Zcoin releases PoW algorithm MTP to solve miner centralization imbalance

Zcoin, the first digital currency to apply the Zerocoin Protocol and utilize Zero-Knowledge proofs for monetary anonymity and privacy, announced in a press release CoinReport received, the public release of the first functional application of Merkle Tree Proof (MTP) as a proof-of-work (PoW) algorithm. Zcoin claims this is progress in promoting egalitarian computing, high security and high performance.

Created by Dmitry Khovratovich and Alex Biryukov, the same scientists who created Equihash, MTP PoW is, says the release, an answer to the difference between power users that can use ASICS, FPGA and GPU and ordinary miners to derive a substantial benefit and mount a cheap attack.

To encourage egalitarian computing, MTP intends to set up the same price/cost for a single computation unit on all platforms, preventing a single device from attain a momentous edge for the same price.

Both attackers and users are equal in the price-performance ratio conditions, ending automated large-scale attacks. Additionally, hashing in MTP is exceedingly memory intensive with Zcoin’s reference implementation using 2 GiB of RAM, and machines infested by trojans in botnets would get conspicuous performance degradation and alert the user of an attack.

Zcoin founder and lead developer Poramin Insom said on the occasion,“One of the main reasons the Equihash scientists sought to create MTP was to improve upon the drawbacks of a long initialization phase.”

He added, “Ultimately, MTP shortens the phase and keeps the algorithm ‘progress free’ and independent of any previous events, leading to more decentralized mining.”

Moreover, MTP can keep verification times equal to those of bitcoin’s without requiring a great amount of memory when a solution is detected. This way, the network is more impervious to DoS attacks aimed at verifiers. More notably, it also enables lightweight hardware such as smartphones to perform verification not imaginable on most memory hard algorithms today.

This video explains MTP in Zcoin:

Zcoin will be organizing a miner bounty program open to the community for creation of effective miners for MTP. In the competition, a total of $20,000 will be distributed among the best miners for GPU and CPU.