Introduction

This article serves as an introduction to the Steemit community and also helps explain specifications, features and future plans in more detail to early adopters of the Purk [PURK] cryptocurrency.

We hope this answers some of the questions we have been asked so far and gives users a deeper insight in to our goals, the technology behind Purk and helps to recruit new users to support the Purk Project.

About Purk

Purk (https://purkproject.com) is an open source, mineable and autonomous cryptocurrency that can be used to monetise anything from website content, blog articles, multimedia, products and a variety of online services by allowing users to tip or donate to content owners anonymously. Anyone can mine Purk with their CPU or GPU making the cryptocurrency accessible to everyone. Purk is ASIC resistant, utilizes the Wild Keccak algorithm and is forked from Boolberry.

Purk Specifications

Algorithm: Wild Keccak
Supply: 179,424,673 PURK
Block target: 90 seconds
Emission curve: 21
Difficulty retargets every block
Block Reward=(MSupply − A) ]] 21 where A=supply mined to date
Starting Block reward: 84.70 PURKs
Divisible by 6 decimal points
Default P2P Port: 10110
Default RPC Port: 10120
Premine: 0%
Development/PR Bounty: 0-1% (Controlled by votes)

Self Funding

“Purk didn’t have a premine, instamine or ICO. We have a transparent finance model, where 1% of the emission is reserved for the development of the Purk Project.”

We don’t believe in ICO’s. In fact we despise them. The premise that if you sink millions of dollars in to a start-up company and in return they create a successful blockchain based product completely bewilders us. If you look at lists of recent Initial Coin Offering campaigns it’s really difficult to apply any sort of reasonable filter. There’s so much to be obviously skeptical of in this space that wealthier and experienced investors won’t even consider it.

Of course, we are not suggesting all ICO’s are scams or dishonest, there are of course some very credible blockchain based companies who held an initial coin offering. We just firmly believe it’s an unfair launch strategy and cryptocurrencies should be judged on their own merit, development capability and organic popularity in the crypto space before taking millions of dollars of investors money.

So how is Purk funded?

Our emission model rewards miners 99% of each block reward and 1% of that reward towards any future development plans for the project. 10% of that 1% is sent to a PR wallet to allow for any ongoing marketing and advertising costs. All future development and marketing is therefore fully funded and paid for allowing for continuous evolution and future progression of the Purk Project.

If miners don’t wish to donate to the project, they have the option to vote how much of a percentage is provided as a donation. This can be anywhere from 0-1%. After every 720 blocks, it calculates the percentage of all miner donations and sends Purk to the designated wallets.

Purk Features:

ASIC Resistant - Purk is completely ASIC resistant and can be mined using a CPU or GPU. We chose the Wild Keccak algorithm for Purk so we could allow the everyday person to mine. This makes the coin less prone to centralisation and provides all users an equal opportunity to be Purk stakeholders.

Untraceable Payments - Purk uses a variation of the Diffie-Hellman exchange protocol, which provides users a completely anonymous payment scheme. Usually this would allow two users to create a common secret key derived from their own public keys. With Purk, the sender uses the receiver's public address and their own random data to compute a one-time key for each payment. The sender can produce only the public part of the key, and the receiver can compute the private part; this ensures the receiver is the only user who can release the funds after the transaction is submitted by performing a single-formula check on each transaction.

Analysis Resistant - The Purk blockchain is resistant to any kind of analysis. All transactions are unlinkable ensuring Purk is a private and completely anonymous cryptocurrency. Purk is designed to mitigate any risks associated with key re-usage and one-input-to-one-output tracing. Every address used for a transaction has a unique one-time key, derived from both the sender's and the recipient's data.

Wallet Address Aliases - Any wallet address can be linked to a Purk alias; for example @purkproject. Aliases are built in to the blockchain and don’t require a central naming authority to maintain. Any Purk wallet holder can commit an alias to the blockchain by specifying their chosen name before mining a block using the daemon. More information about creating an alias for your Purk wallet can be found at https://docs.purkproject.com

Adaptive Limits - Limits such as max block size or fee amount are re-calculated based on Purk’s previous state. Purk changes adaptively with the network developing on its own. The general idea of the algorithm is to calculate all the work that has been performed during the last 720 blocks and divide it by the time miners have spent to accomplish it. The measure of the work is the corresponding difficulty value for each of the blocks.

Wild Keccak Algorithm

Wild Keccak is a Keccak hybrid where internal state update operations are adjusted and connected with the memory dependencies allowing access to the currency state. The hash function reduces memory-hardness whilst keeping a higher scratchpad size requirement for miners. A global scratchpad is built with data that saves directly from the blockchain and increases in size as the chain grows, at a rate that is limited to 90 MiB per year.

After each Keccak round, pseudo-random addressed data is taken from the scratchpad and XORed with state. Each hash computation involves approximately 1100 accesses to 32-byte blocks of scratchpad.

The global scratchpad is just one of the features that helps to make Purk resistant to ASICs and to some extent more favoured towards miners using CPU over GPU. Although GPU mining rewards are generally higher, hashrate reductions and light instability are very probable.

How To Mine Purk

By utilising the Wild Keccak algorithm Purk helps balance CPU and GPU mining speeds whilst keeping the network completely resistant from ASICS. Any average computer user can mine Purk with their built in CPU or GPU.

There is a max supply of 179,424,673 PURK. Every block that is mined has a smoothly varying reward and the block retarget time is 90 seconds. Currently miners can mine from simplewallet, daemon or by using a pool.

