Thanks for checking in Hank! Now is actually a great time to share an update on Koinos with the Bitcointalk community because we’re nearing completion of the mainnet.

The best way to stay up-to-date on the project is to follow @koinosnetwork on medium and twitter. You can also visit koinos.io and subscribe to the newsletter to get updates sent to your inbox. As you will see, there have been a lot of updates, so in this post I’ll focus on the updates that I think will be the most interesting to the Bitcointalk community.

We like to think of Koinos as the general purpose blockchain that Satoshi would have built. Aside from the proof-of-work fair launch of the token, the other two places this is most obvious is governance and, of course, consensus both of which we have some exciting updates about.

Koinos Governance

Whenever possible we like to model our systems off of how Bitcoin operates, and governance is no exception. One of the unique features of Koinos is that all of the blockchain’s business logic is implemented as smart contracts which can be upgraded in-band. The consensus algorithm, resource management system, base cryptocurrency, and even governance are all implemented as smart contracts that can be upgraded without a hard fork by governance. That’s right … governance can upgrade governance! This is what will allow mainnet, and any Koinos-based blockchain, to evolve.

But what are the rules that govern … governance? What makes us think we can pick the “right” rules? We don’t! Instead we effectively implement Bitcoin’s upgrade system as exemplified by the SegWit upgrade. You can learn more about Koinos governance in our June 1st update in which we announced that work on the governance system contract was complete!.

Koinos Consensus

Proof-of-work is a beautiful consensus algorithm, but it isn’t well-suited for a general purpose blockchain where computational efficiency is paramount to delivering pleasurable user experiences at a reasonable price. But we don’t feel that proof-of-stake is a real solution to that problem which is why we instead pursued proof-of-burn. We are working on the proof-of-burn contract as we speak, but on March 23rd we released an update about our new design which we believe delivers the economics and decentralization of proof-of-work with even greater efficiency than proof-of-stake.

Verifiable Randomness

One of the biggest reasons we went with proof-of-burn was to mitigate the exchange attack, but we also wanted to enable anyone to participate in block production, not just whales. In our May 17th update, we explained how proof-of-burn leverages a verifiable randomness function to avoid degenerating into proof-of-work while ensuring that Koinos is provably egalitarian, just like Satoshi wanted for Bitcoin.

Like I said, there have been a lot of updates, so I did my best to focus on those updates that would be most interesting to Bitcointalk users. If you have any questions, don't hesitate to ask!