History
Marscoin Wikipedia article
Marscoin (MARS or MRS) is a decentralized peer-to-peer Cryptocurrency altcoin project released under the open-source MIT license. It is managed by the nonprofit.[1] Marscoin Foundation[2] The project was introduced to the public by Lennart Lopin at the Mars Society conference in 2014.[3] Marscoin was proposed to facilitate a viable independent economic infrastructure for future colonies or missions on the Planet Mars which as a digital currency would be more convenient than carrying around cash for financial transactions domestically on Mars, or when dealing with Earth. The main advantage of this being no weight taken up on space crafts. It would also create a financial system that is not managed by any central authority so the first colonists bring an independent economic infrastructure in form of a blockchain to the red planet.[4]
The simplest application being that of a politically neutral research credit, where those on Mars could be paid in Marscoin by Earth based academic organizations to perform tasks or research, then in return those on Mars could spend those Marscoins to obtain equipment or luxuries to be sent out on the next supply mission to Mars.
Technology
Like most cryptocurrencies the creation and transfer of coins is based on a decentralized cryptographic protocol. Marscoin uses a peer-to-peer digital ledger managed by its open source software. Marscoin itself is based on the Scrypt cryptocurrency reference code used for Litecoin but differs in several areas with regard to its supply, blockchain, Genesis Block, network peers and wallet features.
Functionally Marscoin as a cryptocurrency works similarly to the Bitcoin network in managing transactions in a blockchain. Marscoins are created by generating blocks based on a cryptographic hash function. This process of finding a block is called mining.[5]
In contrast to Bitcoin, blocks are generated in the Marscoin network every two minutes instead of every ten minutes in average[6], which results in faster transaction confirmations for clients. Therefore the blockchain of Marscoin also produces more units over the entire course than the Bitcoin network, of which the maximum converges towards 21 million Bitcoin.[7] Marscoin uses the scrypt technology instead of SHA256 in their proof-of-work algorithm for mining. Scrypt was specially developed to make brute-force attacks with specialized hardware such as ASICs more difficult. To do this, it takes advantage of the fact that random-access memory (RAM) is relatively more expensive.[8][9]
History
Lennart Lopin joins The Mars Society in 2013[10]
Lennart Lopin begins developing Marscoin in early 2014.
Lennart Lopin attends the 9th of April 2014 "CryptoCurrency Convention" in NYC, to present his idea.[11]
The non-profit Marscoin foundation is formed to manage it July 17 2014.[12]
The Marscoin foundation donates Marscoin to Mars One, subsequently The "UK Space Bulletin" website features an article about Marscoin in August 2014 discussing Marscoin and Mars One.[16]
Lennart Lopin attends the 17th Annual International Mars Society Convention in September 2014 to conduct a presentation on Marscoin for Funding Off-Planet Colonization[17]
While at the same convention the Marscoin foundation presents the Mars society with the first 500,000 Marscoin as a donation.[18]
Marscoin is listed for trade on several cryptocurrency trade platforms, including but not limited to coins-e, poloniex, cryptopia, novaexchange and a few others.
2015 Several organizations add Marscoin mining pools to their platforms, including pooler, BNL bejjan, p2pool, prohashing, scryptpool and our-game.
2016 Coins-e ceases operation.
July 2016, Poloniex begins acquisition by Circle and begins a mass delisting of smaller alt-coins to focus only on the top most profitable coins, Marscoin is delisted.
November 2018 Cryptopia begins negotiation for acquisition by Merchant Bankers. Marscoin is delisted along with several other alt-coins.
2019 Novaexchange ceases operation
April 2020 a private offer is sent to spaceX to donate 100,000 Marscoin to them to assist in their Mars colonization aspirations. They fail to respond.[21]
May 2020 someone starts performing attacks on Marscoin pools, and the Marscoin blockchain is stalled. Several pools are forced to shut down or remove Marscoin support.
October 2020 the blockchain is kicked into action again, and some pools resume operation.
December 2020, Elon Musk shows sympathy for a financial economy based on a cryptocurrency called Marscoin.[22]
17th February 2021 CZ from Binance takes credit for the name "Marscoin" and implies it does not exist.[31] Several Altcoin traders attempt to correct him, but he ignores them.
February 2021 several fake Mars copycat coins, and false social media groups are created - and all the real Marscoin pools and websites are placed under sustained Denial of Service attacks. Some pools are knocked offline due to the attacks. Other pools continue to operate at a degraded hash rate regardless.
References
^ "The Marscoin Foundation". Retrieved February 27, 2021.
^ Lennart, Lopin. "17th Annual International Mars Society Convention". The Mars Society. Retrieved February 27, 2021.
^ "Trustless-ledger technology implications for a Martian society" (PDF). Retrieved February 27, 2021.
^ MacKenzie, Donald (April 18, 2019). "Pick a nonce and try a hash" (PDF). London Review of Books.
^ Kawase, Yoshiaki (November 23, 2017). Transaction-Confirmation Time for Bitcoin: A Queueing Analytical Approach to Blockchain Mechanism. Lecture Notes in Computer Science. Vol. 10591. Springer International Publishing. pp. 75–88. doi:10.1007/978-3-319-68520-5_5. ISBN 978-3-319-68519-9.
^ Østbye, Peder (March 7, 2018). "The Case for a 21 Million Bitcoin Conspiracy". SSRN 3136044.
^ Coventry, Alex. "NooShare: A decentralized ledger of shared computational resources" (PDF). Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT).
^ Perival, Colin. "Stronger Key Derivation Via Sequential Memory-Hard Functions" (PDF). Retrieved February 27, 2021.
^ "Mars Society Now Accepts Digital Currencies". 5 August 2019.
^ "Sarasota man finalist for Mars One mission". 19 March 2015.
^ "Mars Society Now Accepts Digital Currencies". 5 August 2019.
^ "Mars Society Announcment". 5 August 2019.
^ Helms, Kevin (December 30, 2020). "Elon Musk Endorses Cryptocurrency for Martian Economy". Bitcoin.com. Retrieved February 27, 2021.
^ "MarsCoin: Elon Musk accidentally pumped this tiny crypto by 2,000%". protos.com. 17 February 2021. Retrieved March 3, 2021.
^ "Musk denkt laut über eigene Kryptowährung nach und sorgt aus Versehen für Rally beim MarsCoin". Finanzen.net. Retrieved February 27, 2021.
^ Petereit, Dieter. "Elon Musk und Binance-Chef CZ sorgen für rasanten Anstieg des Marscoin – unabsichtlich". Retrieved February 27, 2021.
^ "Elon Musk talks about launching Marscoin cryptocurrency". 18 February 2021.
^ "Elon Drops Further Hints about Marscoin". 16 February 2021.
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