Archives for Bitcoin

Genesis Block

Every cryptocurrency derived from Bitcoin has a Genesis Block, the very first block in the blockchain, whose creation is hard-coded into the full node code. In order to prove that it's authentic, the usual rules about hashing the Merkle root and the Consensus information apply. So, one has to come up with some seriously magic numbers to put in the code. The established technique, documented in all the coin cloning guides, involves setting the values to zero for the very first run, getting an error message and using the values displayed in the log file to fill into the source code. However, the section in the Bitcoin code that computes the required hashes for debug printing has been removed from…
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Difficulty Re-Targeting

Adjusting (re-targeting) difficulty for the PoW is a complex issue with Cryptocurrencies. Bitcoin adjustment every 2016 10 minute blocks (two weeks), is very coarse, and is not usable for smaller coins, in the age of ASIC and GPU farm mining, where hashing on a particular network can change very rapidly, sometimes automated or performed for malicious reasons. A range of algorithms and techniques are evolving and many have been implemented and deployed since. Kimoto Gravity Well (KGW) Nite's Gravity Well Dark Gravity Wave Digishield from Dogecoin had time-warp vulnerabilities but was fixed-up in other coins since. Slingshield also made improvements of some sort. Zcash settled on adjustment for every block, after an extended discussion. They implemented a modified Digishield v3. Despite prolonged discussions, Litecoin…
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Reader Suggestions

So far the readers on the Bitcointalk forum have suggested: Self-fund GPU mining a PoW algorithm that's, not easy for ASICs or CPU botnet PoS with the right set of parameters, algo New algo, like NIST5 HODL memory hard algo Airdrop Ethereum cloning guide bounty  New Ethereum cloning guide. Faster clone GoChain.  
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