Bitcoin today is facing a huge problem today.
The original version of Bitcoin was supposed to be a decentralized and distributed cryptocurrency where the security of the whole blockchain is not ruled by a single entity or group at all.
Despite the rule created by the creator of Bitcoin, under the name of Satoshi Nakamoto, 'One CPU, One vote.' the advent of specialized chips named ACICS could mine Bitcoin over a thousand times more efficient than any desktop computer made mining inaccessible to the general public.
Mining in Bitcoin and any similar technology has been dominated by a small group of people with their own capital to develop ACICS and the economics of scale to maintain large mining farms giving them a disproportionate amount of influence at the same time making it easier to mount a success 51% attack.
MTP is short for Merkle Tree Proof, a totally new Proof of Work algorithm that aims to solve the problems of miners visualization.
MTP uses a memory-hard algorithm that can use a massive amount of RAM intensively.
This significantly increases the cost of ASICS and at the same time limits the amount of efficiency that an ACICS can bring as computational function can bring can be highly optimized and also memory use is hard to optimize any further.
Other previous memory-hard algorithm were hampered by the fact that they had to use a massive amount of memory to verify nodes, also needed, even more, memory and CPU increasing the costs of running a node, making them susceptible to denial of services attack.
Hence, developers adjusted the parameters of such algorithm to only use a little memory, making it light-weight on the network.
However, because of this-this made it easier to develop profitable ACICS as we have seen in Scrypts as in Litecoin.
This is the beauty of MTP lies in that although miners require a lot of memory and time produce work verifying the work takes a shortcut allowing it to only need a fraction of the time, and at the same time relatively little memory, keeping the network light-weight and scalable without the need of sacrifice of memory hard algorithms.
Botnets which are networks of computers infected with malware also post as a serious threat to the security of the blockchain.
Other ACICS resistant algorithm have been seeing their hash-rate getting dominated by botnets that are again, likely to be controlled by a small group of people.
MTP's large youth of memory makes it less attractive to botnets since its likely used by a user with a running background application.
We at ZCoin believe maintaining decentralized and security of the blockchain paramount importance and therefore we are proud to be the first to code MTP from the ground up and implement it into our system, keeping the blockchain light-weight, decentralized and scalable.
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From @stammy