Difference between revisions of "DigiByte History"

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== Early days / Pre-launch ==
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== '''<span style="font-size:x-large;">Early days / Pre-launch</span>''' ==
  
 
Jared Tate has been involved with Bitcoin since 2012. In the Fall of 2013, he decided to make several improvements to the Bitcoin core protocol which culminated in the launch of DigiByte in 2014.
 
Jared Tate has been involved with Bitcoin since 2012. In the Fall of 2013, he decided to make several improvements to the Bitcoin core protocol which culminated in the launch of DigiByte in 2014.
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== The Launch ==
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== '''<span style="font-size:x-large;">The Launch</span>''' ==
  
 
*21 Billion total supply (1:1000 ratio to BTC. With mass adoption, average people can still afford to buy an entire DigiByte.)  
 
*21 Billion total supply (1:1000 ratio to BTC. With mass adoption, average people can still afford to buy an entire DigiByte.)  
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== Hard Forks ==
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== '''<span style="font-size:x-large;">Hard Forks</span>''' ==
  
 
History of hard forks of DigiByte
 
History of hard forks of DigiByte
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== Soft Forks ==
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== '''<span style="font-size:x-large;">Soft Forks</span>''' ==
  
 
History of soft forks of DigiByte
 
History of soft forks of DigiByte

Revision as of 11:39, 4 August 2019

Announcement 

DigiByte was created on the 10th of January 2014, by Jared Tate.

DigiByte is a public, rapidly growing and highly decentralized blockchain. DigiBytes are digital assets that cannot be destroyed, counterfeited or hacked, making them ideal for protecting objects of value like currency, information, property or important digital data.

DigiBytes can be sent over the DigiByte Blockchain and forever recorded on an immutable public ledger that is decentralized on thousands of computers across the planet.

 

  • Highly secure & scalable

 

  • Industry-leading transaction speeds

 

  • Tried & tested technology over 5 years

 

  • Manageable units ready for mass adoption

 

  • Active development team & known founder

 

 

DigiByte Overview

DigiByte was created by programmer and entrepreneur Jared Tate with the goal of creating a fast and secure cryptocurrency that could reach a wider and more decentralized community than Bitcoin. The first DigiByte block was mined on January 10, 2014, and included the headline from USA Today: “Target: Data stolen from up to 110M customers," hashed into the Genesis Block to mark the importance of security in digital transactions. Also included was a small 0.5% pre-mine to pay initial mobile-app developers and early downloaders of the blockchain to foster and encourage adoption (0% premine remaining).

DigiByte pioneered asymmetrical difficulty adjustment mining with DigiShield, which is a widely used technology and the basis of many other blockchains. It is also the first to blockchain to fork from a single proof-of-work algorithm to multi-algorithm mining.

The DigiByte blockchain is spread over a 280,000+ servers, computers, phones, and nodes worldwide.

 

Early days / Pre-launch

Jared Tate has been involved with Bitcoin since 2012. In the Fall of 2013, he decided to make several improvements to the Bitcoin core protocol which culminated in the launch of DigiByte in 2014.

DigiByte was founded by Jared Tate with the goal of creating a fast and secure blockchain that could reach a wider and more decentralized community than Bitcoin.

DGB was designed w/ 21 billion supply for a reason. 1:1000 ratio to BTC. With mass adoption, average people can still afford to buy an entire DigiByte.

 

The Launch

  • 21 Billion total supply (1:1000 ratio to BTC. With mass adoption, average people can still afford to buy an entire DigiByte.)
  • 72000 DGB initial block reward
  • Count-down via BitcoinTalk
  • 0.5 % Pre-Mine (DigiByte was one of the few coins launched around 2014 with a fair and reasonable pre-mine. There was 0.25% given away to the public to encourage early adoption and ensure the coin didn’t stall, along with 0.25% supporting development for the first 18 months, both of which is disclosed on the website. This funding supported the coin throughout that development period and the team was able to create DigiShield, along with forking to MultiAlgo and subsequently MultiShield all throughout, thanks to the careful governance of their available funds. 0% premine remaining.)

