Gapcoin (GAP)

Gapcoin (GAP) is a prime number-based peer-to-peer cryptocurrency that aims to address the limitations of other scientific currencies like Primecoin or Riecoin. It is a decentralized payment system, similar to Satoshi Nakamoto’s Bitcoin, that operates independently of banks, governments, and other centralized regulators. The key improvement over Bitcoin is that Gapcoin’s Proof of Work function performs useful work by searching for large prime gaps instead of wasting electricity. This innovative approach allows users to anonymously send money globally quickly.

Gapcoin’s specifications include a custom Proof of Work algorithm focusing on prime gaps, a block target time of 2.5 minutes, and a block reward that adjusts proportionally to the current difficulty. The coin supply is capped at approximately 10 – 30 million GAP, with the block reward halving every 420,000 blocks (approximately every 2 years). Notably, Gapcoin differentiates itself from Primecoin by not favoring early adopters or coin creators, as the number of coins per block produced increases with more people mining Gapcoin. The fair launch strategy aims to prevent instamine, and the source code is accessible for individuals to review and set up their environment.

Gapcoin’s Proof of Work algorithm is designed to be cryptographically secure, hard to calculate, yet easy to verify. It addresses these criteria by utilizing prime gaps, verified by checking if every number between the start and end of the gap is composite. Since large prime gaps are rarer than smaller ones, the difficulty incorporates the merit of the prime gap, which measures the ratio of the gap’s size to the average prime gap size. Additionally, a pseudo-random number is calculated to aid in difficulty adjustment. The mining process involves calculating the prime as sha256(Blockheader) * 2^shift + adder, with the adder needing to be smaller than 2^shift to prevent PoW reuse.