What is BurstCoin: An Interview with The Lead Developer, PoC Burstcoin Consortium

Of course, there is saturation of cryptocurrencies some with lofty proposals but none stands out like BurstCoin. The team behind the BurstCoin are walking the talk and is the first blockchain based platform that will make use of that empty space on your computer hard drive for mining—the green way. Unlike Proof of Work, which has been declared an environmental disaster due to their insatiable energy needs, BurstCoin implements a proposal that was first raised by Dziembowski and Stefan back in 2015 called Proof of Space.

Ecoin4Dummies held an explosive interview with the Founder of BurstCoin and here is what he had to say:

Why should an investor consider Burstcoin?

The Burst team does not try to persuade people to invest in our project, that decision is deeply personal, and should be made by individuals who have done their own research and, thus, convinced themselves that Burst is the project in which they wish to take part of. The core and support Burst team does not get paid, we have no developers’ fund, and we never plan to start one. We are completely volunteer-based and enjoy what we do; and to preempt this following question, the bear market has no effect on our motivation and we are not selling our shares. However, we believe that the plan laid out in The Burst Dymaxion white paper as well as Proof-of-Capacity clearly superior efficiency to Proof-of-Work will make Burst one of, if not the most, advanced chain in existence.

What security upgrades are in the pipeline for Burstcoin platform and wallet?

Details are at the Burst Dymaxion white paper. Briefly, however, we have already implemented the first hard fork, this brought with it a four times larger block size, 64 recipient multi out transactions, 128 recipient multi out transactions for payments of the same amount, and the PoC2 (proof-of-capacity 2) plot format, which eliminates PoC1’s susceptibility to Time-Memory Trade-off Attacks.

Non-hard fork related improvements include an almost complete rewrite of the core wallet code, a full miner tools suite developed by the core team, the fixing of a major bug left over from the days of the NXT fork, General Bytes ATM integration, and many other miscellaneous projects carried out by various community members.

There are two forks still to come. These upgrades include Dymaxion Layers. You can think of them as tangles (think IOTA) on top of the Burst blockchain. This will allow near instant transaction with arbitrary throughput. We will also be adding Ring Signatures, zk-SNARKs, and a PoC3 format that will run alongside PoC2 and enable Burst plots to store valuable data that can be mined on. Finally, there are many projects still in the works that have not been announced to the public since they are not ready, but rest assured there is no shortage of development taking place. Again, for more detail, please refer to the white paper.

What strategies are in place to improve mining efficiency?

Burst mining is already many hundreds of thousands of times more efficient than PoW mining. Some projects currently underway to even further enhance efficiency are the Burst File System (BFS) as well as optimizations of plotter and miner software so miners can read their plots as fast as possible and have drives idling a higher percentage of the time. It is worth noting, that slower plotting ability correlates with increase in ASIC resistance. This is why plotting is via the Shabal256 algorithm; this algorithm is very I/O intensive and thus too slow for ASICs to yield any economic advantage. There are also many private experiments investigating clean energy use for mining (eg. solar, wind, etc) and building machines that will mine at less than one watt per terabyte.

What is the uptake of the Burst platform by companies and Financial Institutions?

Businesses are beginning to use Burst and its chain. A variety of different businesses are coming online and we are waiting for official announcements. There are more things coming but at this time we can not disclose too much due to the announcements being part of a larger overall media campaign. But I can tell you soon you will be able to buy groceries with burst, buy day to day items, and soon I hear there may even be some gift cards coming.

How does Burst achieve efficient mining using only hard drives?

Proof-of-Capacity is actually an evolution of Proof-of-Work. It is not an entirely novel idea down to the core. To mine Burst, it is necessary to first generate files called plots. The plotting process is almost identical to PoW, except that it has to be timely. A plot is simply a file. This file saves the digest of the nonces a miner would generate in a PoW scheme. In PoC, scanning of plots happens on every block complete with deadline calculation. One, there is deadline submission with checks every second to see if the block's start time plus elapsed time is greater than the deadline. If it is, the miner has won the right to forge the block. In simpler terms, the lowest submitted deadline wins the right to forge the block.

While the actual mining of Burst happens on hard drives, you do need to do a small amount of hashing to generate the files to mine. There is no writing to the disk after plot generation.

What strategies are in place to navigate forking and any such developments? What is the uptake rate of Dymaxion Layer payment channels?

It is, and always will be a priority of the Burst team to reach consensus on any proposed forks. It is our express stance not to proceed with contentious forks. The pre-Dymaxion hard fork had over 90% support. This saw nearly every node, miner, and pool switch over. Within the next month, all laggards had either realigned with the fork, or dropped off the network. Dymaxion layers are not live on the network yet.

Burstcoin also facilitates smart contracts. How do miners execute smart contracts?

Burst uses the transaction and transaction process model. Smart contracts executes with the transaction that initiates the smart contract. Each node executes a smart contract upon transaction processing.

Conclusion

The road towards perfection is still a work in progress. In coming months, the platform plans on further steering their core. They shall make move through PoC3 Protocols, building a multi-lingual and flexible wallet. That's besides marketing the platform on a commercial scale. You can buy BurstCoin at UpBit, Bittrex, Poloniex, and others. For safety, download and install the official BurstCoin wallet.