In the last weeks I have started to follow Slimcoin, an interesting cryptocurrency which is the first to use the new block generation method Proof-of-burn (PoB) (see Proof of Burn article at the Bitcoin Wiki for a long explanation). I will probably start a thread about this blockgeneration method in the Development section as it is possibly a method which can be added to Peercoin in the long term to replace PoW.
Slimcoin (SLM) was created in late May 2014. It is a fork of Peercoin 3.2 and uses PoW, PoS and PoB. The bitcointalk thread is here, the website is http://slimcoin.org and the Github site here. It is traded on BTER.
PoB consists mainly of a kind of lottery where you can destroy (“burn”) coins and the amount of coins destroyed defines the probability to generate blocks. My interest in this method lies in three “features”: first, it doesn’t favour the most wealthy (like PoS) but the holders which take most risk, second, it is perhaps a solution to the infamous “Nothing at stake attack”, and third, it is possibly price-stabilizing (will expand this further when i create a PoB thread). It uses no additional energy, the client must just run without any “mining”.
Unfortunately, the Slimcoin client is pretty buggy, has network propagation issues and needs a lot of RAM to run stable (if you want to try it with a Raspberry Pi or similar, assign a LOT of swap space). The original developer has still not been able to fix these bugs and is pretty quiet.
As I know the Peercoin community is pretty open-minded I had the idea to cooperate between the (very small) SLM community and the PPC community. Perhaps someone with development skills can even look over the SLM code to see what is wrong. If someone is interested, there have been offerings for a bounty for fixing these bugs.
(Disclaimer: I have about 100 SLM for testing purposes. The coin apparently was not premined nor is a scam, although if there is a cooperation with PPC community I would recommend look through the code changes to be sure.)
This looks very interesting indeed. When I first found Peercoin I was actually looking for a proof of burn currency having read the wiki on it and been convinced of the efficiency of the approach. I didn’t find one but Peercoin showed the same level of efficiency so I followed it instead. I’ll have to take a closer look at this one.
Is there any place I can see a chart of the money supply / inflation rate up to now (if possible excluding burned coins)? I have a sneaking suspicion that the 250 million unit figure might be a gross over estimation just as the 2 billion figure was for Peercoin. It looks like both SLM PoW and PoB have rewards that reduce as difficulty goes up and PoS is likely to be dropped (seems redundant anyway) so inflation could end up a lot lower if the thing ever gets popular.
Where can I see development bounties? are they just posts in the thread?
As far as I know there are only ordinary block explorers for SLM, for now. There is a new slimcoin site run by Bitcointalk member a123, who has jont the development team and is now de facto the lead developer for the coin, which has a block explorer (it actually seems to be offline, I hope he’s just updating something) and some other tools: http://slimcoin.club
I have a sneaking suspicion that the 250 million unit figure might be a gross over estimation just as the 2 billion figure was for Peercoin. It looks like both SLM PoW and PoB have rewards that reduce as difficulty goes up and PoS is likely to be dropped (seems redundant anyway) so inflation could end up a lot lower if the thing ever gets popular.
I don’t think the SLM supply will reach more than ~ 25-30 million if difficulty reaches a reasonable level. The last month, with much uncertainty, SLM was quite inflationary as PoW difficulty was very low.
Where can I see development bounties? are they just posts in the thread?
The development bounty that was mentioned to me was for someone picking up development, which has now happend as a123 has joint the dev team and fixed the most important bugs (and probably got the bounty). Yes, bounties are announced for now in the Bitcointalk thread. I saw you have already written there (if you’re the same JohnnyLatte than the Bitcointalk one )
Yeah that was me. I like the answers given to my question about nothing at stake. As far as I know nobody has a trustless solution to this problem and its refreshing to see the people in the slimcoin community give an honest answer. I have acquired some SLM to play around with and must say I enjoy the process of proof of burn and even managed to find a couple of blocks with just PoW. It seems the incentives to act to support the network are much higher when you own what amounts to a virtual mining rig that works only with this currency than with PoS: all your potential future gains depend on the currency functioning over a longer period of time. Whether or not that works out in reality depends on how well the currency is implemented technically though.
I like too that mining does not put my stake at risk since I can keep that in a separate wallet from burned coins although it would be nice to have cold lock implemented for slimcoin its not as important.
Removing PoS seems like a good idea. The two approaches seem redundant in the same coin and it might be a bit more acceptable to Peercoiners if its not competing with the same security model.
For those who are interested in Slimcoin, in Bitcointalk we have started a newer thread (some will already know it). Slimcoin is still alive, and looking forward for the 2nd anniversary
Some bugs have been fixed by various developers, but there are still plenty of them. The Windows wallet is usable now apart from some freezes (the Linux wallet, unfortunately, has a more severe bug). Still the development activity is too low, but trading activity is increasing on BTER.
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