Beginner’s Guide to Via Coin: Everything You Should Know

The Bitcoin protocol served as the basis for the development of Viacoin. Similar to Bitcoin, this cryptocurrency was intended to be a decentralized, peer-to-peer form of conducting financial transactions.

However, there are many quality features that set ViaCoin apart from other cryptocurrencies in its own right. These aspects include mixed mining and algorithm hashing. Keep reading to learn more about ViaCoin.

How did it all begin for ViaCoin?

ViaCoin first went live in 2014 and now has a core team consisting of seven people. The majority of members of the team have decided to conceal their identities, revealing only their GitHub and occasionally their Twitter accounts.

ViaCoin competes with virtually every other cryptocurrency that is primarily focused on transactions. So, it is understandable if your initial reaction is to consider Bitcoin and Litecoin to be two competing cryptocurrencies.

However, given that ViaCoin is capable of doing atomic swaps with these coins, they ought to cooperate rather than compete.

In a perfect world, if one blockchain gets clogged up with too many transactions, you would simply switch to another cryptocurrency that has fewer people using it so that you can complete the transaction. After the trade, you participate in the swap back.

How does ViaCoin work?

ViaCoin has a number of innovative features that, among other benefits, result in reasonably swift transaction times and interoperability with other blockchains that are more widely used.

Mining ViaCoin makes use of the Scrypt algorithm, which was once a popular choice for coins due to the fact that it is resistant to ASIC mining hardware. When compared to Bitcoin’s SHA-256 algorithm, it reduced the efficiency of ASIC mining hardware by a factor of ten, levelling the playing field for cryptocurrency mining.

However, at this time there are a number of firms that manufacture ASIC miners that focus on Scrypt. So, the ASIC resistance of the algorithm is no longer present.

Merged mining is something that ViaCoin has implemented alongside only a few other coins. This is a method that allows you to mine two different coins at the same time. It is also known as Auxiliary Proof-of-Work.

In this method, an auxiliary chain (ViaCoin in this case) “piggybacks” off the hash power of a parent chain that is more well-known and well-established. The majority of ViaCoin miners have Litecoin set as the parent chain.

The practice of merged mining has a number of benefits. Even though mining both chains doesn’t use any additional power on your part, you will still obtain rewards from both of them.

Auxiliary chains benefit from the hash power of their parent chains, which results in an increased level of security. When hashes from auxiliary chains are included in the parent chain’s blockchain, the parent chain only experiences modest network bloat.

However, these benefits come at the expense of increased labor. To achieve merged mining, auxiliary chains call for more development work, so miners and mining pools must perform additional setup and maintenance to support it.

The team behind ViaCoin

In July of 2014, Bitcoin Core engineer BTCDrake was the driving force behind the launch of the ViaCoin project. Shortly after that, yet another engineer working on Bitcoin Core, Peter Todd, joined the team as an advisor.

Both left ViaCoin in September 2016, at which point it was taken over by a developer known only as Romano, who was 21 at the time. ViaCoin is in good hands with him at the helm, despite the fact that some people first questioned whether or not he was too young to head up the project.

As they all employ GitHub aliases, not much is known about the current ViaCoin development team other than the fact that they have been successfully fulfilling their deadlines and goals.

On the “Team” page of the ViaCoin website, in contrast to the majority of other projects, all you will discover are some hand-drawn cartoonish faces and links to the respective contributors’ profile sites on GitHub, LinkedIn, and Twitter.

Nevertheless, they have been widely excused for maintaining their anonymity and secrecy due to the fact that they have been so dedicated to the creation of ViaCoin.

Final words

Checking a project’s GitHub repository is one of the best ways to see how much work is being done on it. Code commits give a rough idea of how much the developers are adding to the protocol and pushing out new features. If you’re still unsure about ViaCoin and how valuable it is on the market, feel free to take a look.