PascalCoin – A New Cryptocurrency Setting a Record For Daily Trade Volume

Right after being enlisted on Poloniex, the cryptocurrency exchange, the price of PascalCoin (PASCAL) soared by more than 1600% within less than 24 hours. The volume of exchange exceeded 7000 bitcoins less than a day after the PASC/BTC market was added to Poloniex. Although the first block on PASCAL’s blockchain was mined last August, PascalCoin didn’t attract much attention until less than a week ago. Before being enlisted on Poloniex, PASCAL price averaged between 600 and 2000 satoshis on Cryptopia. A high of around 165,000 satoshis was recorded on Poloniex last Friday which means that PASCAL coin has set a record of a 8250% rise within 24 hours.

So, let’s get familiar with PascalCoin and see how it is different from bitcoin and other altcoins:

What is PascalCoin?

Pascal Coin, or PASCAL, is a cryptocurrency that utilizes account numbers, rather than public keys, to operate the peer-to-peer protocol. Assumedly, there will be a predictable number of accounts which promotes efficient storage of their balances, without having to refer to past transactions, so an account’s current balance would be the only parameter that has to be checked before executing a transaction. Account numbers are secured with cryptographic keys, or unique PINs, that can be modified at any time. The protocol allows using a single PIN to operate more than a single account, yet each account has only one PIN.

PASCAL is not forked from another cryptocurrency; it is written from scratch in Pascal, a programming language that was designed in 1969 to simplify programming of complex mathematical operations.

How Is PASCAL Different From Bitcoin?

Bitcoin’s blockchain is where all information related to historical transactions is stored via a Merkle Tree. This secures the network against fraudsters and double spending attempts. Although a bitcoin transaction is comparable to a bank’s wired transfer, bitcoin possesses some unique aspects that sets it apart from a classic bank. First of all, an account number is replaced by a bitcoin address that is 25 bytes long, stored somewhere between 26 35 characters, so it is almost impossible to remember a bitcoin address which renders it rather hard to use the system.

For a bitcoin transaction to be verified, the proceeding transaction, from which an amount is available for spending, has to be checked. Although this guarantees perfect functioning of bitcoin’s financial system, it renders data, regarding historical transactions of every bitcoin address, visible to anyone and each miner has to have a copy of all historical transactions to be able to mine bitcoin.

If someone loses his/her private keys, he/she will never be able to spend these coins. Bitcoin is based on the elliptic curve cryptographic keys “secp256k1”, which are presently resistant to hacking, yet there is no guarantee that future technological advances won’t render them vulnerable and easy to hack.

PASCAL proposed the following alternatives to the basic elements of bitcoin’s protocol:

• PASCAL uses account numbers, just like a bank, rather than addresses and relying on public key elliptic curve cryptography “secp256k1”.
• PASCAL needn’t check the historical transactions of an account, but only query its balance (secured in a safe box) and hence doesn’t depend on historical transactions to operate. Transactions stored on the blockchain are only used to guarantee appropriate handling of the safe box.
• PASCAL presents a unique concept of transactions (Payload), as only the intended recipient of a transaction can view its details. As the public key is visible to anyone, it can be used to encrypt messages which can only be decrypted by the owners of the matching private keys.
• PASCAL’s protocol provides a way for retrieval of unused, or lost, coins. This will only apply if after a certain period of time, the owner of the private keys of the coins doesn’t use them to make any operations.
• The possible operations are not dependable on the programming language as it the case with bitcoin. Version 1 of Pascal’s protocol only supported the following operation:

– Transactions from one account to the other

– Change the keys used to operate an account

– Retrieve coins stored from an account whose private keys were lost

• PASCAL’s protocol is designed to permit creation of new types of operations along new revisions or upgrades of the protocol and miners will vote whether or not to accept proposed modification of the protocol.