The quickest way to start mining Purk is by visiting the official mining pool at https://pool.purkproject.com

For CPU Mining use CPUMiner-Multi

.bat file example:

minerd -o stratum+tcp://pool.purkproject.com:3333 -u YOUR_WALLET_ADDRESS -p x -k http://pool.purkproject.com/scratchpad.bin -l scratchpad.bin

For GPU Mining use CPUMiner-Multi-OpenCL

.bat file example:

minerd -a wildkeccak_ocl -i 16 -o stratum+tcp://pool.purkproject.com:7777 -u YOUR_WALLET_ADDRESS -p x -k http://pool.purkproject.com/scratchpad.bin -l scratchpad.bin

Estimated Emission

Day 1 end at block 960 ~ 81294.167370 PURK - Smoothly varying reward - Start 84.70
1 Week end at block 6720 ~ 568278.462074 PURK - Reward decreases
2 Weeks end at block 13440 ~ 1134738.877447 PURK - Reward decreases
Month 1 end at block 29760 ~ 2502895.151882 PURK - Reward decreases
Month 2 end at block 58560 ~ 4891467.806383 PURK - Reward decreases
Month 6 end at block 176640 ~ 14348780.274436 PURK - Reward decreases
Year 1 end at block 350400 ~ 27332221.120194 PURK - Reward decreases
Year 2 end at block 701760 ~ 50516999.624666 PURK - Reward decreases
Year 6 end at block 2104320 ~ 112506831.201581 PURK - Reward decreases
Year 12 end at block 4207680 ~ 153743614.859489 PURK - Reward decreases
Year 14.4 mths at block 5032604 ~ 161511857.081435 PURK - min block reward / 7.685933
Year 16 end at block 5610240 ~ 165951531.454830 PURK - min block reward / 7.685933
Year 21 end at block 7363200 ~ 179424673.000000 PURK - min block reward / 7.685933

Roadmap

Purk Button API

Purk was created to help content owners and service providers monetise their website or application by accepting quick and easy donations from their users or customers. Website users can send Purk to a content owner or service provider to show appreciation for their hard work.

By sending micropayments as a tip, Purk proposes to highly reduce the amount of monetisation that is needed on a website. Instead of using intrusive adverts, affiliate links, pop ups and sponsored posts, website owners can install the Purk Button and accept quick and easy payments to monetise their content or service instead. Not only does this reduce the amount of promotional clutter on a website, it also reduces costs on content writing and saves time by allowing your customers to tip/pay your writers or employees directly.

Users will be able to access the Purk button embed code from the Wallet GUI which easily integrates in to any website or application using a simple HTML snippet. Website owners can request donations to their long address or wallet alias and receive almost instant payments to their chosen Purk wallet from their users.

The Purk Button is currently mid-development and will be released on GitHub by the end of May, 2018.

Donations Platform

As a fully decentralised cryptocurrency, development updates should not be decided by a single, central authority. To ensure the natural progression of Purk we will start development on a donations and fundraising platform, where a community of Purk supporters, donee’s and donors can vote on development updates, advertising proposals and PR for Purk alongside other donation based projects that are listed by the community.

Standard users will have permissions to present content, development and marketing campaigns whilst Purk holders can donate to a project using the Purk Button API. Miners will also have the added ability to donate by providing a percentage of their mining rewards limited by block height or donation amount to any campaign.

Instant Encrypted Messages

Instant messages that can be sent with donations using the Purk Button. Messages are untraceable, private and completely unlinkable. Messages will be encrypted with temporary per-message AES keys and negotiated using the Diffie-Hellman key exchange protocol.

Purk users can send best wishes, messages of appreciation or thanks to donees whilst still keeping their anonymity. Or, as the case maybe; Publicly, after the implementation of optional traceable transfers.

Optional Traceable Transfers

CryptoNote payments are anonymous by default. We propose to start development on a protocol for non-sensitive, traceable transfers that are inter-linkable, faster and cost less in transaction fees.

By providing users the option to allow their transactions to be traceable, we can reach a larger market via the donations platform, opening our doors to charities and other organisations who require a paper trail and fully transparent payment model for their donors.

Purk Pay

Development of Purk Pay Plugin for merchants or service providers to easily accept Purk as payment on their website for goods or services rendered.

Purk Pay will offer seamless checkout integration for the most popular, open source ecommerce platforms such as Magento, Shopify and Woocommerce.

IOS and Android Wallet

Development of Purk mobile client for iOS and Android. All of Purk’s standard wallet GUI functionality on mobile for decentralised, anonymous mobile donations.

Community Driven

As a community driven cryptocurrency, Purk is completely open source and development is not centralized in the hands of just one team of developers - anyone can contribute to the project. We also rely on our community to create buzz, provide feedback, report bugs or flaws and offer any other useful information, advice or ideas to help further the progression of the cryptocurrency.

Purk currently consists of a small number of contributing members who work on the development and marketing of the project. We are always looking for skilled individuals to add to our team and we have a number of online active communities where anyone is welcome to join and participate.

Resources

Purk has a number of official online resources where you can find out more information about the cryptocurrency, technical details, future plans, news and announcements.

Website: https://purkproject.com
Github: https://github.com/purkproject/purk
Documentation: https://docs.purkproject.com
Block Explorer: https://explorer.purkproject.com
Official Mining Pool: https://pool.purkproject.com
Twitter: https://twitter.com/purkproject
Discord: https://discord.gg/cqmSrfz