GoByte — The Neoscrypt’s little giant
At first glance, GoByte might seem to be just another Dash fork. The only different thing would be the PoW algorithms. Dash’s core runs on the well know X11 algorithm while GoByte uses the NeoScrypt algorithm, which is a further improved version of basic Scrypt.
But what is a PoW algorithm?
A proof of work is a piece of data which is difficult (costly, time-consuming) to produce but easy for others to verify and which satisfies certain requirements. Producing a proof of work can be a random process with low probability so that a lot of trial and error is required on average before a valid proof of work is generated. Bitcoin uses the Hashcash proof of work system.
One application of this idea is using Hashcash as a method to preventing email spam, requiring a proof of work on the email’s contents (including the To address), on every email. Legitimate emails will be able to do the work to generate the proof easily (not much work is required for a single email), but mass spam emailers will have difficulty generating the required proofs (which would require huge computational resources).
Hashcash proofs of work are used in Bitcoin for block generation. In order for a block to be accepted by network participants, miners must complete a proof of work which covers all of the data in the block. The difficulty of this work is adjusted so as to limit the rate at which new blocks can be generated by the network to one every 10 minutes. Due to the very low probability of successful generation, this makes it unpredictable which worker computer in the network will be able to generate the next block.
For a block to be valid it must hash to a value less than the current target; this means that each block indicates that work has been done generating it. Each block contains the hash of the preceding block, thus each block has a chain of blocks that together contain a large amount of work. Changing a block (which can only be done by making a new block containing the same predecessor) requires regenerating all successors and redoing the work they contain. This protects the block chain from tampering.
The most widely used proof-of-work scheme is based on SHA-256 and was introduced as a part of Bitcoin. Some other hashing algorithms that are used for proof-of-work include Scrypt, Blake-256, CryptoNight, HEFTY1, Quark, SHA-3, scrypt-jane, scrypt-n, and combinations thereof.
Ok, So what’s the difference between X11 and NeoScrypt?
First, let’s start by learning what X11 algorithm is. X11 is a widely used hashing algorithm created by Dash core developer Evan Duffield. X11’s chained hashing algorithm utilizes a sequence of eleven scientific hashing algorithms for the proof-of-work. It was partially inspired by the chained-hashing approach of Quark, adding further “depth” and complexity by increasing the number of hashes, yet it differs from Quark in that the rounds of hashes are determined a priori instead of having some hashes being randomly picked. The X11 algorithm uses multiple rounds of 11 different hashes (blake, bmw, groestl, jh, keccak, skein, luffa, cubehash, shavite, simd, echo), thus making it one of the safest and more sophisticated cryptographic hashes in use by modern cryptocurrencies.
Now, what’s NeoScrypt? As the name suggests, NeoScrypt is a further development of Scrypt as described in Percival. It is aimed at increased security and better performance on general purpose computer hardware while maintaining comparable costs and requirements. NeoScrypt’s core engine is configured to employ non-reduced Salsa20 of 20 rounds (Salsa20/20) as well as non-reduced ChaCha20 of 20 rounds (ChaCha20/20). Both of them are used to produce the final salt as their outputs are XOR’ed into it. If approximated to abstract load/store units, NeoScrypt is 1.25 times more memory intensive than Scrypt. There are no known successful attacks on non-reduced Salsa20 and ChaCha20 other than exhaustive brute force search. NeoScrypt replaces SHA-256 with BLAKE2s which is a further development of BLAKE-256 [10], one of 5 NIST SHA-3 contest finalists. Based upon ChaCha20 , operates with a lower round count of v1 26-Jul-2014 10, supports keyed hashing, is native little endian and faster significantly than SHA-256 and even BLAKE-256.
NeoScrypt Market Dominance
Even that the NeoScrypt PoW algorithm premiered in 27th of July 2014 on PhoneixCoin, it was immediately adopted by other crypto-currencies like FeatherCoin, OrbitCoin, TrezarCoin, and many others. Now, 4 years later, a handful of crypto-currencies continue to use this algorithm. One of those coins is also GoByte.
At the moment I am writing this article about our NeoScrypt little giant, GoByte owns almost 19% of the NeoScrypt market, after only 5 months since genesis block. GoByte started it’s rally with a lot of bumps, chain getting stuck every time a NiceHash miner threw enormous hashing power at the small blockchain, a series of hate from older blockchain adopters calling GoByte “A Dash copy-paste coin” and several refusals from different crypto exchanges. All of the issues were fixed through the team’s hard work and dedication.
Now, here we are. After 5 months and 26 days since launch, with a market cap of $10M+ and a huge loving community.
Article Author: Antonio Moratti, Chief Marketing Officer @ GoByte Network
