BitTube Cash 4.0 announcement

Upcoming hardfork and new algo

We are happy to announce that the BitTube blockchain is moving from CryptoNight to the new Cuckoo Cycle proof-of-work. We have been working on this development for over 6 months. In this article, we want to address some technicals, motivations and what this means for you, the end-user.

On July 29th, TUBE will change its proof-of-work to Cuckoo Cycle. This is not a simple hardfork. The process involves terminating the legacy coin emission and swapping all balances to a brand new blockchain.

How this swap occurs depends on where your coins are stored. We have good news: exchange wallets and those connected to the BitTube browser extension will convert automatically. For coins held in desktop wallets, however, a special conversion service will be maintained for a year (until 2021/07/29) to provide users the ability to convert their TUBEs in a reasonable time frame. Note that any unconverted coins beyond this date will be lost forever. We have written a how-to guide here.

Officially, TUBE will be moving from “Tube3” (or “Legacy”) to “Tube4”, which we may also refer to as BitTube Cash 4.0. Here are the important changes.

BitTube Cash 4.0 — What’s new?

In short: faster confirmation times, faster wallet synchronization, a max supply reduction and slightly tweaked AirTime rewards.

Much faster block times

Rejoice! We are moving from 120 seconds average block times to 15 seconds. Speeding up confirmation times has been the main attraction moving to the new Cuckoo algorithm. This is a big deal for donations, tipping, subscriptions and microtransactions on the scale that we are aiming for with BitTube.tv, BitTube.video and other products.

Faster daemon synchronization

The Cuckoo Cycle is a simple algorithm. Compared to CryptoNight and other common proof-of-work algorithms, it is more efficient. You will find that synchronizing your local node is much faster than before. This makes it easier for users to run a full node locally on their machine, ensuring better network security.

Faster wallet scanning

AirTime rewards will be distribution once every 240 blocks. This reduces blockchain bloat and speeds up wallet scan time. This may benefit our AirTime backend as we can sync up people’s wallets quicker using fewer resources.

Max supply reduction

The maximum supply of 1 billion by 2050 is being reduced to 600 million by 2050. This will flatten the emission curve as shown below. The block reward distribution will be shared equally 50/50 between miners and AirTime, resulting in about 5% more coins to publishers and viewers. Though it may not be felt immediately, we hope that the less aggressive emission curve will help stabilize the price in the future.

Summary

• GitHub: https://github.com/BitTubeCash/bittubecash
• Algorithm: Cuckaroo29b
• Max supply: 600 million
• Initial Circulating Supply: 272 million
• Block time: 15 seconds
• Initial Block reward: 19 TUBEs
• Miner reward: 50% of block reward
• AirTime reward: 50% of block reward
• AirTime reward is distributed every 240 blocks (60 minutes)

What this means for miners

With all of that said, what does it mean for miners? Currently, mining TUBE is favorable for high-end GPUs (graphics cards), not CPUs (processors). With the new Cuckoo algorithm, this does not change. In fact, mining Tube4 will be most favorable for GPUs with at least 6 to 8 GB of memory, depending on the operating system used.

Moving to Cuckoo is the optimal solution that will benefit everyone long term. The Cuckoo Cycle is a ‘simple’ algorithm with known optimal mining parameters. There is no ‘black box magic’. This ensures that any publicly available mining software will work just as well as some proprietary solution.

Finally, verifying Cuckoo blocks is fast. This reduces block propagation time significantly, which decreases the risk of orphan blocks (those that are not accepted by the network due to lag). Add to that the faster block times (15 seconds vs 2 minutes), it means small pools and solo miners will have a fairer chance of finding blocks, thus improving decentralization and security.

More developments

Introducing BitTube.solutions and BitTube.cash

The BitTube ecosystem consists of a cryptocurrency network with AirTime as the driving force. A growing number of our products aim to utilize AirTime and TUBE to grow the ecosystem as a whole. There are several new apps coming in the next few months. We are therefore launching BitTube.solutions, a dedicated page to give a products (and timeline) overview at a glance.

Similarly, we are launching BitTube.cash for all things TUBE related. Countdown to the exact time of the BitTube Cash 4.0 launch can be found here.

Have a great week,
The BitTube Team