It has been almost two years since I first heard about the building of a new blockchain, Koinos. It all started here on Hive, most likely the news about Koinos circulated on LeoFinance. I probably wouldn't have heard about it if it wasn't for those who noticed the potential of Koinos and decided to share here. For me personally it began as a participation in a fun experiment. It was clever of the core team to come up with an interesting initial distribution system that was designed to be fair and decentralized. I thought by now we would have the mainnet running already. Mainnet has not been launched yet. However, the core team and the Koinos community have been busy with the testnets and building.
Today, Andrew Levine published an announcement with updates on the development of Koinos blockchain with a title - Koinos Dev Update: V4 Here We Come!. According to the announcement, version 4 of the Harbinger testnet is complete. This version seems to be a final one and is a feature complete version of mainnet. It includes codes necessary to incorporate ERC20 snapshot into the genesis block and enable KOIN holders to claim their tokens. Currently, KOINs only exist in a form of an ERC20 tokens and since mainnet has not been launched yet these are the real KOIN coins. Once mainnet launched, KOIN holder will be able to claim them with their Ethereum private keys or recovery phrases.
It will be interesting to see what will happen to the ERC20 KOINs after all KOINs are claim on the mainnet. Most likely they will become worthless and the trading activity will switch to the real KOINs. I haven't paid attention to latest news about Koinos for a while, and since I hold some Koins and the ticker is on my watchlist, I noticed some interesting price movements in the last few days. Koin has been trading around $0.20 for a while, and all of the sudden it started going up a couple of days ago. It is currently trading around $0.35, but went up to as high as $0.40 a couple of times within last two days.
I was curious if there was any reason, and also wanted to catch up on the latest updates. While I still have no idea about why the price went up, it was great to see that Koinos development progress is close to the finish line and potentially can be launched in Q4. Don't quote me on this, since mainnet launch timeframe has been delayed a couple of times so far. I am not in a hurry, I understand the importance of conducting rigorous tests before launching the blockchain, so that it works as designed and intended.
My Koinos journey started with the fun mining experiment. The core team came up with an interesting idea of letting all wanting to participate to mine the initial coins on their personal computers. It may not be same as mining bitcoin or ethereum. But it did sound fun and I had to try. The idea and intentions for mining and initial Koin distribution was a great one. However, just like with anything crypto, some participants figured out more efficient ways of mining that put them at advantage over other participants who were using their personal computers. After a couple of days mining on two computers, it became obvious that the cost of mining was equal to the cost of buying Koins in the market instead.
By that point we knew a little bit more about the project and what the goals were. I liked it, and wanted to participate by buying some instead of mining. A couple of month after that, bitcoin price started going up nonstop and the crypto bull market started. Initially, buying Koinos didn't look like a good investment, because I had to use bitcoins to buy them, and compared to bitcoin and other coins, Koin didn't do much in price action. It would be unreasonable to expect any drastic price movements for Koin at that point, since it was a new project, was under initial coin distribution stage and mainnet wasn't ready yet. Even testnet was ready at that time.
After a year since the beginning of the mining, Koin price decided to surprise everybody. In a very short time period its price went up as high as $1.50. That is impressive for a coin that was available in the markets for 2 or 3 cents the previous year. Since mid November of 2021, the price has been dropping. This has been the case for all cryptos including bitcoin, ethereum and hive. Perhaps if the bear market didn't start, its price could have gone even higher? or not. It has followed overall crypto market trend, and still was able to retain higher value than what it was worth during mining period. Nobody can predict the future, but sure will be interesting to see how markets will react once the mainnet is successfully launched.
Andrew Levine makes very ambitious claims in the latest announcement:
To be clear, with the launch of V4, Harbinger will be a complete version of Koinos mainnet with all the features that will make it the world’s first truly free-to-use, truly decentralized, and truly evolving L1.
