Friday, July 3, 2015

Noffee Coin : A coin that can't be used to buy your coffee in the morning.



This is a proposal to create Noffee coin. The world's first cryptocurrency created specifically so that you won't be able to buy your coffee with it in the morning (portmanteau of No Coffee). It is also ironically called Noffee because it is predicted that the transaction fee will be very large due to the restrictive amount of space available on each block. 

The goal of this cryptocurrency is to create a blockchain that is small enough that you could easily run a full node on your smart phone even with 10 years of past blockchain data. Now you could be asking, "why would I want to run this on my mobile phone if I can't buy my coffee with it?" Well there are many transactions in the real world that are done with very large briefcases full of US dollars. Noffee coin would be a perfect replacement for such situations. Since the exchanged amount is so huge and the stakes are large, it is imperative that you run a full node and it is no problem waiting three hours to get your six confirms. I have no idea what kind of transactions they could be, but a more imaginative person could figure that out.

The current proposals are:

- 30 minute block time
- 1 kilobyte block size limit 
- Equivalent block reward and halving schedule as Bitcoin. We will halve the block reward every 70000 blocks, which will be about 4 years (same time duration as Bitcoin)

There will be roughly a max of 8 transactions per hour. This means that even with completely full blocks for 10 years, the total blockchain size will be about 170 megabytes. I think a lot of cool stuff can be done with this project, but you definitely will not be able to buy your coffee with it. I am now looking for initial comments and questions regarding the project.

Further things to consider are whether we should further reduce Noffee coin's hardware requirements by putting in things to restrict bandwidth usage in the p2p communication protocol, limit the growth of UTXO's (high dust and minimum tx fee), and reduce computing requirements in the script processing (or remove the entire thing altogether). I like the idea of a "Minimum Viable Block Chain" that would scrap the entire scripting language of Bitcoin as it introduces a significant amount of complexity into the consensus protocol.

 If there is enough interest, especially from other developers that can help out, I will proceed in refining the proposal further and will create the cryptocurrency that everyone deserves. If there is no interest, well maybe this is at least a funny way to think about the block size debate.


Coffee icon made by Freepik from www.flaticon.com is licensed under CC BY 3.0