Arionum aims to offer a simple and secure solution to the growing need for faster and cheaper online payments. The goal is to be easy, fast, secure and for the mining to be democratically spread across non-professional miners.
Today’s cryptocurrency market is dominated by the first cryptocurrency, Bitcoin and the first smart cryptocurrency, Ethereum. Each cryptocurrency aimed to solve a specific problem. Bitcoin’s aim was to replace online payments with a cheaper, anonymous and secured solution, while Ethereum’s goal was to create a blockchain as a service due to its smart-contracts functionality.
Bitcoin has managed to mostly reach its goal, as it is accepted by new vendors each day. But the growth of acceptance and popularity also showed some weaknesses in its protocol. First, the transaction fees have skyrocketed as the network became more and more congested, especially for smaller-size transactions. Second, the mining algorithm, which is based on the sha256 hashing method, has proven easily solved by specialized hardware, moving the mining power from the average user to specialized mining farms owned by just a few, which leads to inequality and a loss of trust in the cyptocurrency. Arionum tries to solve these bitcoin limitations by using a variable block size, which starts at just 100 transactions per block but increases by 10% of the average transactions number each time the last 100 blocks are filled to the maximum transactions number. The specialized hardware issue is solved by using a combination of argon2i password hashing, an algorithm made to be resistant against GPU and specialized hardware, and a sha512 hashing for extra security. This means the mining is best done using the CPU, allowing the average user to mine without investing in specialized hardware or graphic cards and at the same time, penalizing the professional miners that have huge graphic card farms.
The fee problem is solved by having a fixed 0.25% fee on any transaction, therefore offering a much smaller fee per transaction than any other electronic payment system in the world.
ARIONUM