[Cryptography] Bitcoin, litecoin, vertcoin, and derivatives

[Natanael]

Den 1 jul 2014 12:46 skrev "Maarten Billemont" <lhunath at lyndir.com>:
>
> Is there any reputable reviews of Bitcoin and its many derivatives,
specifically Litecoin and the recent Vertcoin?  What are the key
differences in their operation and how trustworthy are their claims (eg.
vertcoin claims to be "ASIC Resistant" - can we believe them and if so,
what does that really give us)?

The majority is just Bitcoin with tweaked constants (block time, supply and
rate of issuance, etc) or replaced hash function (like scrypt, or a combo
of 13 different hashes, or whatever else - the point is to make ASICs have
less of an advantage, unfortunately only helping botnets instead of making
mining "democratic").

NXT and some others are written from scratch rather than copy-pasting. NXT
is using proof-of-stake, which has several problems (such as resusage of
stake in a reversal of the chain (history attack), selling and buying coins
and then selectively reversing transactions to amplify stake, the fact that
there's no incentive to only use it stake to vouch for a single chain (no
guarantee of concensus), etc). Most proof-of-stake coins that aren't dead
already have checkpoints in the blockchain managed by the developer (making
it centralized).

Namecoin adds a key-value store and works for DNS, and also let you
register profiles and more (see onename.io, a web interface for profiles on
the Namecoin blockchain). It is merge-mined with Bitcoin, meaning Bitcoin
miners can reuse Bitcoin PoW in the Namecoin blockchain (requires the miner
to add a reference to the previous Namecoin blocks in the Bitcoin block he
is mining, which means both chains are secured equally by that miner's
proof-of-work).

Zerocoin / zerocash adds anonymity through covering the tracks of how the
coins are moving (using Zero-knowledge proofs).
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://www.metzdowd.com/pipermail/cryptography/attachments/20140701/e8c8fabb/attachment.html>