Spark: The future is now

Thread 1 of 4 : Unveiling

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This post will be concise, and use simple language.

The second thread next week will go more into detail about various aspects of Spark.

Spark is a brand new cryptocurrency made by a team of 3 professional developers who wish to remain anonymous.

It takes the best from all the interesting cryptocurrencies out there (bitcoin, nextcoin, darkcoin) and mixes it with fresh and new ideas.

Below is a summary of all the important/interesting points relating to Spark.

The next thread will talk about some of these points in detail.

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A brand new start

The spark code base is 100% new. It is not a fork of an existing cryptocurrency.

Spark eliminates the clumsy/bloated blockchain and replaces it with what we call « Spark clouds », decentralized ledgers that shut down once they get too big

Spark clouds can emit near instant transactions (less than 10 seconds) which we call « Lightning bolts », if you set a high enough fee compared to the other outgoing transactions at the time you emit it.

Normal transactions are still very fast (should never be more than a minute), and will never get stuck in limbo if you set no fee, like bitcoin transactions tend to

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The self-sustained spark network

As proof of work mining is a waste of energy that might reach environmentally disastrous proportions, Spark can not be mined at all

Instead, inflation is introduced through a standard proof of stake model, with 10% new coins minted each year, except the first year where no extra coins will be generated

On top of the annual proof of stake inflation (distributed every day), mining fees will be proportionally redistributed to stakeholders

Spark's proof of stake does not require wallets to be unlocked and open, all they have to do is exist. Yes, you will get PoS revenue from your cold storage

Only a spark node can recieve a lightning bolt (super fast) transaction. This encourages businesses or other heavy Spark users to support the network by hosting nodes

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A coin with real life uses

The speed of Spark transactions, especially lightning bolt transactions, makes it appealing for online or offline businesses to use as an actual means of payment

Transactions can have attached messages, which is an extremely important feature for commercial usages (attaching a user id, a command id, an invoice id, etc)

Public keys can have aliases, which businesses can use for simplicity. For example, you would send your coins to the wallet Gamecompany instead of sending it to a random hash that you'd never be able to memorize

Sparks are divisible by up to 10 units, making them much more efficient than bitcoin for micro transactions. If Spark value goes up, we will increase this number

Wallets have an open plugin system that lets you build anything on top of them (in Python 3)

A demo plugin that greatly simplifies Spark related accounting for businesses will be released with the wallets

The wallet runs on every major OS (including our beloved FreeBSD), and a special lightweight wallet (called sparkyd) will be offered to exchanges on release

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True anonimity

In the spirit of cryptocurrency, we believe that anonimity is a very important feature, and we live by the way we think

Spark implements a mixing method that makes it extremely hard to trace transactions if you are not aware of their txid.

All transactions, even past ones, are constantly mixed within the spark clouds, which makes it harder to trace them than the currently existing coin mixing implementations

The team decided to remain anonymous on purpose, but we do intend to support the coin and keep churning bugfixes and releases, as we do believe in the importance of cryptocurrency

We are three professional developers who know each other in real life, and have worked on past crypto currency related projects. This is all you will ever know about the Spark team

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Number crunch and distribution model

There will be 1 000 000 000 (one billion) sparks distributed initially, with nothing at all premined or reserved for the developers

There are no block times, as there is no block chain. Spark clouds are spawned and/or transactions written into spark clouds when the nodes deem it necessary

As we have sadly not found a better distribution model, we will have to resort to an IPO to distribute the initial Sparks

The IPO will be fair for everyone involved, and we will guarantee that coins are not wasted or stolen by using a trusted escrow service for the IPO instead of collecting it ourselves

You will be given 10% of the Sparks you have bought through the IPO every month for ten months. This is to ensure that the market does not get flooded all at once, and has time to develop.

The bitcoins raised during the IPO will be used exclusively for the promotion of Spark. The escrow we have contracted will directly spend the coins for us when needed, we will never touch them

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Welcome to the future

Spark is a project that was started in secret in November 2013, and we are glad to finally be able to share it with you.

Feel free to ask all the questions you want in this thread, we will answer it in the next thread.

There should be about one week, more or less, between each thread.

Thread 2 of 4 will be going into detail about any topics that people are curious about.

Thread 3 of 4 will be the IPO and fund raising for Spark. We will reveal our escrow system at that time. This phase will last for 20 days.

Thread 4 of 4 will be the Spark release. In order to not get beaten at our own game, the source code and wallets will be released only then.

We are however open to giving the micro wallet (sparkyd) to exchanges before the Spark release date, to ensure a smooth launch.

See you in the next thread.

- The spark team -