Zcoin with Joyce Ep02: What is mining and what is MTP

We'll be talking about "mining your own business".
Before we start on the topic of mining, I'd like to talk about where cryptocurrency actually comes from.
There are two types of cryptocurrency we are familiar with, the ones that we often buy or sell, like stock, or cryptocurrency that you get from mining.
Cryptocurrency, unlike mining, does not have a centralized governing system, which means there is no one person OR bank that controls you.

The nature of cryptocurrency is basically e-Money, so it's money on the internet.
If I take any e-Money and sent it to your email, you basically get the e-Money I send you (if I send you a lot, YOU'RE RICH!!! :0).
If I send everybody reading this post 1 e-Money, just because for the sake of EXPERIMENTING, (if it were real, rip me .-.) then e-Money would have no value, because it wouldn't be able to track all these transactions I'm doing sending out, only if a lot of people are reading this right now.
This is why cryptocurrency has something called the "blockchain".
It's also known as a "Public Digital Ledger".
It's an online accounting system that keeps everyone in check, like an e-wallet.
Now with this added thing called "blockchain" in our experiment, e-Money would be able to record any transactions made to anybody and therefore keep its value.
Any transactions made online can't be changed either, means that you can't cheat!

The computers and units maintaining the ledger, are called nodes.
The nodes keep all the transactions in check.
So all these transactions, are kept in something called a temporary pool.
It's a swimming pool, but temporary, and only for transactions.
The computers and/or units will need to solve a mathematical puzzle, and the computer and/or units that solves the mathematical puzzle first, pulling all the transactions from the temporary pool into a block.
In short, the computer and/or unit that solves the puzzle gets a block reward, so basically you get paid in the coins you are mining.
Remember that there are a LOT of transactions happening all the time?
All of these will start turning into blocks, linking each other together, becoming the blockchain itself.
With Bitcoin and Zcoin, transactions are made into blocks roughly every 10 minutes.

So, how do mining and blockchains link to each other?
Mining keeps the blockchain secure, like a system that verifies the information, making the blockchain legit.
What happens with mining, is that you put in electric power and computing power.
In return for using computing and electric power to secure the network, you get a block reward.
You also get the transaction fees that people pay off for using the blockchain.
Ideally, the decentralized system of cryptocurrency allows everyone to mine fairly, 1 CPU, 1 vote!
Everyone with a computer will get to participate in the mining for an eco share, which sounds ideal.
But with the invention of better technologies, Many miners have gone from normal computers to graphics cards, to advanced machines, called ASIC.
ASIC means application specific intergrated circuit.
To put it simply, the designs to mine.
After creating the ASIC, they wouldn't want to sell it to anybody, since they could earn more money using the ASIC, giving it to themselves with so much more power, meaning that we won't get to participate because we can't even produce not even 1/10 of their power.
The better technology, the more power they have to mine, making it extremely inaccessible to the public, because we don't have the means to afford these expensive types of machinery to mine.
BUT, Zcoin aims to fix this problem!!
You: But how? You already said we couldn't even produce 1/10 of their power!! ;C
Well, we can use something called MTP, multi-talented person, making more mining power than them!!
nahhhh, just kidding lol
MTP actually means Merkle Tree Proof.
Like Bitcoin's mining algorithm, it is a proof of work system, and by work, we mean computing power (work = computing power).
Not Rihanna's WORK WORK WORK WORK WORK WORK book (very intense name though).
MTP, a Merkle Tree Proof, is a very different Proof of Work system from other cryptocurrencies because it is very memory hard.
What that actually means, is that it requires a large amount of memory to solve puzzles.
So memory here is like those RAM sticks we have in our computers, these RAM states cannot be optimized anymore because they are already the most optimized they can be.
The implementation of the Merkle Tree Proof which is very heavy in terms of memory, cannot be computer optimized anymore.
This means there are no ASICs that can be designed to cheat the system.
All machines are limited by memory speed and bandwidth.
Then again, we are back to a fairground everyone can participate in!
In mining, there are two parties - miners and verifiers.
So you have miners, and you have verifiers.
In a lot of memory hard system, both verifiers and miners will have to work equally hard.
Let's say you are using a 100 GB (Gigabyte) worth of memory to mine, you'd need a 100 GB (Gigabyte) to verify, making the process extremely slow.
But with the Merkle Tree Proof of work system, you only need a fraction of the miners memory to verify the transaction, making sure the transaction happens quickly.
Another important benefit of requiring a large amount of memory is that botnets and computers affected by viruses are less likely to be able to mine without being noticed, because users realized the slow down in their computers when such a large amount of memory is being used.
The implementation of MTP, Merkle Tree Proof, is super vital in Zcoin because this prevents the occurring problem in Bitcoin, where a small group of people with access to expensive mining machinery have so much more power than everybody else.
MTP will reside in Egalitarian computing.
That means no one is at a disadvantage or advantage, promoting a truly decentralized system.
A working prototype of MTP is already avaliable for Zcoin.
However, they are still working on an updated version with important security and performance improvements which
they are scheduled to launch next year.
So stay tuned!