Can I use MultiChain for my own cryptocurrency?

Question

Is it possible and more importantly is it straight forward to use MultiChain for my own decentralized cryptocurrency?

I've read conflicting posts here regarding the possibility of this, some saying, "you can't make payments" via MultiChain or that it would be hard to make it "decentralized" or to add more confusion, having to use "asset properties" - some uncommon language or framework (?).

Maybe I'm the only one confused here and haven't been reading properly, either way, clearing the fog would be nice.

In summary:

1. Can I use MultiChain to synthesize my own fully fledged cryptocurrency?

2. Is it any more diffucult than (for example) cloning the Bitcoin blockchain, or at that, is it even easier (fingers crossed)?

Thank you so much.

Answer 1

The answer is that MultiChain can be configured for a proof-of-work cryptocurrency, but it would be using the same proof-of-work scheme as bitcoin. You should think carefully about the security implications of that fact. It means a tiny portion of bitcoin mining capacity would be enough to rewind your whole blockchain.

Comments

Can you explain further this comment or provide a link to more details?  "It means a tiny portion of bitcoin mining capacity would be enough to rewind your whole blockchain."

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You can start by studying bitcoin's proof-of-work mechanism. The relevant point is that if anyone can own or control more than 50% of the bitcoin network's hashing power, then they can reverse transactions in the bitcoin blockchain. Now bitcoin has an immense amount of total hashing power (currently about 15 million million million hashes per second), so it's very hard for anyone to have more than 50% of that.

But the same principles apply to any proof-of-work blockchain that allows forking. Therefore if you use MultiChain to start a new cryptocurrency which uses the same proof-of-work mechanism, it will unlikely have much hashing power at first. Therefore a very tiny portion of bitcoin's hashing power can be directed to your new cryptocurrency to easily be more than 50% of its total hashing power. Practically speaking, if some very small-time bitcoin miner decides they don't like your new currency, they can trivially destroy it.

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Do you think it could be a viable option changing the proof-of-work part of your code to launch a new cryptocurrency with a different mining algorithm (e.g. a GPU-suitable algorithm)?
And if it is viable, would issuing new assets subsidize miners like a transaction?

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Yes, MultiChain could be certainly be modified in this way. In fact many altcoins went through the same process with the Bitcoin Core codebase.

Issuing new assets is unrelated to miner compensation - miners receive their compensation in the chain's native currency.