# FAQ

## General

### What is Riecoin?

Riecoin is a decentralized and open source peer-to-peer digital currency, released in 2014. It is a fork of Bitcoin and also Proof of Work (PoW) based. In general, we tend to follow their principles, and reading the Bitcoin FAQ may answer some other questions you might have about Riecoin.

Riecoin development is still in early stages.

### What makes it different from other altcoins?

It proposes an useful PoW for science. Computers supporting the Bitcoin network to make it secure by validating transactions are called miners, and must constantly solve a problem defined by the Bitcoin’s PoW type. This is a heavy task, consuming a lot of energy. In the Bitcoin and almost all other PoW altcoins cases, the problem is to find an hash that meets an arbitrary criteria. To solve this, miners are continuously generating random hashes until they find one meeting the criteria.

Riecoin miners are not looking for useless hashes, but prime constellations. These prime numbers are of interest to mathematicians and the scientific community, so Riecoin not only provides a secure payment network, but also valuable research data by making clever use of the computing power that is otherwise wasted. Additionally, work on its software may eventually lead to theoretical discoveries as developers and mathematicians improve it, for example by finding new algorithms for the mining software.

Mining is done using a CPU, so everyone can join and mine to support the network and earn coins in return without having to purchase specialized hardware which quickly become a waste once obsolete.

### What is its purpose, its vision?

Riecoin aspires to become a borderless and widely accepted world currency that can efficiently be used for all kinds of payments or as a store of value, without having to rely on organizations that don't always act for the best of everyone.

We think that Bitcoin already fulfills most of the requirements for this and tend to follow its principles as we don't believe in features such as different systems like Proof of Stake nor so-called privacy mechanisms. However, it is also a shame that its PoW only consists on finding useless hashes. So unlike Bitcoin, Riecoin also aims to provide computational power for scientific research. As the mining power increases, it is conceivable to see the project include additional useful PoW algorithms to provide to more fields valuable scientific data and incentives to contribute to research.

Finally, Riecoin indirectly aims to provide more useful technologies taking advantage of its blockchain and PoW, like storing proofs of existence or contribute to global spam reduction by providing anti-spam tools requiring attackers to spend too much resources and making their attacks unprofitable (replacing annoying solutions like Captchas). The possibilities are infinite!

### Who compose the Riecoin Team? How can I contact you?

Riecoin is maintained by members of its community, and there is little sense to talk about a team as we don’t have paid developers or a concrete organization. However, notable contributors to the project tend to become reference people that represent the project and are the ones to contact before getting involved with Riecoin, forming a de facto team.

### I want to help, what can I do? I am an A and could provide X or Y for Riecoin, are you interested?

Anything that helps Riecoin to achieve its purposes is welcome.

### How was the name Riecoin coined? What does the Riecoin logo represent?

The name Riecoin pays homage to Bernhard Riemann, who did large contributions to mathematics and physics, and is considered by many to be one of the greatest mathematicians of all time. It also pays homage to Bitcoin, the cryptocurrency that started them all.

The logo is a stylized "r", and the curve in the background is a graph in the complex plane of the Riemann's Zeta function ${\displaystyle \zeta }$ for some values of ${\displaystyle {\frac {1}{2}}+yi}$. It was chosen during a contest and the author is Mick Bruce.

## Technical

### How to start the wallet? How to configure the miner? How to beat a world record?

Read the guides proposed in Get Started. To attempt a new record, read this guide.

If you have technical issues, you can join Discord or any other Riecoin social network and ask there. But please first make sure to have followed correctly the instructions.

### Can you explain the Riecoin's PoW in detail? The miner's algorithm?

#### What makes Riecoin GPU/FPGA/ASIC resistant?

The current algorithm requires a lot of memory for more efficiency, and cannot be parallelized well without increasing a lot the memory usage, making hard to write efficient miners for GPUs or design specialized hardware.

That said, we cannot know for sure that nobody will one day find a way to port the current algorithm for GPUs or even find a new one that would be FPGA/ASIC friendly. In this case, Riecoin shall update its PoW with either different parameters or another mathematical problem in order to remain CPU only, or at worst with GPUs not getting significant advantages over CPUs.

## Economy

### How can I obtain Riecoins?

You can obtain Riecoins by mining or buying them from an exchange. Contributing to the project may also earn you some coins as donations.

### Can I buy goods with Riecoins?

Riecoin is not yet accepted by any merchant. We will update this once this changes.

If you own a store, you could be the first one to accept RIC as payment!

### What happened with Poloniex? Why are they owning so many coins and what will happen to them?

Riecoin was listed during years on Poloniex, which was the main exchange for Riecoin trading, but for arbitrary reasons they started to freeze the wallets during months, and eventually delisted Riecoin. During these years, various people accumulated millions of RIC on the exchange wallet but never withdrew them.

The fate of these coins is unknown and subject to speculation. Some think that they can considered as burned as either it could be illegal for them to spend them, or it can be assumed that they don’t care about these coins or that they deleted their private keys after the delisting. Others think that these coins are threatening the Riecoin's future and something has to be done, as they could for example sell large amounts at any time, harming value growth and stability, or the simple fact of them holding coins could already deter a lot of investors and potential project growth.