Introduction

Welcome to our newest format – Altcoin Spotlight! We will aim to post a new report once or twice per month, depending on time and available resources. Altcoin Spotlight will cover various altcoins with a focus on new coin launches. We will try to summarize the most important points of various altcoins that we find interesting or worthy of attention. Since this series is new on MyAltcoins, we figured it was only appropriate to start it with the introduction of a fresh, new altcoin on the block – Cruzbit! Cruzbit is a coin which recently surfaced but is already getting a lot of traction. Without further ado, let’s see what Cruzbit is all about!

Cruzbit

Cruzbit Essentials

A single developer has coded Cruzbit from scratch within a single month. As stated on Cruzbit Github, this is an alpha-quality software, and some bugs are still expected. But don’t let this distract you from quality Cruzbit core. Mainnet is live, and the network is working without issues since the launch on June-21-2019. But what is Cruzbit exactly and why is it worthy of attention? That is a very good question as the very first look on coin metrics reveals hardly anything more than just another one of countless Bitcoin clones. Supply and the emission curve is the same, difficulty adjustment is the same, etc. Basically, all metrics are inherited from Bitcoin. The main difference, however, lies in the codebase.

Cruzbit is a simple peer-to-peer ledger implementation. Developer describes the project as very similar to Bitcoin, but with noticeable distinctions. He actually created it with the knowledge he gathered from studying and working with Bitcoin over the years. The dev likes to describe Bitcoin as a nuclear power plant which is not necessary when a simple Windmill can do the job just as good if not better. Basically, whatever he thought wasn’t necessary for Bitcoin, he decided to remove and make a simpler concept. That is how Cruzbit – a simple decentralized peer-to-peer ledger was born. The above is Cruzbit’s main selling point. Developer friendliness that encourages the building of various applications and integrations in a simple and clean way. More on this later.

Cruzbit Highlight Points

First, the most noticeable difference when compared to Bitcoin is that Cruzbit is written in the Golang (Go) programming language. The codebase is original, written from scratch with some small parts also written from scratch in C++, like CUDA support. Then there is a peer protocol via secure WebSockets API that simplifies web integrations. Also, Cruzbit implemented newer cryptography, namely the Ed25519 signature system.

The block size limit isn’t fixed, and the blocks are only capped by transaction count. The current cap is set to 10,000 transactions. Each transaction is around 500 bytes, which means that the maximum block size is around 5 MB at the moment. Cap will be increased gradually though, dynamics are explained in the quote below:

Since transactions in cruzbit are more-or-less fixed size, we cap blocks by transaction count instead, with the initial limit being 10,000 transactions. This per-block transaction limit increases with “piecewise-linear-between-doublings growth.” This means the limit doubles roughly every 2 years by block height and increases linearly between doublings up until a hard limit of 2,147,483,647. This was directly inspired by BIP 101. We use block height instead of time since another change in cruzbit is that all block headers contain the height (as well as the total cumulative chain work.)

Don’t think for a second that Cruzbit believes in BCH or BSV philosophy of big blocks that do not allow proper decentralization if the network is fully used (or spammed) and blocks are getting filled on a consistent basis. That is not the case – Cruzbit can support ledger pruning, and that is something that will be implemented when the need arises.

Cruzbit does not use Bitcoin scripts, and per the simple pattern the developer was going for – signatures are plain signatures. Transaction format is also very clean and straightforward without any inputs or outputs. There is a public key for both the sender and the receiver with a few extra details like, time, amount, memo field, nonce, series, and signature.

Cruzbit Mining

Cruzbit uses SHA3-256 as its mining algorithm. Due to the simple algorithm, Cruzbit quickly grew over CPU mining and advanced to GPU mining. It probably won’t be long until we see FPGA’s and potentially ASIC’s in a more distant future. As can be seen, Cruzbit developer doesn’t believe that ASIC or especially FPGA resistance is possible. Hence he didn’t bother wasting time on developing or implementing special algorithms that combat the above. The time is probably better spent elsewhere as history shows that “ASIC resistance” depends only on network value. If the network becomes valuable enough, ASIC manufacturers and FPGA developers will find a solution sooner or later, and specialized miners will emerge.

