Announcing the ziftrCOIN Release

ZiftrCOIN will be launching this Saturday(February 28th) at noon(12 p.m. EST)! We’ve put a lot of hard work into it and a large portion of our efforts have been leading to this very moment. We couldn’t have gotten here without all the support we received during the ziftrCOIN Presale and we just want to again express our gratitude to all presale participants, as well as everyone who has expressed interest in ziftrCOIN.

Specifications:

• Algorithm: PoK
• Supply: 10 billion
• Block time: 1 minute
• Difficulty retargeting: Every block
• Tie Breaker: Mature coins spent
• Confirmations: 12
• Distribution: Modeled after adoption rates of new technologies
• Ports: 10333 for protocol, 10332 for JSON-RPC
• Premine: 4.5%

We are pre-mining 4.5% of the total ziftrCOINs, 66.7% of which we will give away to consumers. In doing this, we hope that more consumers start to become familiar with cryptocurrency.

You will be able to begin CPU mining via the ziftrCOIN-Qt wallet immediately upon release to get a bit of a head start. As for GPU mining, we’re waiting to release our GPU code until 1-2 weeks after the coin release date. Why? A couple reasons:

• To give people who don't have specialized mining hardware a chance to mine ziftrCOINs before CPU mining is made infeasible by a large presence of GPU miners.

• To allow the network to grow in hash rate a little more gradually than just having all of the GPUs join at the moment the coin is released.

Be sure to follow ziftrCOIN on Twitter (@ziftrcoin) for all mining update announcements.

What Makes ziftrCOIN different?

$1 Minimum Redemption Value

ziftrCOIN comes with a built-in use case. When spent in Ziftr’s merchant network, each ziftrCOIN will have a minimum redemption value of $1. Think of ziftrCOINs as your very own Ziftr coupons.

Incentivized Proof of Knowledge Mining

In our version of Proof of Knowledge, the miner may optionally prove knowledge of transaction data while mining to get a slightly higher reward. More specifically, a block solved with Proof of Knowledge of transaction data is allowed to claim a 5% higher reward than those that are not. The idea here is that we want to incentivize miners to run their own software to decide which transactions will be processed, rather than just working on data given by the pool operator. With this setup, pools can still exist to limit the variance of miners, but are no longer the source for transaction data while mining. In addition, an SPV node may verify the Proof of Knowledge of transaction data with only one more transaction from the block, rather than downloading the full block data.

Mature Coins Spent as a Tiebreaker

In ziftrCOIN, the core client calculates the number of sufficiently old coins spent in each new block received on the peer-to-peer network. When two blocks are solved on the tip of the chain at nearly the same time, the block with more sufficiently old coins spent in it is chosen as the correct block. Chains are still prioritized by most-work first; the counting of old coins spent is only used when two chains have the same work. This tiebreaking strategy makes it unprofitable for a miner to mine PoK blocks while not including transactions because the blocks would have far fewer old coins spent in the block, and they would lose ties. Since the tiebreaking strategy is mathematically expected to take effect in approximately 18% of blocks, a 5% increase in rewards would not be sufficient to make this attack worthwhile.

Dynamic Block Size Limit

The ziftrCOIN block size limit is not set to a fixed constant, as is currently done in Bitcoin. Instead, the chain automatically allows for growth as transaction volume increases. This can be faked by miners, but a clear majority of miners must be artificially increasing block size limits in order for the block size limit to increase unnecessarily. The block size growth is limited to 10% every 3 months, which is roughly equivalent to doubling every 2 years.

Coin Distribution Model

Most coins follow a halving block reward distribution that incentivizes early adopters to participate before the block reward drops. Instead, we decided to try to match the distribution with common adoption curves for new technologies. For example, the chart contained in this article (below for convenience) shows the standard adoption curve of new technologies. Ten billion total ziftrCOINs will be created over 30 years, with the coins distributed in each block changing each day following a standard bell curve.

Support for OP_CHECKLOCKTIMEVERIFY

The Bitcoin scripting language currently has no way to make a transaction output that cannot be spent until a later point in time. The ziftrCOIN network supports the use of both OP_CHECKLOCKTIME and OP_CHECKLOCKTIMEVERIFY to allow the creation of outputs that can only be spent after a certain point in the blockchain. This is useful in many scenarios, such as using escrow with a third party who cannot participate in the arbitration process unless there is actually a problem between the two transacting parties. This scripting opcode was also used to lock up the coins that Ziftr received (not including giveaway coins) in the genesis block. The goal here is to prove to the community that we are not going to take the coins we have set aside and dump them on the market, because we literally could not even if we wanted to. The core client, however, does not currently relay transactions that use these types of outputs, but these rules will likely be relaxed soon.

Convenient Transaction Processing Speed

The expected generation rate of ziftrCOIN blocks is 1 block per minute. This block generation time was chosen as a trade-off between convenience and consensus.

We hope you’re as excited as we are about the release of ziftrCOIN! If you have any questions or comments, please reach out to us on Twitter or Reddit or email us directly at [email protected].