Burst: An Energy-Efficient Decentralized Blockchain Platform Based on Proof-of-Capacity

What is Burst

Friends, imagine the banking systems we use every day—they require a central authority to record every transaction. Blockchain, on the other hand, is like a public, transparent “ledger” that everyone maintains together, where every transaction is recorded and cannot be tampered with. Burst, or as it is now more widely known, Signum (abbreviated as SIGNA), is such a “public ledger” system, dedicated to providing a more eco-friendly and decentralized way to handle digital transactions and run various applications.

You can think of Burst/Signum as a “green” digital bank and application platform. Its target users are anyone who wants secure, fast, and low-cost digital payments, or who wants to create their own digital assets (such as points, tokens), or even develop decentralized applications (DApps).

Specifically, on Burst/Signum, you can:

• Make digital payments: Just like WeChat Pay or Alipay, but without intermediaries—direct peer-to-peer transfers.
• Run smart contracts: Imagine you and a friend make a bet and put the wager into an automatically executing program. Once the conditions are met, the program automatically transfers the money to the winner, with no human intervention needed. That’s a smart contract.
• Create your own digital assets: For example, you can issue a membership point system for your small shop, or a voting token for your community.
• Securely store data: Like storing files in a super-secure cloud drive, but this drive is decentralized—no one can arbitrarily delete or modify your data.

Project Vision and Value Proposition

The core vision of the Burst/Signum project is to build a secure, scalable, and sustainable blockchain environment for developing decentralized applications and facilitating digital payments. They aim to solve a major problem faced by many current blockchain projects: excessive energy consumption. You may have heard that Bitcoin mining consumes a huge amount of electricity, like supercomputers running complex calculations day and night. Burst/Signum believes this is not only environmentally unfriendly but also limits the participation of ordinary people.

Therefore, Burst/Signum’s value proposition can be summarized as:

• Eco-friendly pioneer: They use a unique “hard drive mining” method, greatly reducing energy consumption—like putting idle hard drive space to use instead of burning electricity with expensive specialized equipment.
• Open to everyone: Since no expensive specialized equipment is needed, ordinary people can participate in mining with their home computer hard drives, making the blockchain more decentralized.
• Feature-rich: In addition to basic transfer functions, it also supports smart contracts, token issuance, secure messaging, and data storage—like a multifunctional Swiss Army knife.
• Historical innovator: Burst/Signum has created several “firsts” in the blockchain field: it was the first cryptocurrency to use the Proof-of-Capacity (PoC) consensus mechanism, the first to implement Turing-complete smart contracts in a real-world environment (even before Ethereum), and the first to successfully conduct atomic cross-chain transactions (ACCT).

Technical Features

The technical core of Burst/Signum lies in its unique consensus mechanism and a series of innovative features:

Consensus Mechanism: Proof-of-Capacity (PoC)

This is Burst/Signum’s proudest feature. Traditional Bitcoin mining uses Proof-of-Work (PoW), where miners compete on computational power to solve complex math problems, earning the right to record transactions and receive rewards. It’s like a group of people racing to solve a super difficult math problem—the first to solve it wins, which is very demanding on brainpower (computing power) and physical resources (electricity).

Proof-of-Capacity (PoC), on the other hand, can be understood as “hard drive space proof.” Miners don’t compete on computing power, but on who has more hard drive space and has stored more “answers” on their drives. These “answers” are called “Plot files.” When a new block needs to be generated, the system poses a question, and miners search their stored “Plot files” for the closest answer. Whoever’s “Plot file” provides the closest answer the fastest wins the right to record the block.

The advantages of this approach are:

• Energy efficient: Once the “Plot files” are stored on the hard drive, mining only requires reading data, not continuous high-intensity computation, so energy consumption is extremely low—over 99.998% lower than Bitcoin.
• Decentralized: Ordinary people can participate using idle hard drives, lowering the mining threshold and avoiding the concentration of computing power in a few large mining farms.

