Bitcoin has long been the premium cryptocurrency for the storage of value. Bitcoin is the ‘original’ cryptocurrency; an immutable blockchain with a long history. Bitcoin is for this reason why many still see Bitcoin as a stable currency – not because it has not suffered any issues in the past, but because the blockchain technology originally proposed and brought into code reality by Satoshi stands the test of time and leaves a solid record of all operations in a blockchain including any of those that may be disagreeable. We expect transparency in our public trade markets and often transparency is left lacking, however Bitcoin cannot be argued that it shows every right and every wrong, making Bitcoin a trustable currency medium.
Even though the Bitcoin network holds a smaller percentage of the transactions taking place in today’s cryptocurrency universe, the number of transactions has steadily risen, especially in times of heavy volatility as many holders of the coin seek to liquidate their holdings. This has lead to some significant troubles and Yenten seeks to provide another store of value which provides the same trusted immutability as Bitcoin. Yenten seeks to solve the issues in Bitcoin’s growth by implementing the same trusted blockchain technology directly from Bitcore code whilst decreasing the block times significantly to provide a much faster and responsive network in order to achieve a much higher transaction volume and speeds that are now expected of mass-adopted modern cryptocurrency networks.
In Bitcoin, transactions are encoded in the blockchain with a cryptographic hashing algorithm. These hashes are created by miners using a “proof of work” (PoW) algorithm that combines one or more hashing functions.
Bitcoin itself uses the SHA256d hashing function, which has been popularly used for a long time. ASICs (application specific integrated circuits) have been built to create SHA256d hashes at alarming rates which in turn has lead to the Bitcoin network hashrate inflating beyond the level that it was ever intended to be. In order to create a single hash for the Bitcoin network and use it to encode a new block in the blockchain, it now requires a significant amount of power and effort. In fact, using a GPU or CPU to create hashes for the Bitcoin blockchain is effectively futile against the hashing power
provided by SHA256d capable ASICs.
The prevalence of ASICs has lead Bitcoin to a situation where only those significantly invested in hardware are able to gain any kind of reasonable reward from mining it; thereby leaving the transaction processing in the hands of a few actors. Again, this is not an issue of the blockchain itself, but simply a side effect of high block times with an easily solvable hash algorithm.
Yenten
