New Hybrid Proof-of-Stake/Proof-of-Work BTCS Client

Community,

Today we are announcing the official release of the Hybrid Proof-of-Stake/Proof-of-Work Bitcoin-sCrypt client v.2.0.1.

Starting after block 640,000, Proof-of-Stake will be enabled on the Bitcoin-sCrypt blockchain, thus allowing users to generate new BTCS coins by staking their current coins in the BTCS wallet and help confirm blocks on the network. Furthermore, this change will also help decentralize mining on the blockchain.

BTCS v.2.0.1 clients can be downloaded from the official Bitcoin-sCrypt website: https://bitcoinscrypt.io.

Additionally, BTCS v.2.0.1 clients can be compiled from code directly from our github repo: https://github.com/Bitcoin-sCrypt/Bitcoin-sCrypt. Note, the network will only accept connections from BTCS clients v.2 or higher.

The Bitcoin-sCrypt dev team looked to Novacoin/Peercoin’s POS algo for inspiration for Bitcoin-sCrypt’s hybrid POS/POW.

Staking is easy. Users simply keep BTCS coins in their wallet while the BTCS client is running and unlock their wallet for staking. There is an option to just unlock the wallet for staking so that the wallet is still locked for any other purpose. As long as the BTCS client is running and the wallet unlocked for staking, users will begin staking their coins to help confirm blocks on the network and generate new coins.

After new BTCS coins are generated, they must be confirmed in 100 blocks before they can be spent. The maximum total coins ever minted will remain at 21 million, like Bitcoin-core.

Finally, because the BTCS chain has been updated to allow for Proof-of-Stake blocks, users running older versions of the BTCS client (prior to v.2.0.1) will have to re-download the blockchain from scratch.

To do so, users running the old client will have to delete two files the first time they run the new client:

blk0001.dat

blkindex.dat

In Windows, the files are here: C:\Users\[your username]\AppData\Roaming\Bitcoin-sCrypt

In MacOS, the files are here: ~/Library/Application Support/Bitcoin-sCrypt

In Linux, the files are here: ~/.bitcoin-scrypt

(Always back up your wallet.dat file)

Special thanks to the Bitcoin-sCrypt development team for delivering a fully functioning hybrid proof-of-stake client for the Bitcoin-sCrypt blockchain to allow end users to help confirm blocks on the network, generate coins, and decentralize POW mining.