Bitcoin, the well-known digital currency may soon have a competitor, that too created by the same guys who developed bitcoin. According to a recent press release, the new cryptocurrency called Decred will be developed by a group of Bitcoin developers along with the guys behind btcsuite.
The new alternative digital currency aims to prevent the repeat of all the issues bitcoin is currently facing in terms of project governance and development funding. If bitcoin doesn’t clean its house soon, Decred may potentially take over the torch of being the most widely used cryptocurrency from it as soon as it is launched. The Decred team has an added advantage to make a really great product as they already have experience with bitcoin and by now they have come to realize all the dos and don’ts.
Some of the often raised concerns about bitcoin includes apparent increase in centralization of power in the bitcoin project and issues regarding prioritization of interests of those responsible for funding the bitcoin. Decred intends to include a long list of features into their product. These features, listed on their website includes
- Implementation of consensus system based on proof-of-work and proof-of-stake system
- The development of Decred is self-funded and open with block subsidy
- Decred uses Blake-256 hashing algorithm
- Decred may be compatible with bitcoin as the development team has been closely involved in the development of bitcoin earlier and also btcsuite.
- Decred community members will be involved in making bottom-up non-financial decision making easier through Decred Assembly.
- It will use secp256k1 signature scheme or Ed25519/secp256k1-Schnorr for better integration into existing software and make good use of the features offered by Schnorr signatures respectively.
- Decred uses Go as a codebase for development.
Decred has an Airdrop scheduled for next month (30 days and a few hours from now) where they will be giving out 4% of the total Decred supply to all participants. Developers interested to take part in the Airdrop can drop in their details on Decred website.
