Yacoin was started on May 5, 2013 as “Yet Another Coin”. A couple of months later it was officialy renamed to “Your Alternative Currency”.
YAC uses a modified version of scrypt algo – N factor scrypt, it is a hybrid PoW/PoS coin. Main YAC feature: Hashing algo has been changed from scrypt(1024, 1, 1) to scrypt(N, 1, 1). Parameter N increases over time making HW or GPU implementation more and more impractical (but yet possible).
Official YAC website: http://yacoin.org/
Download lasted Windows & Linux YAC wallets from official website.
Current Yacoin Windows wallet download: https://github.com/yacoin/yacoin/releases/download/stable_0.4.2/YACoin-0.4.2.zip
YAC features and technical details:
- Proof of Work key derivation function known as Scrypt.
- The N parameter of Scrypt(N, 1, 1) increases over time and 256 bits of its output are used by the YACoin protocol.
- SHA-3/Keccak-512 as a hashing used in Scrypt
- ChaCha20/8 stream cypher used as a mixing function in Scrypt
- Hybrid Proof of Work/Proof of Stake.
- Fixed Transaction Fees (0.01 YAC per kilobyte) to prevent Blockchain bloat/spam attacks.
- Block each 60 seconds.
- Block reward: 100 coins and depends on difficulty.
YAC coin forum: http://yacointalk.com
YACoin, with its current value of N=32768, uses 4 MB of memory (no commercially-available GPU has a compute unit local memory of this size), thus most data ends up in the much slower shared global memory. As such, YACoin is one of the very few alt coins that can be mined efficiently on a CPU.
Yacoin github source: https://github.com/yacoin/yacoin/releases
In August 2013, the “Coin Control” feature was added to YACoin which enables users to control which addresses are used for their transactions and can help conserve coin age and privacy.