansion, and contraction. This proposal requires hard-fork activation.

Block difficulty: to be reset upon activation to an “appropriately low number.” Over approximately 200 blocks, block mining times will stabilize.

For more information on PIP-0009, see https://github.com/PascalCoin/PascalCoin/blob/master/PIP/PIP-0009.md

Or see in depth explaination: https://medium.com/@pascalcoinmktg/pascalcoin-pip-0009-760d9041ceb4

PIP10–50% Inflation Reduction

Per the proposal, it was identified that PascalCoin’s growth has been stunted due to its high inflation. It may have grown twice as much as it has now and the price may have been upwards of four times greater than that of its current price. That’s about 50% of lost price value according to one of the main devs — which is going to be corrected after PIP10 is going to be implemented.

The current block reward is 100 PASC. Every four years (an epoch currently), this reward is halved — an estimate of 420,480 blocks per epoch.

The proposal is to reduce the epoch to two years, or 210,240 blocks per epoch. This would halve the inflation.

Lastly, this will go into effect in epoch 0 and it will have a low-impact to make this change now, in epoch 0, as block 210241 hasn’t been reach yet (the first block in epoch 1).

By reducing the inflation, each coin is worth more. Moving forward, without dual-mining being allowed, those that remain and help grow this ecosystem will be rewarded with a more valuable piece of the pie.

PIP 09 and 10 complement each other nicely to bring the ecosystem back into a state of equilibrium.

Best thing about it? This proposal can be implemented with a single line of code.

For more information on PIP-0010, please see: https://github.com/PascalCoin/PascalCoin/blob/master/PIP/PIP-0010.md

Or see in depth explaination here: https://medium.com/@pascalcoinmktg/pascalcoin-pip-0010-1801f31e41ce

PIP11 — Developer & Infrastructure Funding

Additional funding is necessary to ensure the continued competition of PascalCoin relative to other cryptocurrencies.

Other cryptocurrencies, such as DASH, have implemented a developer reward to provide this additional funding. It is with this proposal that PascalCoin wishes to implement the same idea of a developer reward so the development of PascalCoin can continue in areas such as layer 1 and 2 protocol development, marketing, exchange listings, and more.

This proposal suggests that the developer reward should consist of 20% of the PASC and PASA (20 PASC and 1 PASA) reward for a successfully mined block.

Additionally, it would provide developers with the ability to provide accounts to new users.

Upcoming PIPs

Further PIPs have been proposed: PIP 12, 13…. PIP 19. All of them are interesting and prepare PascalCoin for a lot of more future developments. Remember, PascalCoin is a decentralized project just like Bitcoin, so you can submit your own PIP to the benefit of the entire community that can be voted on.

https://github.com/PascalCoin/PascalCoin/blob/master/PIP

A future of development and real-life uses

If you’ve been following PascalCoin’s roadmap, you could see that lots of developments on our road-map have been made and some new things have or will be will be added for development.

One such example is the Layer-2 protocol that will enable PascalCoin to provide a multitude of use-cases and value overall to the society we live in, such as:

● PascalChat — chatting via blockchain, fully private

● Decentralized exchange on the PascalCoin blockchain itself

● Releasing tokens (similar to ERC20 tokens)

● Better-than-DASH Anon capability (in-protocol transaction/account mixing)

● Enabling Blockchain Proof-of-ID

● PascalCoin Market — Craigslist on Blockchain or even eBay style

Want to get started?

Get yourself a PASA by heading over to the Discord https://discord.gg/TbJHdra (or Telegram Channel) where a committed and friendly community awaits you. In fact, they donate the PASAs to new members.

Then you can continue by following the guides available in a dedicated channel on the Discord.

Join PascalCoin on this exciting journey!