Bitcointalk.org forum member keccak512 announced in a post on March 8 a currency called Heavycoin, an altcoin that puts specific focus on security.
The innovation that lends Heavycoin it’s, um, heaviness, is the fact that the currency’s blockchain is secured with four hash functions.
“If one of these hash functions fail, then Heavycoin is still protected by the others,” the Heavycoin About Page reads. “This is a significant step forward over Bitcoin, Litecoin and most other crypto-currencies, which rely on a single cryptographic hash function.”
Stronger hash functions
It also notes that the SHA-256 hash function — on which Bitcoin relies and which is part of Heavycoin’s collection of hash functions, as well — should not be trusted on its own, as revelations from Edward Snowden have indicated.
Heavycoin developers conclude that currencies with SHA-256 cryptography may be vulnerable to government influence or tampering.
Decentralization
Furthermore, Heavycoin relies on CPU-only mining to avoid what it describes as “centralized mining.”
“Mining centralization is a problem for Bitcoin, Litecoin and most other crypto-currencies. Increasingly, more and more transactions are mined by a handful of big players with expensive, specialized hardware. When most transaction processing is handled by a wealthy, small group, then this threatens the crypto-currency's independence and the numerous benefits that come from decentralization.”
The details of Heavycoin are a bit more technical than with, say, Dogecoin, so if you are interested, check out the Heavycoin homepage on Github here.
Links:
- BitcoinTalk.org - CPU-only, Ultra-secure, Decentralized Block Reward Voting
- heavycoin.github.io