Sebastian Green, founder & developer of Swap.

Swap is one of those projects with an active mining community which stood out to me the past months. Not because of its wicked price action, but because these guys are moving forward no matter what.

I had the chance to do a Q&A with Swap’s founder and main dev Sebastian, and I invite you kindly to read along because he’s someone with a very refreshing view on cryptocurrency as we know it.

Without further ado, let’s start!

“Hi Sebastian, what is your background and for how long have you been involved with blockchain technology?”

I started Bitcoin mining in 2011 on two AMD GPUs (5 BTC per week). In 2017 I started a lot of mining pools for Monero type coins (Bittube, Graft, Electroneum, etc). I did this to learn the differences in their approaches and to understand Monero’s internals and its flaws.

“Swap’s tagline claims to have “zero BS (bullshit)” besides other advantages, what exactly do you mean by that?”

Most coins that came after Bitcoin have some kind of developer fee; be it a premine or a mining fee. Swap is a clean coin with no premine and no governance or mining fees. It is a coin FOR miners BY miners.

Did you know that even BTC has 1 million coins laying in an unknown state?

Monero’s proof of work is like a hamster wheel for miners. The anti-ASIC war is a fake battle to keep profitability up for those designing the POW. Miners would never vote FOR their replacement every 6 months. For some deep diving please check out the Medium article “CryptoNight is Poison” for more detailed information.

“What’s the reasoning behind using the Cuckaroo29s protocol?”

Well, C29s is the mining algorithm; also known as the proof of work, not a protocol. The protocol we are using is still the CryptoNote protocol because it has the privacy feature set we wanted to implement and it has been peer-reviewed.

Being peer-reviewed is important because it gives a measure of trust to the software. However, because of the obfuscation and complexity in the PoW used by Monero and other CryptoNote protocol based coins, we felt that we needed to move from their PoW and find something better. After all, their PoW is not peer-reviewed.

Our goal is to be a miners coin and we could not justify supporting a PoW that had secret optimizations that were possessed by only a few. The Cuckoo cycle proposed by John Trump had been peer-reviewed and its secret is in its lack of complexity. I have studied the variants and created the C29s protocol so that we could differentiate ourselves from other coins that would also use Cuckaroo variants. This helps us to defend from Nicehash or other large hash attack vectors. A major benefit is also increased efficiencies by an order of magnitude.

A Monero CPU miner can process 50 hashes per second. Therefore at full CPU load a machine can only sync 50 Monero blocks per second max. C29s is not symmetrical. While it takes a lot of resources to find a cycle (hash), validation is trivial. A single CPU can verify one million cycles per second improving sync speed and global block propagation.

Due to such an improved rate of validation, we can have a 15-second blocktime without risking problems that would appear using a different PoW. The 15-second blocktime has other advantages that don’t appear on the surface but yield an extremely smooth running network. Transfers are almost lightning fast. You’ll see the incoming transaction within 15 seconds. Your transaction will be fully confirmed in two and a half minutes. Compare that to Bitcoin’s 10-minute blocktime and verification.

What would you rather use?

“How would you describe your (mining) community?”

Our core team has been bolstered by fantastic support from our community. People have seen and understood what we are trying to accomplish and they want to join us. Supercircles has done a fantastic job building upon Cancab’s original work for our website and Initech has been voracious in his quest to spread our project on any and all forums he can find. At the beginning of our project, we were utilizing a different PoW before we forked to C29s. We used a modified PoW called CN Superfast. Because it was based on the Cryptonight proof of work (Please note CryptoNote is a protocol and Cryptonight is a PoW) we had a heavy concentration of AMD miners.

There were even a few people like PharmEcis who used dual and quad CPU servers to mine XWP. However, since our fork to C29s, we have become dominated mostly by NVidia miners with 6GB of VRAM or greater who have the graph per watt advantage. However recent miner software has given AMD cards with 4GB of VRAM the ability to mine as well.

“To people who never mined a single coin before, what recommendations would you have for them?”

You can solo mine Swap without using a pool because we have developed and released the MicroPool which allows you to set up and run your own pool very easily. It becomes point and click easy. With a 15-second blocktime, there are 5,600+ blocks per day, so even one rig can find a fair share of blocks every day. Ultimately mining is a process that helps to decentralize a network. Running a node also helps to verify and process transactions.

