A Cryptocurrency to Learn about Cryptocurrencies

This Coin is a fork of SmallChange (which is a fork of LiteCoin itself). It was created for educational purposes. With this we aim to i) prove that really anyone(!) can start a Litecoin/Bitcoin based currency; and ii) allow users to experiment with coin parameters (in a private network).

I don’t take any credit for the develop of the coding, outside the few changes we made. All credit goes to the creator of LiteCoin and SmallChange.

Details

EsanCoin is a ‘faster’ version of Litecoin which uses scrypt as a Proof-of-Work scheme and is intended for microtransactions.

30 seconds block targets

4 567 680 total coins

no subsidy after approximately 5 years; in between: 10 coins per generated block

difficulty retargets every 5 min

currently peers are looked up over IRC only

currently no block checkpoints are in the code (easy to include)

References

LearnCoin SmallChange Litecoin

Usage — Development process

Preparing my development environment

For you can work with EsanCoin is necessary that you install the next libraries over Ubuntu 14 -Linux.

$ sudo apt-get install git
$ sudo apt-get install libboost-dev
$ sudo apt-get install libboost-system-dev
$ sudo apt-get install libboost-program-options-dev
$ sudo apt-get install libboost-thread-dev
$ sudo apt-get install libboost-filesystem-dev
$ sudo apt-get install libcurl4-openssl-dev
$ sudo apt-get install libdb5.1-dev
$ sudo apt-get install libdb5.1++-dev
$ sudo apt-get install qt-sdk
$ sudo apt-get install libminiupnpc-dev
$ sudo apt-get install build-essential
$ sudo apt-get install openssl

Since it is necessary to have two machines running in a common network, we will use virtual machines in a VMWare environment (but you can use any other alternative to emulate operating systems). To download vmware player use the following links:

for Linux or [here][Here]
for Windows or [here][Here]
for Mac

The OS with all the required libraries (previously listed) is available at Mega — Ubuntu 14. After downloading, create a copy of the file and install two machines in VMWare (each one started from a different file).

Cloning EsanCoin

On each virtual machine, open the terminal and download the project.

$ git clone https://github.com/johnkevinbarrera/EsanCoin.git

Installing EsanCoin

In the project, enter .../EsanCoin/src in a terminal window and execute:

$ make -f makefile.unix	// creates wallet
$ ./EsanCoin	// asks for a user and a password

If everything went well, you will see a message requesting a user and password for your EsanCoin wallet

Setting up our credentials

In the directory of your OS enter ./EsanCoin and within this directory, create a file called EsanCoin.conf that contains the following:

    rpcuser=<<unique_user>>
rpcpassword=<<unique_password>>
addnode=<<IP_of_the_other_computer>>

Mining

This is the process by which the miners receive rewards, to start the mine in EsanCoin return to .../EsanCoin/src in the terminal and execute:

# First we need run our node:
$ ./EsanCoin & // starts the service (you are already a node)
$ ./EsanCoin getinfo // information about the node

# Now we can star the mining:
$ ./EsanCoin setgenerate true 4 // start mining using multi-threads
$ ./EsanCoin getmininginfo // information about the mining
$ ./EsanCoin getbalance // check the account balance

Note: Mining is not necessary, but to run your node is necessary in every computer.

Making transactions

After starting the mining we wait until we have some money to start our transactions.

# First we need create an account:
$ ./EsanCoin getnewaddress "name_of_account"
$ ./EsanCoin listaccounts

# Now we make our first transaction
$ ./EsanCoin move "" "name_of_account" "amount"
$ ./EsanCoin sendtoaddress "address_of_wallet" "amount"

# Making transactions of some account to other account
$ ./EsanCoin sendfrom "address_name" "address_of_wallet" "amount"

$ ./EsanCoin gettransaction "transaction_hash"

Queries in the BlockChain

To see the blocks and transactions, we can use:

$ ./EsanCoin listsinceblock
$ ./EsanCoin listtransactions
$ ./EsanCoin listunspent

Warning

EsanCoin should not be used as a real cryptocurrency. All of the coin parameters are chosen arbitrarily or at most with ‘fairness’ towards everyone in mind. Again, this EsanCoin exists because:

proves that really anyone(!) can start a Litecoin/bitcoin based currency (just look at the changes I applied to the original Litecoin source, for genesis block generation look at main.cpp)
allowed us to experiment with coin parameters (in a private network)

Published at Tue, 19 Feb 2019 19:20:00 +0000