http://riecoin.org/logo_48small_png.png riecoin

Launches at 20:00 UTC on Tuesday, Feb 11th, 2014

General parameters:

PoW: new idea, prime numbers, not Cunningham chains
Blocks every 2.5 minutes
Block reward of 50RIC, halving every 840000 (about 4 years)
Cap: about 84 million RIC
Difficulty adjustments every ~~576 blocks (24hs)~~ 288 blocks (12hs)
RPC port 28332, or 38332 for testnet
P2P port 28333, or 38333 for testnet

Website: http://riecoin.org/ The process of money creation in Bitcoin - referred to as mining - involves executing software that utilizes your hardware running sha256 hashes until a certain criterion is met. This part of the mining process is called generating a "Proof of work". The whole mining process also has a critical role in processing transactions and providing security to the network. It is estimated that all the processing power devoted to Bitcoin mining represents more computing power than several of the largest supercomputers in the world combined. Wouldn't it be great to be able to use all that massive power for something else? Even special purpose hardware was designed for Bitcoin mining. Some consider this a waste of resources, while others argue that supporting a decentralized currency is hardly a waste. We believe that the mining process required for currency to work does not need to include hashing functions as a Proof of Work, and that a "more useful" calculation can be done instead. That's the point of Riecoin: the mining process, besides fulfilling its function to the operation of the network, generates series of prime numbers as a by-product. This prime numbers are of interest to mathematicians and the scientific community. Riecoin is proof that it is possible to effectively harness all that massive computing power to something useful other than hashing functions. Fair launch: Since this is a new PoW, it is very hard to define a starting difficulty that avoids instamining. To overcome this and contribute to a fair launch, the first 576 blocks will have no reward and the next 576 will linearly increase and reach the full reward at block 1152, after 4 difficulty adjustments were performed. Besides avoiding instamining, this should allow time for those who want to compile their own clients. Expect the starting difficulty to be hard. Source code will be provided a few days before launch, but the PoW functions will be replaced by stubs. The idea is that everyone would be able to examine the code and confirm that there's nothing strange and it is indeed pretty similar to bitcoin's. Everyone would be able to compile it, see if they have the correct dependencies, etc, but it won't run. At launch time, when the final code is released, everyone could easily check that the only thing that changed is the PoW code, so you'd only have to check the diff of a few lines of code and recompile. Mining A basic miner is embedded in the client (use "setgenerate true"), but a fork of cpu-miner that is much more optimized will be released too. Optimized mining requires a sieve, which in general create a RAM access bottleneck, so it's hard to predict how much improvement would you get by using the GPU. I'd bet someone will find a way to implement an efficient GPU miner. Same thing with ASICs. But if they make an ASIC for this, the would be making an ASIC that could be used to find interesting prime number structures. Cool! Details of how the PoW algorithm works will be released this week, but the source code will be provided at launch time. follow us on twitter: @riecoin

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