Green Cryptocurrency

Benchmarking, Performance and Power Efficiency February 3, 2018 If you haven't read the first part of this series of articles, you can go the beginning here: Environmentally Responsible Cryptocurrency . The optimal implementation of an democratic energy efficient cryptocurrency system should be one that balances performance, cost and power efficiency. If performance is too low, it won't be useful. If overall mining cost is too high, it will have too high a barrier for the masses to invest in. If power efficiency is too low, it won't be able to be powered by freely available environmental energy, e.g. sun, wind, tides, etc. Existing CPU cryptocurrencies improve democratization by making ASIC or GPU mining impractical. But the plethora of alt-coins out there and the casualties of the marketplace have shown that the market is probably not quite ready for a CPU and memory intensive cryptocoin. Nonetheless, we'll look at how one of the existing CPU coins, Con Magi (...

Thinking Ahead for a Environmentally Sustainable Cryptocurrency January 1, 2018 (originally posted on LinkedIn Publishing) If you haven't read the first part of this series of articles, you can go the beginning here: Environmentally Responsible Cryptocurrency . Coin Magi is designed to be profitable for miners with general purpose CPUs by using a combination of M7 based hashing in addition to a mining reward system utilizing an attraction, repulsion model. However, it is for the most part not designed to discriminate between general purpose CPU types. Since PoW is still a major factor in the reward system, it is not tuned to specifically reward energy efficiency. Granted. PoW implies work, which implies power, so designing a system that rewards power efficient work is certainly not trivial. Perhaps a new model could incentivize energy efficiency. But this introduces an entirely new problem. How could one incentivize energy efficiency algorithmically? Does that even mak...

Getting Software Running + Performance December 31, 2017 (originally posted on LinkedIn Publishing) First, if you haven't read the first part of this series of articles, you can go the beginning here: Environmentally Response Cryptocurrency . Also, note that this was originally part of the first article. I'm breaking these up into separate article to improve readability and follow up progression. Progress has been slow doing setup + experimentation on Raspberry Pi Zero W for the operations related to Cryptocurrency . Without some performance investigation, it will be tough to know where the time is being spent. Someone on the Magi Slack has a really good suggestion which was: get everything running on Linux and then copy over all the initialized state, blockchain, etc. over to the RPi. I've begun this and the speed difference between running on an Ubuntu VM compared to RPi Zero W is astounding. It really makes you appreciate the speed difference between a modern ...