Burst/Signum later developed PoC+, further optimizing this mechanism.

Smart Contracts

Burst/Signum supports Turing-complete smart contracts, meaning it can run all kinds of complex programs and logic. In the Burstcoin era, these were called Automated Transactions (AT). The Signum platform provides the Java-based SmartJ platform, making it easy for developers to create and deploy smart contracts.

Scalability Solutions

To meet the needs of large-scale transactions in the future, Burstcoin proposed “The Burst Dymaxion” white paper, which describes a second-layer solution built on top of the existing blockchain. You can think of it as a fast lane built alongside the main road, used to handle a large number of daily microtransactions. This solution draws on Bitcoin’s “Lightning Network” and IOTA’s “Tangle” technology, aiming to achieve a scalable, energy-efficient, and anonymous transaction network.

Other Features

• Data pruning: As the blockchain grows over time, to avoid data bloat, Burst/Signum implements data pruning to keep the blockchain compact.
• Secure messaging: Users can send encrypted messages on-chain to protect privacy.
• Asset exchange and crowdfunding: Built-in features for creating and trading digital assets, as well as supporting decentralized crowdfunding activities.

Tokenomics

The native cryptocurrency of Burst/Signum is SIGNA, which plays a central role in the entire ecosystem.

• Token symbol: SIGNA (the original Burstcoin token symbol was BURST).
• Issuance mechanism: When Burstcoin launched in 2014, there was no initial coin offering (ICO) and no premine, meaning all tokens were generated fairly through mining.
• Total supply and circulation: As of March 5, 2024, the total supply of SIGNA is about 2.18 billion, with a circulating supply of about 2.12 billion.
• Inflation/Burn: In the early days, Burstcoin’s block rewards decayed by 5% per month. Later, Signum removed the hard cap via a hard fork and set a minimum block reward of 100 BURST per block (every 4 minutes), resulting in an initial annual inflation rate of about 0.6%, which will decrease year by year.
• Token utility: SIGNA is not just a digital currency; it has multiple practical uses in the Signum network:
  • Network security: Miners “commit” SIGNA tokens to participate in PoC+ mining, helping to secure the network and earn rewards.
  • Transaction fees: Any operation on the network, such as transfers or executing smart contracts, requires a small amount of SIGNA as a transaction fee.
  • DApp access: Some decentralized applications built on Signum may require SIGNA to use specific features.
  • Digital payments: Used as a fast and secure peer-to-peer payment method.
  • Trading and arbitrage: Since SIGNA is traded on exchanges, users can profit from buying and selling.
  • Staking and earning: Users can also earn income by staking or lending SIGNA.

Team, Governance, and Funding

The Burst/Signum project has a unique history:

• Core members: Burstcoin was originally launched in 2014 by an anonymous developer under the pseudonym “Burstcoin.” About a year later, this developer disappeared.
• Team characteristics: As an open-source project, community members took over development and maintenance. Thus, Burst/Signum is a typical community-driven project, with multiple community groups responsible for different development areas.
• Governance mechanism: As a community-driven project, its governance model is more decentralized, with decisions usually made through community discussion and consensus.
• Funding: The project has a Burst Marketing Fund (BMF) for organizing various incentive programs and promotional activities to encourage adoption and development. There is no detailed public information on the specific size of the treasury and funding operations.

Roadmap

The development history and future plans of the Burst/Signum project are as follows:

Key historical milestones:

• August 2014: Burstcoin project launched, with the genesis block released on August 11.
• Multiple “firsts”: Burstcoin was the first cryptocurrency to use the Proof-of-Capacity (PoC) consensus mechanism, the first to implement Turing-complete smart contracts in a real-world environment (before Ethereum), and the first to successfully conduct atomic cross-chain transactions (ACCT).
• Community takeover: After the original developer left, the project was taken over and continuously developed by an active community.
• “The Burst Dymaxion” white paper released: This white paper outlined Burstcoin’s future direction, especially its scalability solution.
• Signum hard fork: Through a hard fork, Signum removed the token supply hard cap and introduced a minimum block reward to ensure long-term miner incentives.

