FAQ - novacoin-project/novacoin GitHub Wiki

What’s the major differences between NovaCoin and PPCoin?

Though Novacoin is similar to PPCoin in some things but it's a project with own ideology and independent codebase, that's why it's hard to perform such comparison.

We can say definitely, that:

Novacoin uses newer version of bitcoin as the base.
NovaCoin has a different emission model (floating reward per coin-year).
NovaCoin uses scrypt hashing function for proof-of-work.
NovaCoin uses the both proof-of-work and proof-of-stake for chain trust score computation.
NovaCoin has separated target limits for proof-of-work and proof-of-stake.
NovaCoin has no proof-of-work block signatures.

What’s proof-of-stake?

Proof-of-stake is term referring to the use of currency itself (ownership) to achieve certain goals. In NovaCoin proof-of-stake is used to provide minting and transaction processing on a par with proof-of-work.

What about premine? I heard something about 200/150/90k...

No seriously... don't listen to retards

http://www.devtome.com/doku.php?id=Novacoin

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=143221.msg3730462#msg3730462

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=217110.msg2298533#msg2298533

How is it energy-efficient when there is still mining?

The energy efficiency we refer to is long-term energy efficiency, as in long term we do not require the use of energy to sustain the network.

Currently proof-of-work remains the most practical way of providing initial minting of a crypto-currency. So we decided to keep it as part of our hybrid design.

Why do you need central checkpointing?

We don't need it, actually. It’s main purpose is provide additional protection for the network during the initial growth period and help ensure a smooth upgrade path if critical vulnerability is found. We are confident that central checkpointing can now be gradually weakened and eventually removed to achieve similar decentralization level of Bitcoin as the Novacoin network matures. Users are able to ignore broadcasted checkpointing by using -cppolicy option, if they wish.

Can I use encrypted wallet?

Yes. Encrypted wallet is supported but there is some difference from Bitcoin. If you use an encrypted wallet you would have to unlock the wallet in order to mint blocks. For user security we added an option to the walletpassphrase RPC command to mint block only. In this unlocked wallet mode, one cannot send transaction through RPC command thus providing additional security to the wallet if hacker gains access via RPC.

Is there a cap on total money supply like Bitcoin’s 21 million?

There is no hard cap other than a 2 billion coin max put into the code for now. But that should not be interpreted as an approachable cap, as it might never get anywhere close to that. It should not be considered a hard cap either as it may get lifted but that’s likely not needed in a very very long time. Due to the nature of the mint rate design it’s not possible to predict a final limit as it depends heavily on market participation, as well as the influences between proof-of-stake minting and fee destruction (there may not even be a mathematical limit if minting continues to outpace fee destruction). What we do know is that the proof-of-work minting would slow down according to Moore’s Law (we are aware that Moore’s Law eventually would stop to apply), and proof-of-stake minting introduces 1% annual inflation in the future (but it starts from higher values). So generally speaking it is still a very low future-inflation design comparable to Bitcoin.

How do I generate a vanity address containing some pattern like in a bitcoin vanity address?

(courtesy of dreamwatcher)

vanitygen -X 8 <pattern>

Once the key is generated you can use novacoind importprivkey to import it into your wallet.