The invention of Bitcoin in 2009, popularly attributed to Satoshi Nakamoto, changed the world of finance and investment. It is clearly now considered as the breakthrough moment for the digital economy and digital store of value. It enabled a new, open global financial system for which anyone can participate, giving them more power over their finances. Since then, we have seen the expansion of the blockchain technology, the invention of thousands of other cryptocurrencies, and an accelerated adoption of this asset class around the world.
Many of these cryptocurrencies, however, are based on the Proof of Work (PoW) consensus of Bitcoin, therefore, many of them have the same major complaint — the amount of energy required to mine new blocks and operate their network.
The intense computation and consequent extensive energy requirement needed to maintain these Proof of Work based blockchain networks is enough to power many countries; and with the world facing a threat from climate change, reducing their carbon footprint has become a stated goal of many countries, societies and corporations.
Aside from the environmental concerns, another issue with many PoW cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin or Ethereum is that the amount of energy required is increasingly making many doubt their decentralized nature. The majority of these cryptos are controlled by a small handful of big mining companies located in areas of the world where the cost of energy and computing equipment is relatively cheap. In fact, we have in the past witnessed a huge drop in the hash rate of these cryptocurrencies during major energy outages in these regions of the world.
At HDDcoin Network, we believe that:
Our core values are:
Our goal is to reshape the global financial system through the power of the blockchain technology, powered by thousands of nodes maintained by the community, and with transparency and a commitment to the environment — thereby taking control from any central entity, person or organization, and giving that control back to the community.
Our vision is to support an environmentally friendly, community-focused alternative to Bitcoin and other Proof of Work cryptocurrencies. We were impressed with the work done by Chia Network Inc in this area, and subscribe to their belief that “cryptocurrency should be easier to use than cash, harder to lose, and nearly impossible to steal”.
HDDcoin is decentralization blockchain based on the Proof of Space and Time (PoST) consensus. It maintains network robustness, in line with Satoshi Nakamoto’s principles. Miners and Mining in Bitcoin terms is synonymous with Farmers and Farming in HDDcoin terms.
HDDcoin is a fork of the Chia Network blockchain. HDDcoin blockchain Mainnet launched on July 8th 2021, and is not affiliated with Chia Network Inc.
One issue we saw with the solution offered by the Chia Network blockchain is the 21 million Chia (XCH) pre-mined from their genesis block, which is a number we believe is far too high. In fact, it would take multiple decades for the rest of the network participants to farm as much XCH as has been pre-farmed by Chia Network Inc.
We saw this flaw with Chia as an opportunity to implement a much fairer, decentralized Proof of Space and Time (PoST) algorithm based blockchain network, and used Chia Network Inc’s outstanding open source code as our starting point. After conducting a 5-years cost projection analysis for the development, maintenance and marketing operations for the HDDcoin blockchain, we concluded that a 3.5 million pre-farm was a reasonable number for our case.
Below are the core specifications of the HDDcoin blockchain:
The HDDcoin blockchain uses a consensus algorithm called Proof of Space and Proof of Time (PoST). This is a much greener consensus method that does not consume significant amounts of electricity, and utilizes hard drive space, instead of specialized computing hardware that most Proof of Work consensus blockchains have come to demand. Moreover, since electrical energy costs for running hard drives is very minimal, due to this low cost of entry, HDDcoin will remain more decentralized and fair, and thus more secure than any Proof of Stake cryptocurrency.
In recent years, PoST has become a very popular blockchain technology, divided into two parts: Space and Time.
Proof of Space is a way to prove that one has kept some unused storage space on their hard drive. A farmer on the HDDcoin blockchain will plot unused space on their hard drive by installing software that generates and stores a set of cryptographic numbers on the drive as a plot.
When a challenge to create a new block is broadcast on the blockchain, farmers scan their plots to see if they have a solution close to the new challenge. This operation of checking spatial proofs is fast and efficient.
The probability of winning a block is the percentage of the total space of the entire network that a farmer has per challenge, with an average of 4608 challenges won per day. In terms of validation, the space proof will randomly select the validating farmer who validates the next block of transactions. These Proofs of Space also give excellent assurance that the winning farmer who will validate the next transaction block, will be chosen at random.
Since Proof of Space takes very little time to look up, the HDDcoin blockchain has a second component called Proof of Time, which will protect against the potential situation where attackers with a lot of space create alternate competing transaction histories and futures.
Proof of Time requires actual “wall clock” time to pass between blocks, and is implemented by a Verifiable Delay Function (VDF) that takes a certain amount of time to compute but is very fast to verify. The key idea of a VDF is that it requires sequential computation, so having many parallel machines or CPUs/GPUs/ASICs (as in Proof of Work mining) does not create a benefit, and therefore electricity waste is minimized.
Not every farmer on the HDDcoin blockchain needs to run a VDF server (or Timelord), but those farmers who wish to add more redundancy and security to the Network can do so. However, the fastest one will always finish first, and it takes only one Timelord on the Network to complete a block and move the chain forward.
Proof of Time also adds additional assurance that the next block’s validator will be chosen in a fully unpredictable way so that farmers can have confidence that it is very unlikely that a party interested in their current transaction will be chosen as the next validator.
HDDcoin Network intends to have the HDD cryptocurrency listed at various exchanges, ranging from mid to large tier, to facilitate the exchange between HDD and other cryptocurrency pairs like Bitcoin (BTC), Ethereum (ETH) and USDT. We hope to create a market where there will be substantial liquidity in the trading of HDD.
Poor design, security issues and other harsh limitations have made it very difficult for enterprise projects to adopt the smart contract programming language of cryptocurrencies like Ethereum to move money or investments in production or at scale.
HDDcoin is working to overcome this challenge by adopting Chialisp, a smart coin language developed by Chia Network, and based on the functional language Lisp, where everything on the blockchain is a coin. These smart coins deliver smart contract and smart transaction capabilities in one package.
Use cases for Chialisp include advanced multi-signature support, atomic swaps, authorized payee whitelisting, withdrawal clawback escrow, withdrawal rate limiting, slow paper wallets, digital identity wallets, and tokenized coins.
Chialisp, the smart coin language adopted by HDDcoin blockchain, has been designed for security and simplicity, while allowing for powerful and broad functionality. Applications running on the blockchain will have functionality appropriate for banking, payments, financial and other applications.
The HDDcoin Network has plans to make the blockchain available for other real world applications including NFTs, Wallets, Games, Secure Messaging, Public Record Systems, etc, and we welcome the blockchain developer community to build applications to run on the HDDcoin blockchain.
