Zcoin, a privacy-centric cryptocurrency, today announced the public release of the first working implementation of MTP as a proof-of-work (PoW) algorithm, in order to promote high performance, high security, and egalitarian computing.
MTP (Merkle Tree Proof) PoW was created by Alex Biryukov and Dmitry Khovratovich, the same scientists who created Equihash. With this ASIC-resistant algorithm, Zcoin aims to provide faster, lightweight verification for a fairer mining process, including CPUs.
According to the official release, MTP addresses the issue of disparity between ordinary miners and power users that can use GPU, FPGA and ASICS to gain a significant advantage and mount a cheap attack. By establishing the same price/cost for a single computation unit on all platforms, MTP aims to prohibit any single device from gaining a significant advantage for the same price and promote egalitarian computing. As users and attackers are equal in the price-performance ratio conditions, MTP helps in stopping automated large-scale attacks.
Furthermore, hashing in MTP is highly memory intensive with Zcoin’s reference implementation using 2 GiB of RAM, and machines infected by trojans in botnets would experience noticeable performance degradation and alert the user of an attack.
“One of the main reasons the Equihash scientists sought to create MTP was to improve upon the drawbacks of a long initialization phase,” said Poramin Insom, founder and lead developer of Zcoin. “Ultimately, MTP shortens the phase and keeps the algorithm "progress free' and independent of any previous events, leading to more decentralized mining.”
In addition, Zcoin explained that as MTP can keep verification times on par with Bitcoin without requiring a lot of memory once a solution is found, it makes the network more resistant to DoS attacks targeting verifiers. It also allows lightweight hardware such as smartphones to perform verification not possible on most memory hard algorithms today.
Zcoin said that it will be organizing a miner bounty program open to the community for development of efficient miners for MTP. The competition will award a total of $20k USD distributed among the best miners for CPU and GPU.
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