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Quazar coin
QuazarCoin (QCN) is a cryptocurrency announced in May 19, 2014 by a team of anonymous developers. QuazarCoin was established as an alternative to Proof-of-Work based cryptocurrencies in an attempt to fix a problem of very high demands on computing power of user’s equipment that PoW makes on later stages of functioning.
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QuazarCoin review
In 2014, it already was very hard to mine bitcoin with average equipment and ASIC miners were widely used, excluding common users from participating in cryptocurrency industry. Threshold to enter bitcoin usage became too high. At that time, Bytecoin already proved itself and Cryptonight algorithm to be reliable and robust alternative to Bitcoin and its SHA-256d. Besides it, Cryptonight was ASIC-resistant and only CPU-minable. That was a main reason behind taking Bytecoin’s codebase as a platform for developing new coin. The idea behind QuazarCoin was to make universally acceptable currency that is easy to use, easy to get and easy to transfer for all potential users. QuazarCoin team saw security and anonymity as a crucial part of currency that can become widely used.
To make QuazarCoin secure, developers adopted Bytecoin’s ring signature - a type of digital signature that can be performed by any member of a group of users that each have keys. Therefore, a message signed with a ring signature is endorsed by someone in a particular group of people with no disclosure of particular individual. That means, that all participants in the network can use plausible deniability and transaction can’t be traced down to actual person that initiated it. Due to this feature, QuazarCoin, as well as other CryptoNight-based cryptocurrencies is resistant to blockchain analysis.
To make QuazarCoin highly accessible, developers implemented egalitarian Proof-of-Work - a part of CryptoNote technology that makes all users equal in terms of an opportunity to mine QuazarCoin profitable, regardless of their gear. CryptoNote brings the equality with pricing function that is perfectly suitable for ordinary PCs. It utilizes built-in CPU instructions, which are very hard and too expensive to implement in special purpose devices or fast memory-on-chip devices with low latency. Emission curve of QCN is similar to Bitcoin, 50% QCN will be emitted in 6 years. Total amount of possibly emitted coins is around 18,446,744 QCN.
Block time of QuazarCoin is 120 seconds, transaction confirmation takes several seconds and commission is near 0,005 QCN. QuazarCoin’s difficulty is retargeting every block. Block reward decreases according to the formula (264 - 1 - A)*2-21*10-12, where A = supply mined to date. QuazarCoin price peaked very fast after its appearance. At the end of May 2014, its price was $4,68 and capitalization got close to $550 000. Soon after that, community lost interest in this cryptocurrency and soon QuazarCoin price was not higher than $0,5. It didn’t rise since then. Right now, official QuazarCoin website is not working. QuazarCoin team is not active on social media, most of their plans and promises are not fulfilled to this day. Cryptocurrency services and a large part of community, including some of QCN investors, consider QuazarCoin dead. This crypto is not maintained and has no real advantages to be used over many other cryptocurrencies. Some users, however, are supporting the currency and trying to get it to be listed on more cryptocurrency exchanges.
Trading Wallet
QuazarCoin’s miner and wallet are available on its bitcointalk announce. QuazarCoin team made them compatible for Windows, Mac and Linux. QuazarCoin mining is currently one of a few ways to get the currency, because, according to CoinMarketCap.com, no cryptocurrency exchanges are performing operations with QuazarCoin. The last one to do it was HitBTC.com. The other way is to find an owner of QuazarCoin and perform transactions directly with him.
СryptoNight Algorithm
CryptoNight is a Proof-of-Work algorithm built by Bytecoin developers in cooperation with CryptoNote technology developers. CryptoNight is a memory-hard hash function and is designed to be inefficiently computable on GPU, FPGA and ASIC architectures. The first step of CryptoNight algorithm is initializing large scratchpad with pseudo-random data. The next step is numerous read/write operations at pseudo-random addresses contained in the scratchpad. The final step is hashing the entire scratchpad to produce the resulting value. CryptoNight is what provides QuazarCoin with most of its features. Those features include: untraceable payments, unlinkable transactions, double spending proof, blockchain analysis resistance and egalitarian Proof of Work. For a long time, CryptoNight was resistant to ASIC mining, but modern ASIC manufacturers managed to develop ASICs that are fully functioning with CryptoNight cryptocurrencies. CryptoNight was also implemented in such cryptocurrencies as Monero (XMR), DarkNote (XDN), AEON (AEON), Fantomcoin (FCN) and some others. Current development teams of mentioned currencies differ in their approaches to governance of the network in terms of ASIC-resistance. For example, Monero (XMR) team made a fork to avoid the accessibility of XMR to be mined by ASIC users and Bytecoin team made a decision to support ASIC miners be due to high risks of user’s deanonymization in case of forking the blockchain.
Resources
- Is QuazarCoin dead?
- What is Bytecoin Coin?
- What is the point of an egalitarian proof of work?
- The ASIC Statement: Clarification From The Bytecoin Team
- CyptoNote Philosophy
- QuazarCoin
- QuazarCoin Announce
- QuazarCoin CoinMarketCap