How To Mine

How to start solo mining? There are no official binaries available so it would be best if you compiled from source for your respective operating system. But there are community builds available for convenience. Pick the method you prefer.

General steps are as follows:

Compile from source or run wallet binary, Generate keys with “newkey” command, Copy the public key and close the wallet, Backup wallet folder, Compile from source or run client binary, Specify your public key, number of GPU’s and start the client (miner), Let it sync, After syncing, it will automatically start mining.

For exact commands read GitHub README, and SetAnimals Ubuntu notes. All blocks that are mined need to have extra 100 blocks on top of them (coinbase maturity) before you can actually see a new balance. Hence, don’t worry if you don’t see new balances on your wallet at once. You can use “rewards” command to see them immediately, though. Currently, only Nvidia GPU’s are supported, and there are no public pools available yet. One other thing to note is that you will need to have decent CPU in your mining rig if you want to maximize hashrate, Celeron won’t cut it, at least not until GPU miner is fine-tuned and optimized.

Help Wanted

Cruzbit has only one developer – asdvxgxasjab, and he is coding all on his own with a bit of help from a few community members. On the GitHub, we can actually see that he seeks help for parts he hasn’t got the expertise to do by himself. Developer also actively participates in a community built Discord and discusses project details, gives updates and plans next steps. It is refreshing to find a developer who listens and appreciates community suggestions. There are too many failed projects that had potential just because developers were too stubborn and completely disregarded community opinion.

Exchanges

So far Cruzbit got some attention but is still lowkey and flying under the radar, not a lot of people know about it and neither do exchanges. However, the word is getting out quickly, a few prominent personas starred the project on GitHub, which is always a good sign and shows interest. qTrade team got a hint from community members, and they quickly set a new record. Cruzbit was listed on qTrade within a single day – free of charge! It has to be the fastest original coin listing in the crypto history and clearly demonstrates how easy it is to work with Cruzbit and proves that developer-friendly badge is well deserved. Notes that Eric from qTrade posted on Discord are another confirmation:

Since then, Vinex Network also listed Cruzbit. Trading went live on July-31-2019.

Community

If you want to be a part of the community, joining the project’s Discord is always a good idea, especially since the Cruzbit developer is very approachable and willing to answer all questions. Discord currently has 236 members. Cruzbit is also present on Twitter and has 82 followers at the moment.

For tracking any kind of progress, we suggest using GitHub since the updates are posted regularly, mostly on a daily basis. Other than that, there is a standard subreddit, r/cruzbit, even though the developer first posted about Cruzbit on the r/cryptography and r/golang. Cruzbit has two community-built websites, this one contains lots of useful information. Community member jstnryan did an excellent job.

Coin Metrics

Cruzbit inherited Bitcoin metrics and kept them exactly the same. We posted them below in case you need a reminder. Note that there is no premine or dev block reward. And the coin has been announced on Reddit shortly after genesis block. As a result, the launch was fair. Even inexperienced users could start mining immediately as clear instructions were provided on GitHub.

Block reward: 50 CRUZ, halving every 4th year (210,000 blocks)

Max supply: 21,000,000 CRUZ

Block time: 10 minutes

Retarget interval: 2 weeks (2016 blocks)

Mining reward maturity: 100 blocks

Conclusion

Cruzbit has been well received by the community and shows potential due to its quality elements. It appears there is a market for simple, stripped-down, developer-friendly cryptocurrency. Mostly due to the Bitcoin complexity for new developers that weren’t following its development over the years. If you have patience and support new projects, give it a bit of time and see how it ages. There is a lot more work to be done. We are looking towards further developments, especially to the privacy feature, which is currently on hold.

Time to conclude the first Altcoin Spotlight, tweet us your Cruzbit thoughts!

Resources

MyAltcoins team,

Petar & Ana