Announcing Ergaki - A performant, public bulletin board for voting and auctions

The first Scorex-based testnet, Lagonaki, combines the Permacoin consensus protocol implementation with a simple, Nxt-like payments module. After Lagonaki, the next Scorex-based testnet will be Ergaki, a block chain system that will be used as a public and performant bulletin board for various protocols including voting and auctions. The components of Ergaki are the following:

1. A new Proof-of-Work scheme based on RollerChain. By default, nodes will follow a "rational behavior", and will remove blocks that are not needed for Proof-of-Work mining. Potentially, a scheme like Ghost/Spectre or Bitcoin-NG/ByzCoin will be used to increase the system's troughput.

2. A new transactional module where state will be comprised of boxes. This transactional model will be different from that of Bitcoin, therefore there will be no stack-language scripts.

3. A new fee model by which mandatory fees will not be based on transaction size but on state increment. For example, a transaction that is lowering the state size would have a minimal or no fee at all. In addition, the storage of boxes in a state will incur fees not only based on size, but also based on life timespan also, with a possible exception for a box of some minimal size. So, unlike all other blockchains, it would be not possible to store anything in the Ergaki blockchain forever by paying only once.

4. A new improved difficulty-adjustment algorithm. A white-paper on that is basically ready and will be published before the release of Ergaki.

The IOHK Scorex team will test the Ergaki testnet on some applications by using a large testbed against a private Ethereum network. The goal is outperform the latter by the orders of magnitude.

Ergaki is planned to be released in September, 2016.