Mission Statement
“Certurium shall be governed by its community in a way to constantly improve its properties as a digital store of value. The technology behind the asset may change over time – as it has in the past – but the philosophy shall remain: to provide its investors with a secure asset not subject to any relevant inflation, making it an excellent hedge against the quantitative easing slowly eroding the value of almost every fiat currency.”
Cryptocurrency
A cryptocurrency is a digital or virtual currency that is secured by cryptography, which makes it nearly impossible to counterfeit or double-spend. Many cryptocurrencies are decentralized networks based on blockchain technology—a distributed ledger enforced by a disparate network of computers. A defining feature of cryptocurrencies is that they are generally not issued by any central authority, rendering them theoretically immune to government interference or manipulation.
Certurium
Bitcoin was the original cryptocurrency and is currently the largest by market cap. Certurium was forked from Bitcoin back in 2013 and since then the code code has been adapted and modified to enable Certurium to reach it’s goal of being a long term, investment asset, which is designed to slowly increase in value over time.
Because of this background, you can be sure that Certurium has all the security and pedigree of the world’s largest cryptocurrency … with some improvements.
Certurium does not belong to a country. It is not under the control of a single bank or organization. Its only master is its holder. Forever.
Read on to find out how Certurium is different from Bitcoin and why these changes matter.
Block Size
A block is just a group of transactions in a blockchain ledger which are processed (or authenticated) by miners in one batch. Once a block is authenticated, all the transactions within it are added to the immutable record of the coin’s transaction history. The block size limits the number of transactions that can be approved per batch.
Because there is only so much processing power in a blockchain network, the block size limits the number of transactions that can be processed per second. It is important to keep the block size small for reasons of security and this is why transaction processing on Bitcoin (and Certurium) is relatively slow, when compared with the international banking system. For Bitcoin this poses a problem, since it was supposed to be a transactional currency. For Certurium, this is not a problem, since it is not designed as a transactional currency but a store of value.
Read the full article at Cointelegraph.com
NeoScrypt
NeoScrypt is the mining algorithm used by Certurium and is a successor to the Scrypt algorithm and password-based key derivation function (KDF) created by Colin Percival, originally constructed to combat large-scale hardware attacks by requiring mass amounts of memory for an attacker. Scrypt is also commonly used as the Proof-of-Work (PoW) algorithm for a good portion of cryptocurrencies in today’s space, and ultimately has served as the foundation for Litecoin and Dogecoin (notably).
Effectively, password based key derivation function is what’s known as a deterministic algorithm, which derives a cryptographic key from “an input datum known as a password.” One of the most common uses of KDFs is in “key stretching,” where the length of a user’s password is lengthened, ultimately preventing against brute force attacks. Unfortunately, PBKDF2, a popular KDF utilized by cryptocurrencies, does not use significant amounts of memory to operate or complex logic, making it susceptible to brute force attacks via general purpose hardware, such as custom design (ASICs) and GPUs (all at a relatively low cost).
Cue NeoScrypt, NeoScrypt is a further development of Scrypt, addressing the aforementioned issues and geared towards:
- Increased security,
- Better performance, and
- Low costs.
Difficulty Adjustment
Bitcoin’s difficulty adjustment algorithm is executed only once every 2016 blocks or about every two weeks. While this is not ideal it works sufficiently well for Bitcoin where the hashing power experiences only minor fluctuations relative to the total hashing power. With Certurium a sudden increase in hashing power could cause a high block rate leading to a much higher coin inflation than intended if the difficulty adjustment algorithm was not altered. Using the original Bitcoin difficulty adjustment algorithm, a sudden drop in hashing power – on the other hand – would prolong the time required to mine a new block by factors. Consequently, it is crucial to select an algorithm that adjusts the mining difficulty with respect to the changing hashing power. Certurium uses the T3 difficulty adjustment algorithm in C++ on top of Certurium Core to offer the solution to this problem.
Summary
Bitcoin, on the one hand, is neither ideal for payments nor as a store of value. Certurium, on the other hand, positions itself as a pure long-term investment asset, leveraging the blockchain’s potential where it is of importance.
Very high mining reward in Bitcoin leads to high sell pressure, setting an artificial ceiling for Bitcoin’s price development. Certurium has a low mining reward and thus low sell pressure, which leads to positive price developments.
Bitcoin and its protocol have become politically entangled, meaning that constructive change takes place too slowly or never at all. Certurium is not connected to a protocol, but to an idea: To ensure long term value appreciation. If a new technology other than blockchain becomes dominant, Certurium can change its protocol and is thus resilient to change.
Certurium is not a cryptocurrency to execute payments – it is a cryptographic asset dedicated to storing wealth securely. It is built to keep. This leads to low liquidity on exchanges.
Thanks to its low mining reward, Certurium guarantees an incredibly low energy consumption. Adjusted to equal its market capitalization, the energy consumption is a fraction of one percent of that of Bitcoin
