Ubiq History
The Ubiq team originally created the JumBucks (JBS) cryptocurrency - a fork of ShadowCoin (SHDW) - back in September 2014. JumBucks opened up the possibility of exchanging encrypted p2p messages with anonymous dual-key stealth addresses, not only for making transactions. After three years of research and development, the creators decided to switch their project to the Ethereum blockchain, which opens up greater potential for creating an effective platform. An updated project called Ubiq (UBQ) was launched in January 2017, without an ICO or pre-mine.
How does it work?
Ubiq cryptocurrency (UBQ) is designed to increase the usefulness of the network. Ubiq's monetary policy has a predictable inflationary control system which helps strike a balance between simulating scarcity and motivating miners to secure the network. The final annual inflation of Ubiq is forecasted at 3%. At the same time, the production protocol has been improved - the block decryption period is constant and not subject to fluctuations, creating conditions for system stability and predicted calculations.
Ubiq democracy
Ubiq is built on an improved version of the Ethereum code, putting stability at its core. The project offers an enterprise-stable platform by implementing well established and thoroughly tested EVM code coupled with a conservative update schedule, reducing the risk of network instability and unintended hardforks.
Developers implemented a governance system called 'Escher' that democratizes the platform's development by providing an on-chain vote for users. The Escher token (ESCH) serves to allow active participants to vote inside the system based on the District0x protocol (https://district0x.io). Escher provides the ability to maintain the system that fuels and directs proposals, polls, goals, and rewards to help the Network Development Fund. All the important decisions are entrusted through verifiable and transparent public voting. The ESCH token is used to ensure the utilitarian unit in the Ubiq blockchain ecosystem.
Ubiq stability
Ubiq uses a unique Flux algorithm - an innovation that adds to the sustainability of the network, keeps block generation stability under varying hashrate, and minimizes expectation time of transaction confirmations. Flux was created by UBQ developers with a difficulty adjustment option for ensuring an average block time of 88 seconds.
The developers also used Digibyte's Digishield and Exponentially Subjective Scoring - the defense mechanisms that significantly reduce the likelihood of double-spending and provide a smooth consensus of nodes on the "longest" chain. This allows the network’s working processes to remain quick and reliable.
UBQ token and mining
All network users pay gas and transaction fees in UBQ which can also be used for trading on the exchanges. The Ethereum virtual machine (EVM) runs the same on Ubiq: an independent developer writes a smart contract in Solidity and executes it in the same way as in Ethereum. Ubiq essentially acts as an additional project for creating smart contracts and applications for the business segment; nevertheless, unlike the Ethereum blockchain, the UBIQ network is not loaded with a huge number of tokens. This problem creates difficulties in blockchain features used in Ethereum, given the low level of network scaling. However, the weak workload of the Ubiq network creates good conditions for profitable mining.
Ubiq uses a Proof-of-Work (PoW) consensus algorithm. Being a code fork of Ethereum, it initially employed the Ethash (Dagger-Hashimoto) mining algorithm. Ethash is a GPU dominated algorithm. However, Ubiq has since switched to Ubqhash for its PoW consensus algorithm. This decision took place through Ubiq’s decentralized governance system “Escher”. Ubqhash did not change the fundamentals of the Ethash algorithm, preserving the hashing speeds on the new algorithm, but it brought one very important change: the Ethash mining algorithm is a memory-intensive algorithm requiring a DAG file. This file contains the necessary resources to run the mining software. DAG files take GPU memory rather than system memory. Therefore by employing slower DAG file growth using Ubqhash, Ubiq allows GPUs to mine for longer periods of time before they become obsolete.
