“The People’s Coin” Spacemesh Launches Following Five Years of Research

Tel Aviv, Israel, July 14th, 2023, Chainwire

Spacemesh is proud to announce today, that after five years of work, they will at long last be performing network genesis on July the 14th at 08.00 UTC.

Spacemesh chose the date of July 14th, which commemorates the storming of the Bastille, as the day to launch the People’s Coin. The goal is to establish a cryptocurrency that can achieve widespread distribution, particularly among younger generations and underprivileged demographics who are currently unable to participate in the cryptocurrency revolution due to insurmountable barriers to entry

Spacemesh, The People’s Coin, is born today

Spacemesh’s team of cryptographers, led by Prof. Tal Moran, spent over 5 years building a radically novel way to achieve consensus in the permissionless setting from scratch.

• Instead of the commonly-used PoW or PoStake, Spacemesh uses PoST (Proof of Space-Time)
• Rather than a Chain topology (i.e., a blockchain), Spacemesh uses a DAG (Directed Acyclic Graph), a.k.a. a “mesh”
• Additionally, rather than the winner-takes-all paradigm via Lottery (“Competitive Mining”) used by all Nakamoto-based consensus protocols, Spacemesh uses lottery-free, non-competitive “leaderless” voting (“Collaborative Mining”)
• Lastly, instead of generating a new proof for every challenge, which is energy intensive, Spacemesh miners reuse the original proof continually—resulting in extremely low energy use and near-zero ongoing costs for operating a miner

The Spacemesh protocol ensures fairness for smaller home miners by rewarding them based on their storage commitment size during each epoch, which occurs approximately every two weeks. This prevents powerful miners, including adversarial ones, from receiving a disproportionate share of rewards. Spacemesh also has significantly lower barriers to entry compared to other permissionless cryptocurrencies. To become a miner (smesher), all that is required is a PC with available storage space, any GPU with OpenCL support, and a reliable internet connection. Specialized mining equipment is unnecessary, and ongoing power usage is low, resulting in minimal electricity bills. Additionally, there is no need for deposits, bank accounts, or credit cards.

The combination of low entry barriers, low operational costs, and incentive compatibility, establishes a novel guarantee of…