Show HN: A Browser-based Blockchain

This is a neat. However, there is nothing explaining fundamental operation I can find except the source code itself, and it seems to me that it suffers from pretty serious scale limitations. I.e its ability to deliver on the value proposition in its current form is low.<p>Also, your proof of work is Sha256 which means that the moment this thing goes live and there is any value attached it won&#x27;t work. You have to switch to a memory hard proof of work to even begin doing this.<p>Finally, most of what you are trying to accomplish can already be done using SPV onto existing digital currency networks. Pushing the entire network into the browser doesn&#x27;t really help. The cynic in me wants to say this is an ICO pump for people who don&#x27;t know any better.

So far looks sweet, I have a small bit of advice.<p>I&#x27;d double down on the simplicity aspect - for a lot of people cryptocurrency is a weird thing to get into and hard to understand. You guys have taken something as ultra-complex as mining and blockchain and stuck it in the browser, no small task. Make your focus a cryptocurrency for everyone - include demos of how cryptocurrency itself works.

I have a soft spot for removing barriers and making things accessible so this really resonates with me. With a single click of a button I&#x27;m connected to the network and have started mining. Pretty awesome!<p>I also love how the P2P is visualized in a straight-forward way. I definitely think this will help demystify blockchain technology. You immediately realize that you&#x27;re part of a decentralized network and that blockchain nodes are nothing else than other nodes like you.

Left this running all day at about 30kh&#x2F;s and got 200 coins<p>Couple of hints:<p>* Have a way of backing up your private keys! Many people delete browser local storage and this is not a safe or long term place for them to live! NAG THE USER TO DO THIS. 99% of the people here betanet will lose their keys, fo sure<p>* Consider hierarchical deterministic (HD) generated keys, so a single seed can generate all future keys<p>* Consider brainwallet seed (must be long, suggest at least 256 bits entropy), custom dictionary words<p>Most cryptocurrencies use secp256k1 or ed25519 for ecdsa&#x2F;xeddsa as their curve, this is using P-256. Satoshi was suspicious of the NIST curves, thats why he didn&#x27;t use P-256 for bitcoin.<p>You will need something better than SHA256 for PoW function too, others have identified memory hard hash as idea. Look at Momentum (ProtoShares), EtHash (Ethereum) and CryptoNight (Bytecoin&#x2F;Monero) as approaches to this. All have rolled their own in this space, keep you tx hashes standard but use something creative for PoW function.

Interestingly, I&#x27;m getting a <i>significantly</i> higher hash rate in Chrome than in Firefox (12,000 vs. 600). This is despite the fact that Firefox has a higher priority on my OS (High vs. Normal) and they&#x27;re both using the same amount of CPU.<p>What hash rates are you seeing on your machine&#x2F;browser?

Before anyone gets too excited because the page doenst make this clear, you are all mining on the Test block chain, not the release block chain, the coins are worthless, they are fine for playing around with though.

Ok, you have a roadmap, but I&#x27;m left with more questions than answers, e.g.: if a blockchain relies on every node having a ledger of the whole transactions, and bitcoin&#x27;s ledger now occupies more than 100GB, then how is this supposed to work when the ledger becomes big?<p>Also, how do the &#x27;instant&#x27; transactions work?

I like how it starts you up instantly and how simple mining, helping the network and transactions seem to be. Really well done. I found a quick block too and sending&#x2F;receiving transactions and getting the confirmations seems nice and fast. As a user it makes me pretty happy.<p>However, turning your coins &#x27;permanent&#x27; somehow doesn&#x27;t seem nearly as intuitive. I have no real idea how these coins are now tied to me. I found my block on chrome, and launching the site in incognito mode &#x2F; firefox doesn&#x27;t show the funds in my wallet. This would make me worry about deleting my browser history&#x2F;cookies&#x2F;etc and I&#x27;d have no idea how to access these coins on another computer. How do I go about making these coins tied to me beyond some form of browser storage, and why isn&#x27;t that process explained somewhere? Right now it feels like a mild breeze might erase my wallet and the coins in it. Is this something that&#x27;ll be dealt with in the future?

I like the idea of reducing the barrier to entry in the multitude of markets, but I&#x27;m also a bit cynical in that any web-based wallet seems extremely risky to me in terms of the potential for attacks and stolen coins.

This seems really interesting! For someone without too much knowledge about blockchain and digital currencies: How does this compare to Bitcoin and Ethereum?

Just ask here if you need some test coins. I already mined a first block.

Is it possible&#x2F;easy to compile stellar-core to the browser? If we could do it and use the networking module&#x2F;part of this Nimiq it would be awesome.

Where is their office? Looks like they&#x27;re all working out of some beach house somewhere in the South Pacific.

Lets get this out of the way now: what are the block size rules as transaction numbers increase?

So is this a mining program <i>inside</i> the browser? Can someone please explain?

Network bandwidth just doubled. Don&#x27;t think my thinkpad is going to mine any.

This is interesting - but how can a browser serve incoming connection requests?

That&#x27;s pretty cool. Will you also make a native miner?

Why another cryptocurrency? I can&#x27;t keep track!!

Is the betanet app code available somewhere?

What does &quot;nimiq&quot; means?

I thought general opinion from security experts was browser based crypto is DOA...

This is good until the ASICS come in force and make mining in the browser useless.

17% CPU utilization when mining. You need to multithread that.<p>Or better yet, implement it in a WebGL shader.