One of the main hallmarks of a healthy cryptocurrency is the community that springs up around it. When that community then takes the ideas and the codebase and creates new products, services, or movements, a type of self-sustaining ‘ecology’ emerges. That community inertia can keep an altcoin moving forward past all expectations (Dogecoin), and it will probably be the deciding factor if any altcoin is to succeed in the long-term.

With that in mind, lately I’ve noticed that quite a bit of independent development has been surfacing around Blackcoin, an altcoin launched in late February of this year.

The most visible of these independent development projects is that of BlackHalo/BitHalo, a ‘smart contracting’ system for both Bitcoin and Blackcoin, allowing two parties to be able to transfer funds through contracts, agreements, or payments without the need for any third-party.

Wanting to know more about the author and his projects, I emailed him a few questions to which he graciously responded.

HR: Tell me a bit about you, who you are, what your background is.

DZ: My name is David Zimbeck. my background is diverse; business, chess, acting, commercial production and hard labor. I used to program as a little kid and then I tried to get this made but couldn’t find anyone so I took to python, holed up in my trailer for 5 months and coded BlackHalo - taught myself everything from scratch. This is cross platform, BitHalo was complete almost 2 months ago but I withheld release due to superior speed of BlackHalo. Now I will have both in the same client

HR: You’re not part of the Blackcoin dev team?

DZ: I am not part of Blackcoin dev team. I am totally solo. But they have seen what I have done and they love it. Now that I have released, many of them have done what they can to get the word out and help in any way they can. People are so excited about this project that they have literally gone out of their way to help - for example one of the team members made all my sites for free.

I have been on reddit talking to them for months explaining everything in depth and they know better than anyone how this is going to change the world, and how it’s not limited to coins (it will revolutionize finance and law).

HR: Why Blackcoin?

DZ: I chose Blackcoin because of its speed and malleability patch. I also think proof of stake is much safer than proof of work. Now with POS 2.0 I know I have made the right decision.

HR: Besides secure trades, how else can BlackHalo be used?

DZ: There is so many uses for this I would not know where to start and where to end. It can back commodities, it can barter, microtrade, employ, do unbreakable ebay, reduce frivilous lawsuits, derivatives, allow people to trade internationally peer to peer, zero risk lending etc. Although these features can be used already, there are no templates yet to show “mom and dad” how those things will be done. Also there are no contract “pools” yet which was supposed to be bulletin boards for contracts which is the basis for the decentralized exchange and just basically any kind of contracts, sales or agreements.

HR: Any projects besides BlackHalo?

DZ: Yes. NightTrader is a series of protocols to handle all the communication platforms. True p2p communication over encrypted email, bitmessage, irc and whatever we can leverage. Decentralized servers are being build on top of these platforms and what NightTrader does is simply awesome. It uses the contracts themselves to make computers comply to human rules and contracts. So hacking will be a thing of the past. So its “agreement between computers using halo contracts to enforce them”



HashReport thanks David for taking the time to chat with us. We hope to see him at The North American Bitcoin Conference next week.

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