development and research of cryptocurrencies solving a...
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Development and Research of Cryptocurrencies Utilizing Decentralized Blockchains
Ben Mendelson, Sophomore, [email protected] Wobus, Sophomore, [email protected]. Charalampos Papamanthou, [email protected]
Science, Discovery, and the UniverseComputer Science
IntroductionDecentralized cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin
have grown wildly in value over the past several years, drawing the attention of major media sources and investors. The blockchain technology that is used to create these currencies has the potential to be engineered to tackle a variety of problems. With our prior interest in blockchain technology and cryptocurrencies, we decided we wanted to create our own token. Our goal was to find a particular problem and try to use this technology to find our own solution using the blockchain.
Conclusions and Future Work
Using our current progress so far with TerpCoin, we aim to develop a simple website and a whitepaper that can showcase the coin’s current value and historical transaction log. Furthermore, we hope that we can get TerpCoin on an online exchange, such as Hitbtc, Kucoin or Cryptopia. Our coin currently has a purchase price of 1 Ether to 10 TerpCoin, however once our initial offering is depleted and the coin is available on an exhange, the value will be able to fluctuate with the market as a unique asset. We hope to continue our work with the Ethereum platform and learn more about writing smart contracts for the network.
Solving a ProblemWe wanted to create a currency for the
campus that can serve as an alternative to Dining dollars or Terrapin express. While we realize how ambitious such a project this would be to actually encourage the university to shift from using their currently existing campus credit systems to our decentralized versions, we thought it would be a fun concept to work with. The image to the left shows a couple lines of the code we used to generate TerpCoin. As you can see, we dictate total supply, initial supply, and several other important variables.
Creating Our Coin Our original idea was to create several different coins and get at least one on a major exchange. We initially tried forking Bitcoin version 0.16.0 and finding ways to make our own modifications. We ultimately shifted toward using the Ethereum network to host our coin on their platform considering Bitcoin 0.16.0 would require us to recruit miners for hosting our network, while making a token on Ethereum would allow our coin to rely on the mining of Ethereum which is already a developed network. Our primary coin, TerpCoin, is an ERC-20 token which is a smart contract hosted on the Ethereum blockchain. We initially launched this coin on the Ethereum Test Net before publishing the contract and making it available on the Ethereum Main Net. The coin is now publicly purchasable on the Ethereum Main Net through our designated smart contract. With our contract in place, any Ether transferred to our address will return the sender with a defined amount of TerpCoin.
Acknowledgements:
ExchangesThere exist many online exchanges that allow
people to store their cryptocurrency on a website that is handled by the server, rather than on a local wallet. The benefit of this is that there is no worry of accidentally losing your funds due to a hardware failure or forgotten passcode. However, this also puts the funds at risk in case of a hack to the website. Exchanges also allow people to buy and sell cryptocurrency using other cryptocurrencies. For example, someone can sell their Bitcoin in exchange for Ethereum, and vice versa. The exchange we wish to get our coin on is hitbtc and yobits, both of which are relatively lesser known exchanges. This is because we know that more popular exchanges, such as Binance, have much stricter requirements on getting a coin on there.
We would like to thank our mentor Dr. Papamanthou for his guidance in our project. We would also like to thank our SDU director Dr. Peel for overseeing our progress, and our fellow classmate Andrew Chow for helping guide us with his expert knowledge in Cryptocurrency.
Top 4 ERC-20 tokens currently on the market. Screenshot captured from https://etherscan.io
Contract address on Ethereum Network: 0x83fcf5439c702d528579193e0d8ca388c3cf3b26