A new cryptocurrency has arrived on the scene and it has experienced tremendous growth in both the community and number of miners. Ravencoin, created on January 3rd of this year (2018) was launched without much fanfare. The date however is notable as it is the 9-year anniversary of Bitcoin’s launch.
In fact the popular cryptocurrency site Bitcointalk, which almost all new coins utilize to launch their coin in the Altcoins announcements section, didn’t even have a post mentioning Ravencoin until its January 14 post by user kaigeta 11 days after it launched.
Before this, the only clue to Ravencoin’s existence was a single blog post on Medium which was published on October 31, 2017. The post opens with a sentence that seems it was designed to intrigue fans of Game of Thrones:
“In the fictional world of Westeros, ravens are used as messengers who carry statements of truth.”
In keeping with the spirit of its Bitcoin origins, the developers also paid a sort of homage to Bitcoin in it Genesis block test with a headline for the NYT reading: “The Times 03/Jan/2018 Bitcoin is name of the game for new generation of firms“.
Despite it mysterious origins, the coin’s popularity quickly grew, with now over 142 pages on it’s Bitcointalk announcement thread and over xxx miners contributing nearly xxx Ghash to its network. Its popularity isn’t just restricted to miners either, as Overstock CEO Patrick Byrne has invested $1.8 million USD into Ravencoin thereby securing nearly 30 million tokens in the process.
While modeled on Bitcoin, Ravencoin intends to put mining back into the hands of the miners and general community. Frustrated with the takeovers of other block chains by ASICs that are mainly in the hands of a few well established corporations, the Ravencoin founders wanted to recreate the early visions and hopes for Bitcoin, while preventing its eventual fate. Besides being ASIC resistant, Ravencoin also makes a few other departures from Bitcoin such as:
Total supply of 21 Billion coins versus Bitcoin’s 21 million.
Block time is 1 minute average versus Bitcoin’s 10 minutes.
The block reward is 5,000 versus Bitcoin’s original 50 per block. *Since Bitcoin has went through 2 halvings, BTC’s reward now stands at 13.5 BTC/block.
You can start to see the pattern here where Ravencoin is basically Bitcoin times 1000 in many of its parameters. The 5,000 Ravencoin awarded every minute equals 50,000 RVN every 10 minutes, would equate to 1000 times Bitcoin’s (original) 50 coins per 10 minute issuance.
Like Bitcoin, Ravencoin will have a block halving that occurs approximately every 4 years, at which point half of the coins total supply will have been mined, or approximately 10,500,000,000 Ravencoins. The next halving expect in 2022 would lower the block required to 2,500, then 1,250 in 2026, 625 in 2030 and so on.
Ravencoin derives its ASIC resistance from the fact that it uses the X16R algorithm and it is the first use case to test the new algorithm. The X16R hashing algorithm consists of 16 hashing algorithms operating in chain fashion with the ordering dependent on the last 8 bytes (16 nibbles) of the hash of the previous block.
| 0 | blake | 8 | shavite |
| 1 | bmw | 9 | simd |
| 2 | groestl | A | echo |
| 3 | jh | B | hamsi |
| 4 | keccak | C | fugue |
| 5 | skein | D | shabal |
| 6 | luffa | E | whirlpool |
| 7 | cubehash | F | sha512 |
Ravencoin Specifications
White Paper: https://ravencoin.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/01/X16R-Whitepaper.pdf
Block Time: 1 minute
Block Reward: 5,000 RVN
Total Coin Supply: 21 Billion (21,000,000,000) RVN
Founders Reward: No
ICO: No
RPC port: 8766
AddNode: Ravencoin Node List: http://www.ravennodes.com/nodes/
Your explorer link should be changed as unfortunately threeye is no longer maintained or updated which is causing confusion for people as it does not show recent addresses, transactions, etc.
https://exp.virtopia.ca
This explorer is maintained by myself and a suitable replacement. Keeping it running and up to date is a priority. It is also listed on the bitcointalk ANN.
I added your block explorer link, thanks for the head’s up.