What is Blakecoin, and why should you care? There are already plenty of new alternatives to Bitcoin, why do we need one more? This is an important question, so I will do my best to answer it. I will start with the basic specifications and some background information, and then continue with more detailed explanations.
Blakecoin Specifications
• Blake-256 hashing algorithm
• 7 billion total Blakecoins, generated over approximately 400-1000 years • Block reward is 25 + inflation (very small amount of inflation; it is based on block height and current difficulty)
• No halving or decrease in block reward
• 3 minute target block time
• Difficulty adjustment every 20 blocks (~ 1 hour)
• Block maturity in 120 blocks (plus 20 block buffer)
Blakecoin is the first cryptographic currency to utilize the Blake-256 hashing algorithm for its Proof of Work (PoW). This algorithm was one of the SHA-3 finalists and was chosen for several reasons. Although it was not the winner of the SHA-3 competition, Blake-256 has properties which make it better suited for use in crypto currencies than Keccak and the other candidates. Please refer to the “Benefits” section for more details.
BlueDragon747 launched Blakecoin October 6th, 2013. It was pre-announced and there was no premine. Originally mining was CPU only, but shortly after launch, GPU mining and FPGA mining became possible. For the first several weeks, only solo mining was possible. However, the Eliopool and MPOS pool software has been ported to support Blakecoin and there are now a handful of pools available. Development of the tools and software related to Blakecoin has been gradual but steady because quality control has been a primary focus of the developers. Presently the Blakecoin ecosystem is reaching a level of maturity that provides a strong foundation for future development and widespread adoption.
While Blakecoin is a general use crypto currency, Bluedragon747 is also working on an infrastructure to allow Blakecoin to be used as a currency ecosystem for online video games. Any online video game would be able to adopt the system, creating a micro economy for gamers. Imagine being able to make money from gaming by withdrawing the money you earn in the game, or being able to make micro payments for digital goods in games in a consistent manner. There are many possibilities with this kind of system. Since Blake-256 is relatively non resource intensive, it is possible to mine Blakecoin in the background while playing video games or doing other tasks on your computer without causing significant performance loss.
Blakecoin
