Coffee Coin

“Bitcoin gives us, for the first time, a way for one Internet user to transfer a unique piece of digital property to another Internet user, such that the transfer is guaranteed to be safe and secure, everyone knows that the transfer has taken place, and nobody can challenge the legitimacy of the transfer. The consequences of this breakthrough are hard to overstate.” - Marc Andreesen

Energy Efficient Blockchain Simulator for Research started by Sharan Duggirala and Siddharth Kulkarni of the Department of Computer Science in San Jose State University. This is a fork of the original collaboration, that I intend to work on personally and/or other open source contributors. This project is intended for three different sets of people:

• People curious about the performance of their own computer when mining on a simulated network.
• People who want to investigate the change of certain conditions and the respective resulting change in miner efficiency. In fact our research results are briefly displayed in this documentation and further elaborated on in the two PDFs within the repository.
• People who may want to fork this into a new cryptocurrency.

How to Run the Program

To find out futher about the functioning of each of the Python files, please refer to the BREAKDOWN section.

First and foremost the coffeecoin-server.py should be running at all times. This will be a simple call as shown below:

python coffeecoin-server.py

Now we are ready to run the miners for experimentation. In order to make this easier, we have created an automatic miner, coded within coffeecoin-autominer.py. This can be called as shown below:

python coffeecoin-autominer.py 4 1 

Here the arguments to the miner, are as follows:

• Argument 1: The number of desired miners to be run on the computer
• Argument 2: The type of hashing function to be used. 1,2 and 3 signify MD5, SHA1 and SHA256 respectively.

While stats are available from the coffecoin-server, use coffeecoin-board.py, for a better analysis. Execute this program as shown below:

python coffeecoin-board.py

Breakdown

The project is divided into sections according to the division of the Python files within the code.

• coffeecoin-server.py: The server program is designed to process requests and deliver data to users and miners over the entire block chain network. The functionality of the server can best be describedby the various routes through which requests are made and data is sent and received.
  • Transactions Manager: This route is called whenever a new transaction has been made between two users.This transaction is then added to a queue of unverified transactions, which waits till it is verified by miners.
  • mine - Mining Hash Verification: This route is called when a miner sends an answer for verification. On successful verification, a new global challenge is set and the miner is awarded with a coin.
  • info - Get current Hash challenge: This route is used to receive information about the current challenge. Also newminers are added to the list of miners that resides on theserver. This serves the purpose of deciding future challenges.
  • board - Get coins earned by each miner: This route returns the data of coins earned by each miner, up until the time the request was made.
  • blocks - Internal function call: This route is aninternal function call, that returns the blocklist i.e all blocks connected to the blockchain to the network.
  • printblocks: This is a debugging route that is used for returning and displaying information of all the blocks currently on the blockchain.

For an in-depth understanding of the various Python files within CoffeeCoin please refer to the BlockchainEnergyEfficiciency.pdf, titled Randomized Approach to Finding the Optimal Blockchain Miner Configurations for Maximum Energy Efficiency. Furthermore, to understand the literature survey that has taken place in order to create this entire project, please refer to the Energy_Efficiency_Survey.pdf, titled A Literature Survey of Energy Efficiency Within Blockchain Networks. Both these documents are available within the repository, and we recommend at least a cursory glance through the first one.

Todos

• Write more tests
• Start building a UI

License

MIT