TNABC – Day One Recap

The first day at The North American Bitcoin Conference in Chicago was great for CureCoin. The convention floor was very busy, and the team met a lot of interested folks. Many a business card was exchanged!

Some folks seemed to think CureCoin was a donation system instead of an Alternate CryptoCurrency altogether. When it was explained, however, we found that everyone was very responsive to the idea of a POW system based on valuable computations. We couldn’t be happier to see the enthusiastic response so far – and there’s a whole day to go.

One of the more common themes was “where are we now, and where are we headed?” Let’s take the moment to explore this, since it was a primary topic.

“Where we are now:”
->Fold proteins, earn cryptocurrency (Curecoins)
->Network secured using proven classical means
->PoS mintage based on 1% monthly

“Where we are headed:”
->Certificate Blockchain
->Semi-decentralized system of mintage where people fold or do other valuable computational research with a trusted institution, get issued a certificate. Certificate is valid for mining a block if the golden nonce (block solving nonce) is within the valid nonce range awarded by the university for the WU submitted
->Network can verify the validity of a cryptographic signed certificate by comparing the signing authority to pre-known, hard-coded public keys for the universities
->Blocks have to be spaced out properly by the network, so no university can do any form of attack
->Client automatically checkpoints blocks behind a certain age (4-6 blocks) so they’re ‘locked in’
->Decentralized pools possible with ‘extra data’ field in certificate data
->Working on quantum-computer-resistant signature schemes based on Merkelized Lamports
->Decentralized voting for kicking off suspicious universities
->Devs notice suspicious behavior or are alerted to it, we submit a 12-24 hour block on that university which is enforced by the clients, then clients can vote “yes” or “no” using their balance. The balances valid for voting are ones mined from all certificate authorities except the one being voted for/against. The vote can either be a 2-week lock for us to deal with the problem in the event of an attack on the university, or can be a permanent ban from the network if the university itself is malicious.

People asked a lot of great questions. The most question asked of our developers were:

“How do you stop 51% attacks from universities” (Enforced block spacing)
“How do certificates work” (Explained above, but universities issue certificates locked to a block, then the folder/miner tries mining a block with the certificate)
“How can people view the network” (We want to have a blockchain explorer built into the final client, and for sure there will be a ‘recent blocks’ pane which shows what address and what university each block originated from, in sequential order.
“How will temporary locks be enforced?” (Built into the software will be a way to validate network messages are legitimate from the devs, from which network rules can be dictated to a small extent, just enough to mitigate damage in a response time)