MicroBitcoin, a cryptocurrency that forked from leader Bitcoin in 2018, has announced that it will burn 70% of its total supply as part of a key upgrade.
The MicroBitcoin volumes being burned are not currently in circulation as they have not been activated since the cryptocurrency hard-forked from Bitcoin in May 2018.
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This means that 150 billion of the 210 billion MicroBitcoin will be lost with the upgrade, with the remaining circulating supply made up of the 27 billion activated during the hard-forking, 8.8 billion mined and 10.5 billion pre-mined.
The decision to burn the unactivated supply will, according to MicroBitcoin, remove “the uncertainties of activation” and ensure the community knows the “exact amount of maximum supply and circulation”.
MicroBitcoin upgrade to make platform “faster and more stable”
The upgrade, which will occur on 9 October at 11am UTC, will also include a host of other new features to make the cryptocurrency “faster and more stable”.
The consensus algorithm used to agree upon the creation of new blocks will be changed from rainforest v2, known as RFv2, to YesPower, a proof-of-work algorithm that is designed to be “relatively efficient to compute on current CPUs and relatively inefficient on current GPUs”.
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By GlobalDataThis will also see block sizes decreased to 300kb, a move that the foundation says will combat block spamming and improve the cryptocurrency’s fee market.
The upgrade will also see the amount rewarded to miners decrease significantly, from 12,500 MicroBitcoin for one block per minute to 5,500 MicroBitcoin per block.
The reward will also move from a fixed Bitcoin-like system to a slow decrease determined by a mining reward formula, an approach currently used by the cryptocurrency Monero.
The upgrade will also see MicroBitcoin’s development team technical lock 50% of the 10.5 billion coins held by the foundation until 2021. The other 50% will also be held from sale for use if there is a need to counteract market overheating or distortion.
The upgrade will be launched on the network’s 1,137,200th block level, with users advised not to generate transactions within 100 blocks of this level until it is completed.
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