Decred

Decred logo

Decred (DCR) is an open-source, community-based cryptocurrency, similar to Bitcoin. Decred was launched in February 2016[1] by the bitcoin developers that engineered btcsuite, an alternative full-node Bitcoin implementation written in the Go (golang) programming language and is used by development projects such as Ethereum, Factom, BitGo, OpenBazaar, and the Lightning Network.[2]

Contents

Decred Review

Weekly Coin Intro: Decred

Decred is a cryptocurrency like Bitcoin, with a strong focus on community contribution, open governance, and sustainable financing and development. It uses a hybrid proof-of-work and proof-of-ownership system to ensure that a small group cannot dominate the transaction flow or make changes to the Decred without community involvement. The unit of currency is called “decred” (DCR). To ensure the integrity of the currency and discourage people to commit fraudulent transactions or create their own coins, Decred uses a method of recording transactions known as the blockchain.

Features

Decentralized mining of shares. The participant of the system can create new coins without any risk. At the same time, even those who have the least number of shares can participate in the confirmation of the network.

Developed a voting system for adding new options. Miners can determine the progress of the system through the installation of bit flags, thus providing an advanced mechanism for resolving disputes about changing the blockchain. The end of the term transactional operations. Financial transactions have a limited time to prevent inclusion in the blockchain system after a certain height. Patches to fix bugs. As you know, the bitcoin system is imperfect. The developers have proposed their own solution to its problems.

  • 21 000 000 coins. A sufficient amount of virtual money in order to ensure their value.
  • Self-financing development. In order to have a permanent financial resource for the study of possibilities and development of the system, the developers have included in the code the rule of ten percent subsidy. Thus, the miner, having extracted the block, should transfer 10% to the development of the project. At the same time, the transfer is transparent, so the project is sustainable and does not depend on external financing. Users can be sure that the project will grow steadily and gradually improve, obeying only the participants of the system.
  • Using the advanced hash algorithm. The developers have begun to advance their system with a fundamental improvement in the efficiency of mining and simplify the work. This was facilitated by the introduction of a system of new hashes.

Decred price

On 19 June 2018 Decred’s price was 93,07 USD for a token. The cryptocurrency was on the 27th place in the market capitalization rating. Market capitalization was: 666,92 millions of dollars.

Development Milestones

On February 7, 2016 the Decred mainnet binaries were released under v0.0.1.[1]

Decred v1.0.0 was released on April 25, 2017.

Wallets

The easiest way to get started with Decred is to use Decrediton. Decrediton is available on Windows, Mac, and Linux. There are also Mobile wallets available for IOS and Android. Wallet downloads can be found on decred.org

Sending And Receiving Decred

After you have a Decred wallet, you can begin to send and receive Decred. You only need an address to send or receive funds. That address can be generated from any Decred wallet. The address always begins with a D and contains 26 to 36 alphanumeric numbers. After a transaction has been made, funds will clear in about 5 minutes. You’ll be charged a small fee in addition to your transaction amount. The developers claim that a transfer of 100 DCR would incur a fee of about 0.006 DCR.

Decred mining

Mining is the process of mining for DCR cryptographic coins. The essence of the process of production of digital currency is reduced to the solution of mathematical problems by computers that select a hash code from a large list of numerical combinations. In order to carry out this process requires a lot of computing power, so for this purpose, most often used high-performance graphics cards.

Solo mining. Solo mining of DCR is not recommended. The Decred network regularly sees a network hash rate of up to 10,000Gh/s. Solo mining is generally only done by advanced individuals or organized groups with a large cluster of GPUs so it is not addressed here.

Pool Mining. When you mine in a pool, your hashrate is combined with all the other pool miners’ hashrates to look for the correct solution for a block. You will receive a reward based on the amount of work your miner performs in the pool. Pool mining distributes shares based on blocks found so you can earn a steady amount of Decred rather than the “all or none” of solo mining.

Blockchain Architecture

Hybrid PoW/PoS Governance System

Decred is designed with a built-in governance system to resolve centralization and governance conflicts present within the Bitcoin system, and address the ‘tragedy of the commons’ that can occur within decentralized cryptocurrencies.

Decred’s governance system is engineered with a hybridized Proof-of-work (PoW), Proof-of-stake (PoS) consensus protocol. The design was inspired by the MEMCOIN2: A Hybrid Proof-of-Work, Proof-of-Stake Crypto-currency[3] technical paper published in 2013, and the Cryptocurrencies without Proof of Work white paper published in 2014.

Proof-of-Activity

Hybridized Proof-of-Work and Proof-of-Stake systems are also referred to as Proof-of-Activity (PoA). PoA is a consensus protocol introduced by the Proof of Activity: Extending Bitcoin’s Proof of Work via Proof of Stake whitepaper, co-authored by Litecoin founder Charlie Lee.

Hash Function

Decred uses BLAKE-256 as its hash function. BLAKE-256 is based around a HAIFA construction that incorporates a variation of the ChaCha stream cipher by Daniel J. Bernstein. The BLAKE-256 hashing function has high performance ratings on x86-64 micro architecture.[4]

Cross-chain Atomic Swaps

Decred developers created the first functioning cryptocurrency atomic swap between Decred (DCR) and Litecoin (LTC) on September 19, 2017.[5]

External links

See Also on BitcoinWiki

References

  1. 1.01.1 Chicago developers launch Decred, a Bitcoin alternative
  2. Decred launches decentralized voting process for blockchain protocol changes » Brave New Coin|date=2017-06-17
  3. MEMCOIN2: A Hybrid Proof-of-Work, Proof-of-Stake Crypto-currency
  4. eBACS: ECRYPT Benchmarking of Cryptographic Systems
  5. Developers Complete First-Ever Atomic Swap Between Litecoin and Decred