emergency browsercoin fork incoming. the Sandglass difficulty reset had a bug and the chain would stall for good at block 35,550. the fix is deployed.
all you gotta do: open https://t.co/sfQvzoI0PJ once before then. green banner = you're good. miners, refresh or you're mining a dead chain after block 35,550.
sorry for this one. $BRC
Quick heads up for anyone mining:
GPU farms had taken over the old algorithm and were eating basically every block, which kills the whole point of this coin mining competitively in a browser tab. So we built a new proof-of-work, Sandglass, where a browser tab beats a GPU again. It goes live at block 33,550 (~July 22, 14:00 CEST) the countdown banner in the app shows the blocks left.
All you need to do is open https://t.co/sfQvzoI0PJ once before then. Your tab auto-updates and flips to the new algo on its own at the fork height.
If you leave an old tab running without refreshing, it'll just stall on the first new block until you reload it nothing breaks, it just stops following the chain until you refresh.
And nothing changes for your wallet same chain, same balances, same history. This is a rules change, not a reset.
That's it. Refresh, and you're set. ⧗
Once scripts are added there's a lot of other cool stuff to experiment with.
A network of strangers who don't trust each other agreeing on a shared ledger with no one in charge, using nothing but math and electricity, and now a community building games and faucets on top of it. Still the most fun thing I've made. No nonsense.
So far it was very fun. No one lost anything, no one gained anything but knowledge. An experiment to have fun with the technology the way it should be.
A few weeks back I posted about a little experiment: a cryptocurrency that runs entirely inside a browser tab called BrowserCoin. Open a page, you're a full node. Mining is memory hard so a phone and a server farm have about the same odds. Bitcoin shaped rules, fully open source, no market, just a project to have fun with the technology.
A lot of people tried it out, and I would like to recap what happened so far, because it was pretty interesting.
A very important thing about this project: it's not selling anything. The coin was made to have fun with the technology. There is no market, you can't buy coins, you can't sell them. Coins exist because someone mined them. That's it.
It became more decentralized and way less killable by attacking a single server. The whole chain now backs itself up to a public repo every hour, re-verifying everything from scratch each time. If every server and tab vanished overnight, anyone could bring the network back in about fifteen minutes. Every clone is another permanent, verifiable copy.
Quality of life. Faster wallet loading, a better block explorer, and a pop-out miner, a little floating window with live hashrate and CPU sliders so you can keep mining while you do other stuff. All cool features that were developed while the chain was up and running.
I burned ~195k BRC (those were mined when it was mostly just me testing the chain, so I thought it made sense to burn them) to a dead address. Gone forever, no key exists, tagged in the explorer. The address is 000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000dead, which is kinda fun.