Feathercoin (FTC or ₣) is an open source cryptocurrency, published under the license of MIT / X11.1, based on the Litecoin protocol. On April 16th, 2013 Feathercoin successfully forked from Litecoin by the creation of its genesis block. As a cryptocurrency, creation and transfer of coins is based on an open source cryptographic protocol (the blockchain) and is not managed by any central authority.
The hashing algorithm chosen for Feathercoin was NeoScrypt, which had premiered on Phoenixcoin. NeoScrypt is 25% more memory intense, which makes it less feasible to create ASICs for it.
The main programmer is Peter Bushnell, at the time magistrate in Information Technology at the Brasenose College of Oxford University. He explained his motivation for developing the coin in an interview with Vitalik Buterin: ” I am a big supporter of Litecoin, but I found that it had run out of steam as there seemed to be little effort to progress, my emails to Litecoin devs went unanswered and I had to question what I really knew about Litecoin. Having a Scrypt coin made sense as GPU miners were soon to be looking for a new home with the coming of ASIC miners, and I was waiting for another Scrypt coin to jump on to and had in my mind what I wanted ideally. Mincoin came along, but it launched without a Qt GUI and had very large rewards for initial blocks. This seemed largely unfair. We then saw the Russian Novacoin launch which was pre-mined before it was launched to the public, and I also saw that as unfair. I had the idea of a coin that simply followed on what Litecoin had started with Bitcoin by having four times as many coins as Litecoin; that seemed to be the next natural step. It occurred that I could code the coin myself, which is exactly what I did. The good news since Feathercoin launched is that Litecoin woke up and did something – competition is a good thing.”
One month after launching Feathercoin, Peter Bushnell left his job as head of IT at the Brasenose College of Oxford University and lived off his Litecoin savings.
He left the development of the coin in 2014 for unknown reasons and returned to the platform in late December 2017 with the intention of bringing Feathercoin technically to the same level as Bitcoin Core 0.13 and subsequently adding Lightning and BarterDEX technology to the coin
The current version of Feathercoin Core is 0.13.0.0 and was committed to Github on 31st January 2018.
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