Researching this right now. Can someone answer some questions?
1. OP says PoK optional. What/when does that mean?
2. Does Ziftr have a whitepaper available?
Cheers
PoK is proof of knowledge of the transactions in a block. This will give you a small bonus for running a full node - in theory. This is because when pool mining, you just hash a block header given to you by the pool. In reality, a pool that uses getblocktemplate (or even stratum, I think) can fulfill this by giving the block info to the miners at the cost of a little more bandwidth.
So when it says optional it's up to user to run a full node or not and collect reward? Makes sense. And this is up and running now?
3. How long has it been since the ICO?
4. How long was the ICO?
5. Are any merchants currently accepting Ziftr?
Thanks again.
Right, pools are supposed to turn off PoK, so that hashes without it are accepted. A pool using PoK, or a solo miner, would turn it on. No idea about the other questions, though.
We held a pre-sale throughout December through January (give or take a few days).
There aren't any merchants that accept ZiftrCoin, yet. The next few months is dedicated to further developing our payment platform and onboarding merchants.
Wolf did a good job explaining PoK. Our plans (dreams maybe) for PoK is to have it integrated into pool and mining software such that the miners are responsible for what goes into a block. The goal there is to both incentivize many nodes and mitigate 51% attacks (and other pool shenanigans). Users are then rewarded with 5% more coins for their troubles.