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Circcash is a proposed cryptocurrency whose mining problem named Hashspin shall be used to incentivize the development of the energy efficient and powerful reversible computer. In essence, Circcash solves the problem in the cryptocurrency sector of making a cryptocurrency proof-of-work problem that does not waste resources but instead puts those resources to a very good use by financing the development of the computers of the future.

Today, by Landauer's principle, our conventional computers must spend k * T * ln(2) energy where k is Boltzmann's constant and T is the temperature for every bit of information deleted. Landauer's principle is a consequence of the second law of thermodynamics, and this limit cannot be overcome simply by using exotic hardware or by lowering the temperature T since the k * T * ln(2) energy must still be spent in the form of cooling costs. In practice, any conventional irreversible computation regardless of the hardware used whose energy efficiency approaches kTln(2) per bit deleted will start to become unreliable due to thermal noise, so in practice the energy efficiency of conventional computation must stay well above kTln(2) in order to ensure reliable computation. Today, your completely flat integrated circuits can consume up to an incredible >>100 W/cm^2, and today the energy usage of integrated circuits is the most severe bottleneck that restricts the performance of computation today.

Fortunately, there is a type of computation which is not limited by Landauer's principle. Reversible computation is the type of computation where one deletes little to no information. As a result, with reversible computation, one can perform operations without deleting information and in such a way that the operations cost much less than the k * T * ln(2) energy spent on deleting a bit of information.

Reversible computation however comes with a few catches. First of all, as of 2018, there are no reversible computers built for any free market purpose which can outperform a conventional computer in any task. Reversible computers are therefore a topic still in the research phase of development. To make matters worse, but as you might expect, it takes more operations and more memory to perform a computation reversibly than it does to perform the computation using a conventional computer. Fortunately, the space and time overhead of reversible computation is small enough so that reversible computers will eventually be able to outperform conventional computers. For example, a computation that takes time T and space S on a multi-tape Turing machine will take time O(T*(T/S)^epsilon) and space O(S*Log(T/S)) on a multi-tape reversible Turing machine, and similar results hold for all other models of computation. Unfortunately, this space and time overhead is large enough to discourage hardware manufacturers to build energy efficient reversible computers in the first place. This is where Circcash comes into play.

Circcash will be a cryptocurrency very similar to Bitcoin, but instead of using SHA-256 as its mining problem, Circcash will use Hashspin as its mining problem which is a mining problem specifically designed to accelerate and ease the development of energy efficient reversible computers while establishing consensus on the underlying cryptocurrency. The Hashspin algorithm is a reversible algorithm which means that a reversible computer that mines hashspin will not have to pay the computational overhead from mining Hashspin reversibly. Hashspin is also an extremely simple mining problem based upon objects called linear feedback shift registers (LFSRs) which require the very minimal amount of hardware with complete reversibility. Hashspin will use a 15 bit LFSR along with a 17 bit LFSR and nearly all of the resources spent on mining Hashspin will be spent on running these two LFSRs. Since the hardware manufacturers mainly have to worry about constructing two reversible LFSRs, these hardware manufacturers will have a much easier time constructing reversible hardware that can mine Hashspin than they would constructing reversible hardware for any other purpose. Since cryptocurrency mining consumes a large quantity of energy, and since the popularity of cryptocurrencies will likely continue to grow, hardware manufacturers will have a very strong incentive to create reversible computers.

There is absolutely no good reason to use SHA-256 or any other mining problem instead of Hashspin.

As of 9/17/2020, a Bitcoin costs $10,800 while CIRCs cost ~$0.00. There is absolutely no reason to pay millions of times more for a cryptocurrency with a mining algorithm that was never designed to advance science.

Here is the old version of the Circcash whitepaper. An updated whitepaper will be released soon.

https://github.com/jvanname/Zammazazzer/blob/master/CirclefishICO.pdf

Notice: The old name for Circcash was Zammazazzer. The name has been changed since the name Zammazazzer was a joke name.