Building a truly decentralized blockchain network is not an easy task. It requires community and continuous growth of the community within the network. It seems like there is a strong community being build around Koinos. Even before the chain is launched, people are building SDKs, wallets, DEX, libraries, etc for Koinos. So, it is not just the core team doing everything. This is a very good start, and a promising as an innovation in the crypto space. Unlike other blockchain networks that are mainly built using Proof-Of-Stake or Proof-Of-Work consensus mechanisms, Koinos will be using Proof-Of-Burn system for reaching the consensus. The idea behind using PoB model is to make participation in block production accessible to many regardless how wealthy they are or how sophisticated their machines are.
Burning is an action of making Koins unusable by anybody and possibly removing from the circulation. Usually, it is done by sending the Koins to special account that nobody has access to and the Koins received in that account have no way of getting back out to the circulation and essentially get destroyed. In Hive we have @null. If we want to burn some Hive or HBD, we can do so by sending them to @null.
Koinos will be using NFT mining rigs (virtual miners).
To efficiently track virtual miners, the Koinos system will manufacture miner NFTs which are acquired by aspiring block producers who submit proofs of their burns to a system-owned automated market maker contract.
Miners will be earning Koins based on blocks produced and will be receive these earning at various periods of time that change based on the demand for miner NFTs.
The more demand, the more the payback period gets pushed into the future. The less demand, the shorter the payback period becomes.
While Proof-Of-Burn mechanism is not a new one and was originally proposed by Iain Stewart in 2012, we rarely hear this algorithm being used in other blockchain networks. It does sound interesting, and will be great to see it in action.
Will Koinos deliver on all the promises and actually create something new in the crypto space? Time will tell. I hope it will turn out to be another success story. What are you thoughts? Let me know in the comments
Posted Using LeoFinance Beta
Nice post! The v4 testnet launch was announced just after you wrote this post, it's tomorrow (Tuesday August 23rd) at 1pm ET / 5pm UTC. Andrew just posted an update on Hive about it here: https://hive.blog/koinos/@andrarchy/tomorrow-feature-complete-koinos-testnet-launch
(self-upvoted this comment for visibility, don't shoot me)
Thank you for sharing useful information on Twitter and here. It's great to see things happening in Koinos world!
Absolutely! exciting times indeed
Thanks for checking us out and writing this post! Just wanted to clarify that our proof-of-burn algorithm no longer uses NFTs and instead uses a VHP (Virtual Hash Power) fungible token to symbolize miners. This is more efficient, simpler, and gives miners more liquidity. We also released a new unified whitepaper that explains all the innovative features in Koinos and how they work together to create the world's most accessible general purpose blockchain!
Thank you for clarifying the change in proof-of-burn algorithm. I will read the whitepaper. Thank you!
one "problem" I noticed was that there are very little financial incentives for running a node. The APR is about 4% on that and it costs at least around $1k to buy the hardware for running a node and an additional $300+ for electricity a year. This means that only whales will basically be able to make a profit by burning a lot of KOIN which could make the blockchain more centralized. I believe @theycallmedan @starkerz and @edicted pointed out how it's not a feasible assumption to think that people will just start running nodes for the network's sake. Would like to read up on those arguments again.
It does seem like everything we build always evolves into an Oligarchy. That being said, I'm not sure of the Koinos blockchain's end goal. I do know that people will invest money and or time and resources if they believe in the cause. Think of it as just throwing away money on a video game continuously with no real return. People do it all the time.
Another option will be mining pools for those not wishing to spend much or run a node themselves. Technically I guess they may be called burn pools. These pools could offer some level of DAO-like functionality to allow their users to have some influence on governance.
that's a good option to have
Any room for joining koinos new it's on the building stage. Like link to the community on telegram, etc. Nonetheless, Blockchain technology is still on its early stage there's more to where we're going.
koinos.io is their official website. At the bottom of the page there are links to their discord, telegram, twitter and youtube.
Thanks 👍
I don't think I was around when Koinos was launched so I don't really know much or can comment much on it. However, I don't really think sending the tokens now is worth it if it's going to be worthless later. I would have just assigned them when the manninet launches.
