Innovative coins are rare, but now I have found an interesting one: HeavyCoin. One very interesting twist is that the miners vote on the block reward. But there is more.

Hash algo SHA-256 + Keccak-512 + Grøstel-512 + BLAKE-512 Mining HEFTY1 (novel hash function, claims CPU-only) Premine 1-2% Difficulty retargeting Temporal Retargeting (goes beyond Gravity Well) Block reward 0-1024 / 2min (voted upon!) Developers Competent, Engaged

The hash-mining algorithm HEFTY1 is a change to the usual SHA256/Scrypt, which means the common mining infrastructure cannot be applied. This gives a little head start against Multipools and other coin hoppers. They claim CPU-only. I see no reason why it cannot be ported to GPU. They seem to understand hashing algorithms better than I do, though.

They did a small premine, but as I said: it gives more weight to the “trust into developers” aspect. So let us talk about the developers.

There are two core developers: keccak512 and nomisugi. They provide substantial documentation about HeavyCoin, which builds trust. They provide reasons for their design which shows competency. The code is not yet published on Github, only the website is. So I cannot comment on the code quality so far. Essentially, this is as good as it gets. Thumbs up.

Difficulty retargeting is also different. They do not use the Gravity Well, but they claim to have an even better mechanism called Temporal Retargeting. Where the Gravity Well requires one block solving to adapt, Temporal Retargeting claims to adapt within 3 hours even if no block is solved. This would be quite an improvement.

While “security” is a nice buzzword, which all coins claim because they use SHA256 hashing. HeavyCoin tries to actually improve upon other coins by combining multiple hash functions. Quark also tried this, but failed to actually improve security due to the way the combination works. With HeavyCoin, if one hash function is broken there are still 3 more which ensure security. So far the security of SHA256 is no problem in practice, but it might be in 10 years, so this improvement is a nice addition.

After the subtle innovations, HeavyCoin also has very visible one: Miners can vote upon the block reward. While there is an upper bound, the mining reward adapts to community consensus. Compared to the usual hard-coded block-halving approach, this moves some power and responsibility from the developers to the miners. It is more democratic and I heartily welcome this idea.

Conclusion: Innovative, Good Developers. Big recommendation.

On the March 8th HeavyCoin will launch. I will mine it. They are also doing an IPO until March 3rd, if this is your thing.

By the way, according to the secret formula, the initial price for 1 HVC is 1800–3600 Satoshi.

(disclaimer: I got the 10k HVC bounty for the first article here. I consider this equivalent to my usual fee.)