Burstcoin celebrates birthday and launches new energy efficient HDD mining wallet

Founded on August 10, 2014, Burstcoin [BURST] uses a unique algorithm, called Proof of Capability or (PoC), which helps miners utilize unused hard drive space instead of processors and graphics cards when mining. Miners can generate a large amount of data in advance, called a "plot", and then save it to the hard drive. The number of blocks stored is actually the mining speed. For each block, the miner browses the stored plot and calculates the time until if another block has not been found and it has enough capacity to mine a block. The plot only needs to be generated once, making the BURST system hardware and energy friendly to the computer processor unit (CPU) or graphics card (GPU).

BURST is available to everyone, and ASICS will never be more efficient than a mining operation running in the background on idle hard drive space.

The way BURST works is that miners generate cached block data called a “plot,” which is divided into 4096 parts called “scoops.”

Plots are generated from a public address and a specific address, then calculated, pre-appended, repeated multiple hash-pre-append cycles, and then the entire event is calculated, or the last calculation is simultaneous with the entire event.

Each block has a generation signature, which can only be obtained by the generation signature and miners from the previous block, so it is difficult to be manipulated in secret.

When mining, the number of scoops is used as a block, derived from the signature and the block height, so the miner reads all relevant scoops (each plot has a relevant scoop, which surprisingly allows for greater sequential reads and fewer search errors). Only 0.024% of the stored data needs to be read for each block.

The generation signature is calculated with each scoop. Eight bytes are taken from the calculation and then divided by a scaling factor (inverse difficulty). The result is a number of seconds. If that many seconds have passed since the last block generation without a new generation, the address/nonce combination is used to generate the plot/scoop that qualifies to announce a new block.

The miner's hardware can then sit idle until a new block is announced. The address/nonce is included in the block as proof of eligibility, and the block is signed by that address.

Technically, this mining process can mine in PoW mode, however the mining calculation rate is expected to be thousands of times higher and most of the time, your hardware will be idle.

Continuously computing until a block is found is unnecessary, since waiting long enough will cause any nonce to eventually become valid.

BURST is not only the first ever Proof of Concept (PoC) coin, no clones of it exist, but since its launch in mid-August 2014, major developers have put a huge effort into improving BURST. The coin is often referred to as simply BURST.

Recently, it was announced that BURST is the first and only HDD-mining currency, and they also announced that it has also become the first cryptocurrency to implement smart contracts in a real-world environment.

You may have heard of smart contracts Ethereum and Counterparty, which have been in the spotlight and are still developing to implement smart contracts. However, you can start writing smart contracts with BURST now.

Today users are discovering that Bitcoin is not anonymous but rather pseudonymous and can be tracked and traced by third parties with the right resources.

Burst has also addressed this issue, and its solution is called Atomic Crosschain Transactions, which is considered a decentralized trading platform between different currencies. Users can pay BURST with a coin, which provides a hybrid service model to serve privacy purposes, and then send it back correctly to a new BURST account without third-party interference. This has recently been successfully accomplished by BURST and another second-generation cryptocurrency QORA.

BURST is entering it’s second year of development and it looks like the developers are planning big things and are celebrating BURST’s 1 year anniversary while launching some new developments to kick off the new year.

As a community, let's wish BURST a happy 1st birthday, get those new hard drive wallets spinning, and cut those expensive electricity bills!!