I recently stumbled upon a new cryptocurrency project, called Slimcoin. As a matter of fact, it's not very new, it's something that started in 2014 but somehow lost its mojo. A group of people forked the initial project and are now trying to put it back on track. To be honest, I stumbled upon this thing while searching for "raspberry pi mining".

Apparently, you can "mine" Slimcoin even with a raspberry pi.

The codebase of Slimcoin is bitcoin-based with one major difference: proof of burn. The way people generate more slimcoins is by burning them. I know it sounds counterintuitive and that was exactly the reason I wanted to know more. So here I am, head over heels in their white paper.

Proof-of-Burn

Proof-of-burn is a solution to the drawbacks of proof-of-work mining. Proof-of-burn utilizes the idea of burning coins to reduce the need for powerful computational resources when mining. Proof-of-burn solves proof-of-work's dependency of powerful hardware. To acquire more mining power, instead of waiting days/months on end, all that is needed is for some coins to be burned. This idea has been implemented into the coin generation process of the Slimcoin cryptocurrency. Like PPCoin's design, this design attempts to demonstrate the viability of cryptocurrencies that can still be minted once a sufficient amount of coins have been generated, while minimally requiring powerful hardware.

In short, by "burning" some coins, you buy the possibility to get back more coins in the future. It's a bit like futures (as much as I know about futures, obviously).

One of the advantages of this method is the lack of powerful hardware to mine. If you have to wait a few days / weeks /months until the burning transaction matures, there's no need for powerful hardware. All you need is some time.

Another advantage is that you make a medium-term commitment to the platform, by investing in its future. You're burning something now, but you expect something in return in the near future. Hence, you're gonna be around for a while.

While I was analyzing this strategy, somehow I thought about the SBD situations we seem to encounter in our beloved Steem ecosystem. Specifically, the need to burn SBD every once in a while. So, by using a custom proof of burn algorithm, we can make sure we will get back enough SBD in the future, while still maintaining the health of the other components of the platform, like liquid Steem, Steem Power, etc.

At the moment, I see only advantages by implementing proof of burn for SBD. But I may be biased.

So if you see otherwise, I'd love to see your opinion in the comments.