why blackcoin burning? Why not bitcoin burning? This way you limit your reach a lot.. Looks like an internal blackcoin community affair. Possibly pump attempt
BlackCoin is the first free, 100% proof of stake cryptocurrency with fair distribution. It is still easier to obtain BLK than to buy mining hardware needed to participate in Bitcoin distribution.
I'm a big Blackcoin fan but the concerns you raise are valid. Some proof of burn coins use multiple coins for the distribution and limiting it to one coin does warrant scepticism.
I don’t see how initial coin distribution via burning multiple coins could be reasonably done. Let’s say that one user burns 10 BTC and another burns 10,000 BLK. How do we compare these two values?
The main reason why Blackcoin is the suggested source, as laid out in his blog, is because the protocol of Ercoin is nearly identical to Blackcoin. It's the same PoS, it's the same launch principles, the same protocol. It's practically Blackcoin written in Erlang.
From a coarse perspective, there may be some similarities, but mechanisms are fundamentally different, starting from the fact that there will be no concept of unspent transaction outputs in Ercoin.
The reasons for using Blackcoin seem pretty obvious, but if I were an outsider I would too wonder why specifically this coin. I think it also leads to the question what exactly makes Erlang so much more valuable that it warrants a new coin. This may be personal ignorance but the added value at this moment seems quite abstract.
Erlang in itself may not justify making a new coin, but it has some features which make it an attractive language for such purposes. Among them are:
- Great support for concurrency. A cryptocurrency network is a set of many nodes that send themselves messages asynchronously. This can be naturally modelled in Erlang. (Actually in case of Ercoin Tendermint mostly takes care of concurrency).
- Libraries for creating state machines. A cryptocurrency is basically a decentralized state machine.
- Bit syntax, making it easy to handle protocol messages.
Erlang is a functional language and there are other languages compiled to Erlang’s virtual machine, like LFE and Elixir (LFE is actually used in Ercoin). It is also praised for its fault tolerance and ability to achieve high uptime (with hot code reloading), which may have some significance for maintaining network nodes.
At what stage is your project?
Roughly speaking, to have a working network suitable for pre-production testing:
- a few missing things need to be implemented;
- there are some changes needed in Tendermint;
- NIST should publish a new API for their entropy beacon.