If you are savvy enough, mining will even pay for the electricity it used and give you a profit and they work 24/7 for you.

Ver 1.4.0 of our MicroPool. We are constantly improving and adding more features to this powerful tool.

“What can you tell us about Swap’s team?”

We all have varied backgrounds but all of us are very interested in blockchain and it’s associated technologies. I am the main developer and am responsible for coding and maintaining our network security.

Leafy is my right-hand man who helps me with testing and debugging. Rbrcpa handles our communications with exchanges, Twitter and the like.

From left to right — Supercircles, TiagoDS, Leafy, Seb Green, PharmEcis, rbrcpa, Christcoinzy

PharmEcis has become our voice, letting our truths ring loud and clear. TiagoDS does general house cleaning and helps with graphics. Supercircles has become our web developer and Initech handles all of the forums.

Ultimately, we all share the same vision of a good clean coin that was made by miners for miners which allows us to work well with each other. None of us are paid for this. We take pride in our achievements and we have the same opportunities as anyone else does when it comes to mining Swap.

“Looking at your roadmap, what are you most excited for?”

I’ll be upfront and honest. We do not believe in roadmaps. Roadmaps are tools for scammers to trick the public. Many projects have put out extensive roadmaps only to achieve the only thing the developers cared for, an exchange listing to dump their premine.

We have a philosophy that we will simply build the best we can, as we can. All of the work we do is volunteered and unpaid for. For a team that receives no kickbacks, we certainly have delivered far more technology wise than the majority of projects out there who took in millions in premines, ICOs, governance fees etc.

This is our web wallet — super fast and easy to use!

That being said we do have some items coming up that will help round out our technology deployment, increasing access to our network on more devices. Our Android and IOS wallets are in development and will be ready in the near future. Those two wallets will help round out our already deployed Web Wallet and also the Ledger support that we have already integrated.

We continue to innovate with our MicroPool that is a significant departure from the norm. We highly value decentralized networks and are attempting to build the tools to allow the average miner to take control of his mining efforts.

The MicroPool is a stripped down version of the common pool software in use today. We have made it portable, will run on Windows or Linux and it’s extremely efficient. You literally only have to install it, set four variables and point your miners at it. You no longer have pool fees to pay for. Your latency becomes that of your local area network which greatly improves stale shares and orphans. You can use your own node or even a remote one, though using your own is also much more efficient. We are constantly updating it and pushing new features to it because we believe this helps push our built by miners for miners stance.

We believe that the majority of shit coins are destined to die a painful sub one sat death. There is simply a tidal wave of trash that has flooded the markets. We think that a cleansing of these coins is inevitable. At the end of the bloodbath that will hit the alt market, only those who can pass the litmus test of solid fundamentals will still be standing. We aim to be one of those projects.

While we fully believe that roadmaps are garbage, we do have goals which you can see here in this snippet from our website.

You could say that our two biggest tech achievements yet to come will be our implementation of Atomic Swaps with BTC that will revolutionize many aspects of this landscape as we now know it and also our acceptance of ASICs when the time is right. These two milestones will be our biggest achievements yet. Atomic Swaps will change how we trade coins forever. ASIC acceptance after a proven competitive market for ASIC machines that all have access to is inevitable. Playing the cat and mouse game of algorithm switching to try and keep an even playing field is stupid. You expend tremendous amounts of effort for what?

Accepting the efficiency of ASICs is not only good for the security of the network, it is good for the planet! Hash per watt, nothing can beat a properly tuned ASIC. It’s pretty simple, Bitcoin is king and they have plenty of ASICs. The overall global hash protects the network from rollback attempts. Why would we not want the same type of security as long as anyone who wants one of these machines can have it?

Lastly, Leafy has also been busy on developing an application that will run on top of the Swap blockchain leveraging our fast 15-second blocktime. More details on all of these items will come as they are finalized.

“How can people stay up-to-date?”

We are doing our best to be on top of all the important social media platforms. From forums to Reddit, Telegram to Discord, we are there. You can follow our Github and see how active our development team is. You can visit our website or follow our tweets. Really, we are trying to cover it all. If you want real-time access to us, our Discord is your best bet.

Please use the following links below:

I am not a financial advisor who tells people to buy certain assets.

I have not been compensated for my time writing this article. That being said, I am invested in Swap.

Thanks for reading,

Mr. Backwards