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How does Maxcoin compare with previous cryptocurrencies?

  1. What hash algorithm does it use?
  2. What reward schedule has been announced?
  3. Does it solve any problems that Bitcoin or another previous crypto didn't solve?
Murch
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1 Answers1

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MaxCoin is one of many altcoins, yet one of the few that were inspired by famous persons see, such as RonPaul Coin and Coinye Coin.

As far as we know, MaxCoin is going to use the SHA-3 (Keccak) cryptographic hash function, which should in the beginning allow only CPU miners to mine. According to a statement of the creators, it is planned as a mine-coin for everyone having a GPU.

Technical aspects:

Scrypt or SHA-256? Keccak (SHA-3)

How many coins? 250,000,000

Block reward? 96 MaxCoin per block, halving every ~12 months

Difficulty? Retargeting using Kimoto Gravity Well algorithm.

Block time? 30 seconds

In fact this coin doesn't solve any significant Bitcoin (sometimes arguable) weaknesses.

If we take a look at the interest e.g. in Twitter followers that have grown from zero to 6.6k within 2 weeks this is a lot compared to e.g. Zerocoin that has 1.6k followers after about year and a half activity. We might speak about a cryptocurrency Dot-com bubble as this altcoin doesn't have any significant additional technical or economical value.

Edit No.1

My comparison about Twitter followers turns out being very misleading as the Coinye West Coin has now 22K followers and the it's real successor CoinyeCoin has just 2,2K.

Murch
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Marek
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  • Worth pointing out that Maxcoin uses the secp256r1 Random Curve, unlike Bitcoin that uses secp256k1 Koblitz Curve, for the synthesis of elliptic curve public keys from private keys. – skaht Jan 05 '16 at 22:51