Future key plans:

• Dymaxion layer development: Continue to advance the implementation of the Dymaxion layer to achieve a tangle-based Lightning Network, greatly improving network scalability.
• Smart contract usability: Committed to creating code libraries to make smart contract functionality easier for developers to use and integrate.
• Decentralized exchange: Use its built-in marketplace and asset exchange features to build a decentralized peer-to-peer cryptocurrency exchange.
• Core feature optimization: Continuously improve core features, enhance user experience, increase accessibility, and optimize decentralized trading functions.

Common Risk Reminders

All blockchain projects come with certain risks, and Burst/Signum is no exception. When considering participating in or learning about this project, please pay attention to the following points:

Technical and Security Risks:

• Smart contract vulnerabilities: Although smart contracts are powerful, bugs in their code may lead to loss of funds or unexpected behavior.
• 51% attack: In theory, any blockchain may face the risk of a 51% attack—if an entity controls most of the network’s mining power (in PoC, most of the hard drive space), it could manipulate transactions. While PoC aims to reduce this risk, it is not completely immune.
• Dymaxion layer implementation complexity: The Dymaxion layer is an ambitious scaling solution, and its development and deployment may pose technical challenges.

Economic Risks:

• Market volatility: The cryptocurrency market is known for its extreme volatility, and SIGNA’s price may be affected by market sentiment, macroeconomic factors, and the performance of competing projects.
• Market competition: The blockchain field is highly competitive, and Signum must continue to innovate to remain competitive.
• Information transparency: As of March 2024, reports indicate that the project has limited public information on token allocation, unlocking schedules, and team details, which may raise concerns among potential investors.

Compliance and Operational Risks:

• Regulatory uncertainty: Global cryptocurrency regulations are still evolving, and future policy changes may impact project operations and token value.
• Community governance challenges: While the community-driven model is decentralized, it may face challenges in decision-making efficiency and unified direction.

Verification Checklist

If you want to learn more about the Burst/Signum project, here are some important sources and ways to verify information:

• Official website: signum.network (Note: the old Burst-Coin.org site is no longer active.)
• Block explorers: Used to check on-chain transactions and block information. You can search for “Signum block explorer” or visit sites like burstcoin.network, cryptoguru.org, devtrue.net (these are explorers from the Burstcoin era).
• GitHub activity: Check the project’s codebase to understand development progress and community contributions. Signum’s GitHub repository: github.com/signum-network/signum-node.
• White paper: Read “The Burst Dymaxion” white paper to understand its technical vision and scaling solutions.
• Community forums/social media: Follow their Reddit (r/burstcoin), Discord, Telegram, Twitter, and other community platforms for the latest updates and discussions.

Project Summary

Burst, now renamed Signum (SIGNA), is a blockchain project with a long history and a spirit of unique innovation. It is known for its pioneering Proof-of-Capacity (PoC) consensus mechanism, which uses hard drive space for mining, significantly reducing energy consumption and making it a more eco-friendly and sustainable blockchain solution. The project was also a pioneer in smart contracts and atomic cross-chain transactions, demonstrating strong technical strength and innovative capability.

As a community-driven project, Signum is committed to providing a multifunctional platform supporting digital payments, decentralized application (DApp) development, token issuance, and secure data storage. Its proposed Dymaxion scaling solution also signals future potential in scalability.

However, like all cryptocurrency projects, Signum faces challenges in market competition, technical implementation complexity, and information transparency. While it has significant advantages in sustainability, its market performance and community activity still require ongoing attention.

In summary, Burst/Signum is a blockchain project worth watching, especially for users and developers who value eco-friendliness and decentralization. Remember, the above information is for educational purposes only and does not constitute investment advice. Always do your own research (DYOR) before making any decisions.