This week New York City received a visit from Payu Harris who is the founder of the Kimitsu Digital Technology Initiative and is most recently known as being the face behind the launch of Mazacoin. Mazacoin claims to be the first sovereign national crypto-currency in history after it was formally adopted by the Traditional Lakota Nation a few short months ago. Seizing upon the opportunity to speak with him in person, Bailey Reutzel and I met up with him at the NYC Bitcoin Center to interview him about the coin and what he hopes to achieve with this coin’s launch into the crypto currency environment.
The basic stats of the coin are as follows:
Using SHA-256 Proof-Of-Work Mining (ASIC’s Welcome)
Block Target: 120 seconds
Difficulty Re-Targets every 4 blocks based on last 90 blocks (Quick Difficulty Readjustment)
Block reward: 5000 MZC halving every 241920 blocks (about 12 month) – not dropping below
1 MZC (inflationary minimum)
Total coin mined: 2.4192 billion MZC + yearly inflation
2.4192 billion coins will be mined in approx. first 5 years
Thereafter around 1 million per year (inflationary).
These and other specifications can be found on the Mazacoin Features page.
Bailey Reutzel, Payu Harris, and David Moon after discussing Mazacoin for an upcoming podcast.
The interview lasted around an hour and *spoiler alert* will be available in podcast form in a few weeks. However I did want to list out some of the key points covered about the coin:
– The idea of the coin is to give the Lakota – and other people, both Native American and even other people across the world – a tool by which they can engage in trade without worry about input or sanction from banks, governments and other institutions. An example was given of another Native American group who wanted to form a casino on their land but for whatever reason, the Federal government objected and the group went ahead with their plans….until the government leaned on the banks to lock the group’s funds, which killed the project. Having a financial system that is independent of such choke points is just one goal.
– A substantial pre-mined reserve of 25 million MZC coins will be released to the Lakota people, businesses, and charities in the form of grants. This lets any tribe member take advantage of the existence of the coin without being immediately priced out. This will also allow the value of the coin to be shored up, avoiding some of the dramatic valuation swings of the entire pool.
– While Bitcoin does offer many of the same advantages as Mazacoin, some changes where felt necessary to make it more practical for the users. For one, an inflationary component was added to avoid rapid deflation and to allow for the reserve to continue to operate. Also, the block time was dropped and the difficulty made much more flexible.
There will be a full release of the interview in audio form shortly and we will post a follow-up when it is ready. In the meantime, the coin trades as MZC on smaller exchanges such as Atomic Trade today and is expected to appear on Cryptsy and other exchanges as the popularity grows.