The SD Times Open Source Project of this week is Spacemesh, a decentralized cryptocurrency that people can buy without using local currency. It is designed to be fairly distributed and run by home desktop PC owners from around the world.
“We believe that current methods for coin distribution, such as ICOs, airdrops, participation in mining pools and IEOs all have serious deficiencies and that the problem remains as yet unsolved,” the creators of Spacemesh wrote on their website. “We aim to create a cryptocurrency that is highly usable as means of payment between any two people in the world without any possibility of censorship.”
Spacemesh employs a new mathematically proven consensus protocol that replaces Proof of Work (PoW) with Proof of Space Time (PoST), which utilizes unused disk space on ordinary desktop PCs to run the network. Spacemesh also uses a Blockmesh design in place of a chain, enabling far more frequent rewards than a blockchain, the creators explained.
Spacemesh’s safety is intact when less than one-third of the storage space committed to the platform is in the hands of malicious entities. Once an attack ends, during which transactions shut down, Spacemesh’s self-healing method restores both liveliness and safety and all honest parties will agree again on one true transaction history that doesn’t include invalid transactions.
When it comes to furthering decentralization, Spacemesh is lowering the barrier for who can join the platform, to create a large number of non-coordinated entities with a high-degree of geographical distribution, according to the team.
“There are two main aspects of decentralization: mining power decentralization and coin distribution decentralization. Spacemesh achieves both, as the same home miners who provide mining power to the network with an extremely low barrier-to-entry are also the ones who mint Spacemesh coin as award for their contribution,” the creators wrote.
