Introduction

Cryptonite is the first crypto-currency to implement the mini-blockchain scheme along with many other innovative features. Our goal was to create a truly scalable cryptocurrency which combined many of the best ideas developed within the alt-coin community and some of our own innovative ideas. The basic philosophy of Cryptonite is to follow the ideals set by Bitcoin as closely as possible but improve upon everything that could be improved.

Cryptonite was developed by the Mini-blockchain Project over a period of almost four months. Cryptonite is a fork of the Bitcoin core but the code has been extensively modified and expanded upon. It seems that the altcoin community is experiencing a torrential flood of clone-coins right now and it is not our goal to add to that pile of useless altcoins. Our goal was to create something truly new, innovative, and useful to the cryptocurrency community.

The altcoin community should be about innovation, not a select few people making a quick buck. Our goal was to break out of that greed driven trend. Cryptonite had no pre-mine, no IPO, the difficulty adjustment algorithm is designed to adapt quickly and prevent instamines, the coins are distributed fairly over a long period of time (half mined after 10 years), we did over a month of public beta testing before release along with a week early pre-announcement.

Brief Overview

Mini-Blockchain

Cryptonite is the first implementation of the light weight mini-blockchain scheme. Nodes will never again spend days synchronizing with the network and the average user will not have to fear becoming a full node. This is possible because of our decentralized balance sheet approach.

Innovative Ideas

Cryptonite combines many great ideas developed by the altcoin community and also includes several novel features not seen in another cryptocurrency until now. Two innovative features which help improve security and trust are unmalleable transactions and withdrawal limits.

Smart Adaptation

Cryptonite achieves smart coin distribution by adjusting the difficulty and the block reward every block, adapting quickly to changes and providing smoother transitions. The dynamic max block size mechanism ensures that the transaction capacity of the network naturally grows over time.

Future Proofed

Cryptonite has an unparalleled potential for scalability and transaction capacity. The total coin supply has a full 64 bits of granularity and the header timestamp has also been increased to 64 bits. The M7 PoW algorithm uses multiple cryptographically secure hashing algorithms.

Micro-Transactions

Cryptonite has superior support for micro-transactions because we don't have to worry about keeping any so called "dust" in the blockchain forever. Since blockchain bloat is not a problem, blocks can be larger and we can encourage the use of custom transaction messages.

Multi-Sig Support

Cryptonite has full native support for multi-signature transactions, which require multiple parties to sign a transaction with different keys before it is considered valid. Multi-sig transactions are useful in many real world situations, especially for consumer protection and escrow schemes.

Specifications

- Block time: 1 per minute
- Block reward: changes every block (half life of 10 years)
- Max block size: changes every block (100 block average * 2)
- Difficulty adjustment: changes every block (1000 block filter)
- Coin supply: 2^64-1 units (1.84 billion coins, 10 dec places)
- Mining algorithm: M7 PoW
- Pre-mine: none

Usage

See the wiki for information on the Cryptonite API:
http://cryptonite.info/wiki/index.php?title=Cryptonite_API

Use the setgenerate command or the standalone miner to begin mining.

FAQ/Troubleshooting

See this very informative post written by watuba.

Also see this page: www.cryptonite.info/?page=faq

Community

IRC: #cryptonite on freenode
Wiki: http://cryptonite.info/wiki/
Twitter: https://twitter.com/CryptoniteCoin
Code: https://github.com/MiniblockchainProject/

Services

Exchanges

Bter: www.bter.com
btc38: www.btc38.com
C-CEX: www.c-cex.com

Pools

1GH XCN Pool: xcn.1gh.com
MiniChain Pool: pool.minichain.info

Block Explorers

MiniChain: www.minichain.info

More Detail

Mini-blockchain Scheme

Cryptonite is the first implementation of the mini-blockchain scheme, a scheme designed for maximum scalability, achieved by addressing the problem of blockchain bloat and providing a solution which allows all old transactions to be forgotten by the network after they become old enough. This allows new nodes to synchronize with the network extremely quickly and allows existing nodes to free up disk space by deleting old transactions. As a result of this scheme the network doesn't need to become increasingly centralized only by nodes capable of handling the full blockchain, so mining can remain more decentralized.

Micro-transactions & Messages

Thanks to the mini-blockchain scheme Cryptonite has superior support for micro-transactions and custom transaction messages attached to transactions. In Bitcoin and other altcoins where the full blockchain is required to synchronize with the network, small value transactions and transaction messages tend to be discouraged because they cause "blockchain bloat". The scalable nature of the mini-blockchain scheme relieves us from the concern of blockchain bloat and we can have full support for transaction messages and micro-transactions because nodes don't need to store transactions forever.

Withdrawal Limits

Cryptonite is the first altcoin to feature withdrawal limits, allowing users to set a limit on how many coins they can send from an address in one block. This is useful because it helps to prevent double spending and increases confidence in low-confirmation transactions. If a merchant can see that the withdrawal limit on an address prevents it from being emptied in a small number of blocks they can have much more confidence in any transactions sent to them from that address, even without any confirmations at all. So the main advantage of withdrawal limits is that 0-confirmation transactions become safer in the right conditions.

Unmalleable Transactions

If the claims of Mt. Gox and other businesses are to be believed, transaction malleability has caused quite a bit of damage to the Bitcoin economy. Of course even if that's the true reason why Mt. Gox went out of business, it's still their fault for not understanding transaction malleability when it was well known about for a long time. Cryptonite is the first altcoin to feature unmalleable transactions, in order to avoid any repeat of such undesirable events and allow the transaction ID's to be reliable. This is achieved by having the sender sign the txid and by ensuring the txid will always change when the contents of the transaction changes.

Important News

Please update to 14080303 or later. Semi critical. Fixes bug recently introduced that prevents peers from downloading sections of the compressed trie we call slices. In the near future we will be transferring pruned chains only, so we need nodes online with capability to serve for the transition. If your node is not externally reachable then don't worry about it.