Zcoin (XZC) has taken the decision to implement a new mining algorithm. The team behind the Zcoin virtual currency aims at making the crypto available for mining for average consumers. Application-specific integrated circuit (ASIC) miners will not be able to mine Zcoin. The information was released a few days ago by Zcoin on its official website.
Zcoin Implements a New Mining Algorithm
The new algorithm implemented by this project is called a Merkle Tree Proof. With this implementation, ASIC devices will be negated and will not have an advantage over other mining devices. ASIC miners have been created to mine Bitcoin (BTC). Since the network received so many miners during the last years, ASIC miners were developed. This allowed miners to remain competitive in a more difficult landscape.
The Merkle Tree Proof implementation has been developed for the last two years. Additionally, the team announced that it would be ready on December 10. The company informed on its website that the development has been finished.
The official site reads as follows:
“The idea behind egalitarian computing is to level the playing field between people with lots of computing power (i.e., large-scale mining farms) and those with little power (i.e., home miners). In other words, Mining for The People… MTP is designed to make intensive use of memory. This both increases the cost of ASIC development significantly and uses memory bottlenecks to reduce the ASICs advantage.”
ASIC miners tend to be very expensive compared to other mining solutions. In general, big mining farms tend to purchased ASIC miners and control the market. In the past, when Bitcoin and other virtual currencies were not so important as nowadays, it was possible to mine with GPU or CPU.
The team behind Zcoin mentioned that an advantage of intensive RAM usage is that it would alert a user that got infected with malware and it is mining against them.
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According to Financial Magnates, users that want to pay with this virtual currency can do it in a very easy way. Once the user processes a transaction, the tokens get burned and are replaced with Zerocoins after waiting 70 minutes. Once the time passes, these are redeemed for Zcoins once again and created brand new. This means that the transaction history is erased and the supply is maintained.
There are other companies and projects that decided to take similar measures against ASIC mining. Monero (XMR) decided to change its algorithm every some month to make it difficult for ASIC developers to keep up their operations.
ZCash (ZEC), for example, has also been discussing the possibility to ban ASIC miners from its network. However, this issue is still being debated and other possibilities are also being analyzed.
