SafeBox: The brilliant architecture of PascalCoin

leoburca.com (25)in #blockchain • 6 years ago (edited)

This article is part of a series on the highly innovative PascalCoin ($PASC), a cryptocurrency written entirely in the Pascal programming language.Pascal was first used in 1970 and has been a key part of the Apple II and Macintosh computers.On 11 August 2016, Albert Molina created the genesis block for PascalCoin and released it to the world. PASC has several key advantages over conventional cryptocurrencies which are explored in this series of articles.

PascalCoin uses a technology called SafeBox, which is an alternative to the traditional blockchain used in cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin. Instead of requiring that each participant download the entire block chain (history of transactions) in order to begin participating, SafeBox allows participants to begin participating very quickly. This is allowed because SafeBox only stores the last 100 blocks. This permits easy participation, scalability, and speed. In fact, using SafeBox, PascalCoin has been able to break 100 transactions per second.

SafeBox stores the balance of the ledger rather than the ledger itself. It boils down to being a list of these accounts. It stores the account details of every user. Nodes update their own copies of the SafeBox independent of other nodes when new blocks are announced. The nodes acquires updated versions of the SafeBox by acquiring bits and pieces of files from others, resulting in true decentralization.

ACCOUNTS

PascalCoin functions like a bank, but with cryptocurrency rather than fiat. Each user is able to purchase an account with an easy to remember account number. The account can also be given a publicly available name.An account contains: (1) a 32-bit unsigned signifying account number that can never be modified, (2) public EC key that acts as the PIN for the account and can be modified by the owner using their private key, (3) a 64-bit unsigned for the account’s balance, (4) a 32-bit unsigned indicating the number of the last block that modified the account that also aids in finding stale accounts, (5) a 32-bit unsigned N operation that indicates how many transactions were made with the account that also helps fight against possible duplication, (6) a name of type RawBytes that provides a unique and public name encoded in PascalCoin64 encoding whose default value is blank, and (7) a type of word that differentiates accounts.Accounts are grouped into an Account Segment that is generated every time a miner appends to the SafeBox via mining. An Account Segment contains: (1) block number, (2) an array of N accounts, (3) a Unix timestamp, (4) an Account Segment hash, and (5) a block header that allows the restructuring of the total work to construct the SafeBox without requiring the blocks to be present.

MINING

Miners continually work to generate the next version of the SafeBox, where the next version contains new pending operations that have been circulated by nodes. All blocks must reference the SafeBox Hash in order to be valid, which is a checksum of the aggregate hash of all Account Segment hashes and is appended immediately after the last Account Segment in the SafeBox, Account Segment N.A new block creates an Account Segment containing N accounts — N equals 5 for the current version, PascalCoin Version 2. When a miner wins the Proof of Work, it publishes this new block with N new accounts in an Account Segment. The miner’s public key is used to award the miner the new accounts.

SafeBox ensures compliance with the security and offers the proof-based model of verification of Bitcoin with a unique twist, paving the way for infinite scalability. SafeBox allows PascalCoin to be a much more streamlined and efficient update over other coins and is under active development.