I just thought of a good way to describe what is going on with this project...
Every other cryptocurrency involves miner who constantly hash away at the block until it is solved. The miners never stop expending effort and run 100% of the time until a block is found, then immediately start crunching away at the next block. The block time is targeted in order to control the amount of coins being mined.
This is like having a horse race in which every horse is a miner, and the track's length is the block time. For the sake of simplicity, let's say the track is 1 mile long (I know... no such race track exists). The minute a miner puts his 'horse' on the track, it runs as fast as it can until ONE of the horses wins, then the horses are immediately teleported to the starting gate where they instantly start another 1 mile race - then over and over again. The horses never stop. Never. This is Bitcoin.
BLE is different. The BLE track is 1/20 of a mile long. This track is running in conjunction with the Bitcoin track just down the road, but this is how it works...
1. The races are programmed to START at the same starting pistol. When the Bitcoin horses leave their gates, the BLE horses leave theirs at the same time.
2. However, the BLE horses only have 1/20 of a mile to go. As soon as one of the BLE horses wins, the other horses get to walk back to the starting gate, get washed off, and wait in the starting gate for the start of the next Bitcoin race.
3. Because their track is shorter (a 30 second block solve time target = 1/20 mile as compared to Bitcoin's 1 mile race), they finish and get to rest while the Bitcoin race continues.
4. It is still a race and there is still a winner, but there is less energy spent in the process.
Now... what is the dang Metronome thing? Well... I would think of it as the starting pistol. When Bitcoin SOLVES a block, the race instantly starts for both BTC and BLE to start hashing the next block. Obviously, the BLE race will almost always finish way before the BTC race, statistically speaking. Something has to tell the track down the road that it is time to start again and that is the Metronome - linked to the BTC solution of the last BTC block solved and incorporating part of the hash of the last block into the BLE solution to ensure that there is no cheating for a BLE solution.
Some are a bit confused about all of this because it is very very different than what we are used to seeing. Even though the race is shorter for the BLE miners, mining strength still counts. The race is every bit a legitimate - but it is time constrained to start and finish in a fraction of the time. That is where the low energy is achieved.
#BLE JdSNWh7Re4JX8aeP2ndVUve4D39jVeQVRX
I like the analogy. Here's another one:
Mining is a race. In btc it's a long race, ,many times around the track. People can do all sorts of things to improve their run times (hash power), and the requirements are getting ever larger. It's almost like an arms race.
btcLE says, wait a minute. Why do we have to run at full speed all the time? We only need the race to be fair, not marathon-length.
So btcLE says, how about if on each lap that these btc marathon racers take, we just sprint the first 100 yards of it. If we all do that, it's still a fair competition, and it saves us a bunch of energy cost.
There's lots of ways to look at it.
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