 

Hard Forks

History of hard forks of DigiByte

 

DigiShield

Block 67,200. February 28th, 2014

Activated in February 2014 this hard fork allowed for the DigiByte blockchain to protect against multi-pools that mine large numbers of DigiByte at a low difficulty. It achieves this by recalculating block difficulty between each block, allowing for a faster correction when a multi-pool begins or ceases contributing to DigiByte, rather than recalculating once every fortnight as is the case with Bitcoin. The DigiByte Core developers assisted the Dogecoin team to successfully implement DigiShield in early 2014 to help resolve the wild swings in chain difficulty. Since then DigiShield has been added into over 25 other cryptocurrency blockchains such as Bitcoin Cash, Dogecoin, Startcoin, Zcash, Aurora Coin, Bitcoin Gold, BitTokens, Creative Coin, Granite, Huncoin, Monacoin, Mooncoin, Nautiluscoin, Quatloo, Sakura Coin, Scorecoin, SmartCoin, StartCoin, SuperiorCoin and Ubiq.

MultiAlgo

Block 145,000. September 1st 2014

Activated in September 2014 from Myriadcoin source code, this hard fork allowed for multi-algorithm mining. Its purpose was to create a number of different proof of work (PoW) mining methods to accommodate the different types of mining capabilities that exist, such as dedicated ASIC mining, GPU and CPU mining. This allows for a larger number of people to access DigiByte mining pools and therefore it creates a more decentralized blockchain with the coins reaching groups who were unable to mine the coin on its original single-algorithm (Scrypt).

MultiShield

Block 400,000. December 10th 2014

Activated in December 2014, this hard fork worked to activate DigiShield across the new MultiAlgo platform and accomplish the same goals on all five mining pools.

DigiSpeed

Block 1,430,000 December. 4th 2015

Activated in December 2015 this was a hard fork that focused on making the DigiByte coin Transaction speeds faster. Block time was reduced by 50% to 15 seconds and new block propagation code was added based on Microsoft Research. This allows DigiByte to handle up to 560 transactions per second. Every 2 years the DigiByte blockchain's dynamic system doubles the number of transactions per second by doubling the block size. In 2017, capability reaches 560 transactions per second, with a maximum capability of 280,000 transactions per second to be reached in 2035.

Odocrypt

Block 9,112,320 July. 21th 2019

Activated in July 2019 this hard fork brought Odocrypt to life which is a unique FPGA-friendly hashing algorithm made specifically for DigiByte that changes itself every 10 days as an anti-ASIC method. This replaced the Myr-groestl algorithm with Odocrypt. Odocrypt uses the Keccak algorithm (SHA3) for its hashing function, as it is a relatively streamlined and low-memory requirements (Perfect for all common FPGAs). It changes the hashing details every epoch (10 day time-period) based on the new seed. This change occurs at midnight UTC. When the epoch changes, the miners must compile a new .sof file (analog of a binary executable for the FPGA CPU) and program it on to the hardware. During this time, there is a 2-hour period prior to the midnight of the epoch in which the blockchain will accept the new epoch settings and / or the old epoch settings. This gives all miners a chance to re-optimize their settings and reprogram their FPGA's, without causing immediate issues in the overall hashrate for the algorithm, despite automated re-programming's taking only a matter of seconds in most instances. Once reprogrammed the FPGA uses the new seed as its base, which is required in order to maintain the 'optimized' settings. Without this, the FPGA will be churning out invalid hashes and have an effective efficiency of zero.

Blog post from Jared Tate (founder of DigiByte) regarding DigiByte v7.17.2 Odocrypt Algo Fork

 

Soft Forks

History of soft forks of DigiByte

 

In April 2017 DigiByte became the first major cryptocurrency blockchain (second only behind Groestlcoin) to implement Segregated Witness (SegWit) via the DigiSync soft fork. The technical milestone laid the foundation for cross chain transactions and atomic swaps, while also resolving the transaction malleability bug that affected all UTXO blockchains.

In May 2019 Dandelion++ was implemented and released in to DigiByte Core 7.17.2 making DigiByte the first major UTXO blockchain to implement it (After Grin, Beam & ZCoin). Dandelion++ is a privacy-enhancement for the DigiByte blockchain that aids in obfuscating the senders IP address.