Posted Using LeoFinance Beta
at the very least, I do not doubt the enthusiasm and tenacity of Andrew Levine. I have not followed this project and do know there are some bad feeling back from the STEEM days. Time will tell if his project will actually solve any real problems and advance Blockchain.
Lol they still working on that? I thought it died already, man aren't we past the L1 rotation thesis yet?
Nope because as of yet there hasn't been a general purpose L1 that is free-to-use (like Hive). Think Ethereum but no transaction fees and free to run smart contracts. Also not being a PoW or a PoS chain is quite unique.
The price is now $0.29 on coingecko. It's looks promising although it's took a while. The main net launch can tell if it's worth investing in !
Their are many projects am yet to Fellow right now in the community, thou I will say the fact that I was away for some time was the reason behind this, will definitely be giving this a look and having more attention this days too.
Honestly this will Indeed help my knowledge too, what a valid information coming fro you
Wow what a genius you are! Sometimes when I read your article I always wonder how good you are. Indeed you are killing it. Keep going up ma'am. I will also join soon because I sure like video games and I hope it will be profitable too.
I haven't heard of Koinos before, but with what I have just read from you, it seems like a very good project that would as well help life's, during last year, Koinos coins make an upward trends as well as others crypto currency do in the market, that is to say that, it worth Investing on.
Posted Using LeoFinance Beta
Decentralized finance is the future token. Am quite sure pi is about to follow the same pattern.
100 marks on selecting the name of the chain and the coin - KOIN xD Really liked the concept!
Currently now I am feeling guilty as if I am not on hive blockchain because this will actually be the first time I will hear about the koinos blockchain. Perhaps I haven't joined the blockchain then though 😔
yea, hope it succeeds.. :)
I'm new to hive and it's really good to explore and see this
I'm anticipating the launching
It is not part of Hive network though. It is a separate blockchain project.
Okay,nice
As one can see, mainnet is not far off, so now is definitely the time to get to work building your Koinos based application to take advantage of this game-changing technology.
I have doubt's in the word
truly decentralized, we know this isn't true for the blockchain project which is very new.IMHO, Bitcoin and Hive are the only blockchain projects who already achieved this because it has no central authority like entity or company.
As for what we have seen on Hive, it took us 7 years to achieve the word decentralized thus not to be subjected from the billionaire takeover.
The 7 years of hard forks, dramas, battle, token distribution and many other that sums up on what we enjoy on today's Hive truly decentralization.
Can someone enlighten, I am not sure what I am missing here.
The more decentralized solutions we have, the better. "Truly decentralized" is indeed a big statement. We use it to refer to Hive as well. Perhaps, there aren't any networks that are truly decentralized. Not even Hive, not even Bitcoin, not even others. At least some have this as the goal and come closer to decentralization compared to others.
But also, the steps Koinos has taken from the very beginning do emphasize the intentions and mechanisms in place to make it a "truly decentralized" platform. Even the choice of consensus mechanism as proof-of-burn is evidence of that. That said we will know how decentralized the network is once we have the mainnet up and running. So far things look good.
Here's why #koinos will have greater decentralization from launch than most or all other chains (aside from maybe BTC) with launch: the initial distribution and proof of burn. There wasn't a pre-mine, ICO, or development fund. Just pure mining open to everyone at the same time. Since this initial distribution was done as an erc-20 on Ethereum, people also sold tokens they mined on uniswap over the last two years. Because of this, the initial distribution isn't lopsided and starts out in many different hands. Because it requires burning Koin to mine new Koin, everything is pre-slashed (unlike PoS) and the network can't be taken over by someone who simply holds the most stake (also unlike PoS). They would have to burn their stake and actually produce blocks for a very long time before getting their stake back.
It's most similar to PoW on bitcoin except miners are paying for mining up front in a virtual way instead of buying mining equipment and using electricity.
That's why they are using the term "truly decentralized".
Koin what? I am just hearing this, hope it will stay longer, bot today and tomorrow gone. Anyway, update us on the modes of operation.
!PGM
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