Former Steem developers feel that CPU mining is essential for their "blockchain 3.0" to be launched fairly.

The first incident of what many saw as a hostile takeover effort on another blockchain occurred in March of this year. The creator of Tron, Justin Sun, had assumed that he had purchased Steemit, Inc. and the Steem blockchain with it.

Ultimately, the majority of the Steem community migrated to Hive after a protracted conflict that included hard forks and block production takeovers as well as allegations of bribery and misinformation.

While this was happening, several of Steemit, Inc.'s initial workers and developers abruptly departed the firm after it was purchased. They played a minor part in the next conflict, but they didn't vanish into thin air.

Co-founders of OpenOrchard include Andrew Levine, who referred to himself as Steemit's "designated non-engineer executive." They set out to create a blockchain from the ground up, kind of like a Steem 2.0, to cure all of Steem's glaring problems.

As Levine explained to Cointelegraph, it was these problems that ultimately led to Steem's demise.

Stakeholders were able to vote on only 20 witnesses to produce blocks in Steem's Delegated Proof-of-Stake consensus method. Because there were so few people, politics often took over the environment. As a result, the validators might form a close-knit group or become fierce enemies, as occurred with Steem and EOS, respectively.

"Steve was like, 'why the fuck?'" recalls Levine of a conversation he had with one of Koinos' co-founders, Steve Gerbino. What the heck is the relationship between block manufacturing and politics? Simply said, ""blocks should be made."

But this wasn't the only issue, according to their perspective. Levine previously told Cointelegraph that one of the reasons why Steemit was sold was because the firm was losing money on infrastructure maintenance.

To put it another way, the cost of maintaining a general-purpose network like EOS and Ethereum is constantly based on how much you've previously used it." "No data is ever thrown away."

Other blockchains have lately begun to recognize this and investigate means of compressing or disregarding state – a general word for all accounts, balances and transactions in a blockchain. One such example is Ethereum's stateless clients proposal.

However, Levine claims that current blockchains have upgradeability issues. Even the most fundamental parameters need a hard fork, which is a full migration and restart of a blockchain. Ethereum, for instance, necessitates a hard fork any time a developer wishes to alter the gas price for a certain activity.

As with the ProgPow or the Bitcoin block limit argument, hard forks are inherently unstable and frequently become political. Many protocols are held back by difficulties in updating blockchains, according to Levine.

In the end, "we understood that the scaling limits that were appearing at the higher levels were the consequence of lower level design flaws."

Koinos began as a Steem alternative that would have used existing codebases like EOS, but the team recognized over time that they had a chance to re-architect the "third generation of blockchain. "

Breaking the status quo in the development of blockchain

The modular upgradeability of Koinos is one of its most innovative features.

WebAssembly-based smart contracts will incorporate almost all of the blockchain's major characteristics, including the consensus method, resource management, and governance systems.
A few specific features may be implemented natively, but only if they've been thoroughly tested and if it's in the best interest of the game.

Koinos may now develop its protocol without having to resort to hard forking the whole blockchain, which would before be required for every modification. The notion of system smart contracts on EOS inspired the team, but Koinos takes it to the next level.

Blockchains are frequently defined by their consensus mechanism, but Levine feels that this should not be their primary selling point. When he was talking to the creation of consensus algorithms, he added, "The technical aspect is trivial." State paging, according to Levine, is a unique scalability characteristic of Koinos.

Unused smart contracts and information may be removed from a blockchain by "paging" the blockchain. A notion called "pruning" is commonly recommended for less complex blockchains like Bitcoin, which rely on unspent transaction outputs. When it comes to pruning, there is no need to keep track of the fact that a wallet got 1 BTC in 2014 and transferred it to another wallet in 2015, for example. Currently, this data must be provided at all times in current designs.

Smart contract blockchains don't have clear cut circumstances like this, thus it's difficult to decide what to reject. By making each user accountable for maintaining their own data, even in the cloud, state paging tackles this problem by making each user responsible for storing their own data. At any time, the data saved off-chain may be confirmed and reinserted into the blockchain as if it never left.

Blockchain technology's value proposition is its "capacity to store digital ownership as separate from the data itself," according to Levine, who believes this signals a philosophical shift in thinking.

The group, on the other hand, is wary. Although state paging techniques have been demonstrated to function, it is still not obvious whether the trade-offs between storage and bandwidth utilization make it beneficial.

For now, Koinos is using proof-of-work mining, an approach that has mostly fallen out of favor in recent years, to distribute tokens.

The problem of equitable distribution.

Because they were the driving force behind a delegated proof-of-stake system that was undoubtedly a failure, the creators of Koinos are naturally wary of the notion. Why are there twenty [validators]? I believe that's the greatest approach to attack delegated proof-of-stake." Levine commented.

In the midst of efforts like Ethereum 2.0, Levine is firmly of the belief that proof-of-stake leads in "the wealthy becoming wealthier."

The first planting of tokens is a part of it, he said. In the beginning, some staking initiatives relied on proof-of-work to distribute their tokens, but over time, initial coin offerings (ICOs) took control. In Levine's perspective, the ICO is the beginning of the inequity.

To me, there's nothing wrong with the affluent capitalists that you've got here, despite the fact that I have a few grievances against capitalists." However, you have these affluent folks who have accumulated a significant interest and determine the course.

The consensus method for Koinos was not something that Levine wanted to discuss in great depth. However, he hinted that "neither proof-of-work nor proof-of stake" would be required to make the final choice.

However, for the time being, Koinos is launching with a token distribution model based only on PoW. As an alternative to launching an ICO, tokens will be earned through mining on people's PCs.

For the most part, large-scale mining companies aren't interested in using central processing units, although Monero miners are noteworthy exceptions.

The "trading" of hashes for tokens will be done using Ethereum and a proprietary automated market maker. Miners will mine at a specific difficulty level and submit their output to a smart contract that will pay them in KOIN. Lowering the difficulty results in a more constant "hit rate" of the proper hashes, but it needs more individual submissions and hence higher Ethereum gas costs. While a lower difficulty reduces costs, it also increases the unpredictability of when a right hash will be obtained.

A six-month period of mining will begin on Oct. 13 at 5 PM UTC (1 P.M. Eastern Time), following which the Koinos mainnet is scheduled to become live. With a default 5% mining contribution that can be turned off, the team will be able to raise funds for itself. They provided a command-line program and a GUI miner for everyone to use.

The success of a blockchain is frequently based on the level of interest generated by the community. The actual key to long-term success, however, is in the implementation of these unique foundational concepts and the provision of an advantageous environment in which applications may be used and developed. The path ahead of Koinos is still a long and risky one, according to this perspective.