With Bitcore we have a comparatively "small" coin from German countries. The name is reminiscent of Bitcoin, so that the idea of a Hard Fork imposes. Bitcore's other approach as well as the peculiarities of this cryptocurrency should be shed light here.
A big focus of the New Coins on the Block series are high market capitalized coins. We look at coins that are abruptly in the top 20, they look critically and try to determine why this coin has risen sharply in recent months.
With this issue of the series, BTC-ECHO does not want to shift the focus, but to complement: Every two weeks to look at smaller coins, so as to distinguish hidden champions from true shitcoins.
The accusation of shilling can arise quickly with small coins. Similarly, on the other hand, the accusation of unfounded tearing of a coin can be in the room. Therefore, it should be said here and for all other posts that this is not to "buy recommendations" or the like. It looks at the technology behind the coins and provides a reasoned assessment of the underlying use case, implementation, and behind-the-coin team.
At the beginning we want to look at a coin from German countries: Bitcore (BTX) is based, as the name suggests, on Bitcoin. In mid-October last year, a sponsored article was published on BTC-ECHO , so it's high time to take a neutral look at the coin from Germany.
By the name Bitcore and the logo, the association Bitcoin comes to mind, so that one suspects a hard fork. It is not one in the style of Bitcoin Cash, Bitcoin Gold or others. Rather, it is a mixture of Hard Fork and Airdrop, also called Hybrid Fork: From the Bitcoin Blockchain the addresses were extracted and thus a snapshot of the Bitcoin Blockchain, as it looked on 2 November 2017, taken as a basis. All existing and transferred addresses were credited with 0.5 BTX per BTC. These can also be claimed by those who own the Private Key for their Bitcoin Wallet.
In addition, those who have stored more than one BTX in an address can participate in an Airdrop every week. Interested parties can register on the website with this address. Each registered address with more than 1 BTX Deposit will receive distributions every Monday. Currently the Airdrop model looks like this:
In January the amount was increased by 5%, in February it should be 6%, in March 7% and so on. This should continue until the first wallet is empty. The current state of the same can be tracked via a Bitcore Explorer . The Airdrop model, in contrast to various other models used in the crypto scene, is interesting because it does not create values out of nothing, but transparent redistribution takes place.
Bitcore works as well as Bitcoin based on the proof-of-work consensus. It is set as a mining algorithm not on SHA256, but on a mining algorithm called timetravel10. Timetravel10 is designed so that it can not be handled with ASICs, but primarily with GPUs, in order to counteract a mining centralization. Blocks are geminated every 2.5 minutes in Bitcore. The block reward is less than Bitcoin's by this shorter block time, and is 3.125 BTX (plus transaction fees). Within 10 minutes, the amount of newly generated coins is the same as for Bitcoin. An adjustment of the Difficulty takes place approximately every three hours.
Of particular note is that Bitcore supports Segregated Witness, enabling things like Schnorr signatures, Lightning Network, Atomic Swaps, and effectively larger blocks. In addition, the Bloom protocol is activated, which in the case of Bitcoin is used for the simple processing of transactions (or more precisely for the simplified payment verification ). Unfortunately, the role of this unique selling point in the case of Bitcore is nowhere better explained.
Bitcore - thanks to Hybrid Fork (still) small Blockchain
Since there was no real hard fork, the blockchain is significantly smaller than the bitcoin blockchain and currently comprises about 400 MB. The "current" is to emphasize: Should it come to a large mass adoption and enjoy Bitcore especially popular, with 10-MB blocks every 2.5 minutes would mean that the blockchain would grow by 240 MB per hour.
But until that happens, some time will pass; the blocks currently comprise a few kilobytes and cover on average about a dozen transactions. A very rough estimate leads to the conclusion that, assuming a constant transaction size, such problems only come to the network at a transaction volume of 8,000 transactions per minute.
By comparison, Bitcoin itself currently has a transaction volume of approximately 150 transactions per minute, and even the ripple network can boast "only" 1,200 transactions per minute at weddings.
Reference projects with Bitsend, B3 and Bitcloud
At first glance, it is somewhat unsatisfactory that under the heading "Team" only the first names of the contributors are listed, so that a review of the specified competencies is difficult. However, there is overlap between the teams behind B3 coin , Bitsend and Bitcloud on the one hand, and Bitcore on the other, so that at least part of the team behind the crypto currencies can be reaffirmed by deep developer experience in blockchain technology.
In some places, the website seems a bit fast zusammengebastelt, so that different tutorial links get lost in the void. You also miss a little more technical information, for example, the mentioned mining algorithm. In addition, the marketing is a bit too lurid, phrases like "# 1 payment coin" and emphasizing a "second chance", the people now have who missed their chance at Bitcoin 2011, has the character of Bauernfängerei. Cooling the rhetoric would do the page good here - the introduction on their Github reads much more sophisticated.
Apart from these pages, the coin is certainly interesting and can boast an active community. In particular, the idea of a snapshot of the entire blockchain could also be a viable option for further fork projects, which may not solve an important part of the scaling problem in the long run, but at least temporarily relax the situation for node hosters with a small wallet.
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