PRESS RELEASE
Minima, a compact, scalable and secure cryptocurrency with the mantra ‘“The Evolution will not be Centralised”, announced today, the world’s first truly decentralised Blockchain protocol that runs entirely on mobile phones.
The brainchild of Founder and Chief Architect Paddy Cerri, a Bitcoin evangelist, the Minima Protocol addresses key limitations of current Blockchain systems, namely that of the potential for centralised points of failure.
Three weak points of current Blockchain protocols are:
- a) miners able to censor transactions;
- b) developers able to change the protocol;
- c) self-interested blockchain protocol leaders able to sway the overall direction and reputation of a coin.
On the other hand, the Minima Protocol makes every user an equal participant, with no one group or cartel being able to achieve dominance over the network.
The Minima mainnet, when it goes live in 2021 will be full, robust and complete. There will be no miners, no protocol developer groups and there will be no Foundation. It will be a fully decentralised blockchain ready for users to come on board and for DApps to be deployed.
Minima achieves this by empowering every user to run a “complete node” on the common device of society, the mobile phone. A complete node not only validates every transaction, but helps in the construction of the Blockchain, which is normally a privilege reserved only for the ever-decreasing number of miners.
“Based on the status quo of PoW mining, when conglomerates join the Bitcoin industry, Bitcoin mining will inevitably become centralised. The current number of Bitcoin nodes is far too small for a resilient global payment network, and another issue is that non-mining nodes play no part in anti-censorship, the one true value proposition of Blockchain systems,” says Paddy Cerri.
Minima users individually mine their own transactions, and this cumulative work is used to create blocks. Users automatically collaborate to perform the same task as competing miners, allowing a decentralised approach to energy consumption, rather than the energy arms-race so evident in current PoW blockchains.
Both Bitcoin and Ethereum record every transaction in a public ledger, which creates an ever-growing database that requires an increasing amount of storage.
The Minima Protocol adopts a different approach, where each user only keeps the data of their own transactions, but each has the hash of the entire database. With no group or cartel in charge of extending the Blockchain, this makes Minima far more resilient to both miner coordinated and State-level attacks. All Minima users not only run full validation of every transaction, but are also involved in the construction of new blocks and the all-important creation of the Blockchain.
“It’s like a book – each user only stores their own page and a copy of the spine. This way all users can verify if another user’s page fits the spine. This considerably reduces the data storage requirements and allows the nodes to be run on mobile phones. Minima thus needs no more computing power than a popular messaging app. This way our vision is not to have 10,000 validating nodes, but millions of complete nodes, that are both validating all transactions and helping in the construction of the Blockchain.”
Minima solves another inherent limitation of current unfinished Blockchain protocols.
“Users of a Blockchain protocol are at the mercy of small groups of developers. Soft forks, hard forks, upgrades and decisions to change the base-layer do not make sense for a robust global protocol. Consider HTTP / POP3 / TCP – they don’t change, they just work, and this is an absolute necessity for global adoption. Not a lot of Blockchain protocols, to date, have understood this.
“The dream we all dreamt; a powerful blockchain protocol, with powerful scripting, functionally complete and ready for the masses. A sustainable fixed-cap programmable monetary system. Every user on the network is equal. With zero centralising points of failure. This is a dream that Minima is making a reality,” concludes Cerri.
The Minima testnet is currently running and will be open sourced in Q1, 2020. Beta Apps are being deployed this quarter also. The mainnet will launch early next year – complete and not requiring upgrades and forks.
