Auroracoin is a decentralised, peer-to-peer, and secure cryptocurrency released as an alternative to the Icelandic Króna to bypass governmental restrictions associated with the national fiat currency. It was launched with the aim of becoming the ‘official’ cryptocurrency of Iceland. AUR was a pioneer in the area of country-specific cryptocurrencies. AUR was launched on the 25th of January, 2014, by an anonymous developer who went by the pseudonym of Baldur Friggjar Óðinsson. It was originally based on Litecoin, using the Scrypt algorithm with a Proof of Work mechanism, but was later updated to use a multi-algorithm architecture in 2016, forked from DigiByte. Auroracoin uses the PoW consensus mechanism, which utilises device hashing power to solve a complex mathematical problem in order to authenticate a transaction proposed to be stored in the blockchain. The difficulty of solving the problem ensures that authenticating forged transactions is very difficult unless the attacker owns an impractically large chunk of the network’s total hashing power. AUR is one of the only cryptocurrencies to use a combination of five different hashing algorithms, namely Grøstl, Qubit, scrypt, SHA-256, and Skein. While initially very popular, Auroracoin has seen little to no activity for a while, with poor marketing, and frequent dev team changes. Reasons for little growth have been various, from slow adoption in Iceland, to developers leaving and joining the project midway. However, it is expected to not go lower than the recent low, and might see a rise as AUR plans to launch a more aggressive marketing campaign in Iceland to promote the coin among the masses. Unlike most other altcoins, Auroracoin has made extensive changes to the original codebase. It has introduced security measures such as Automatic checkpointing, and protecting against known flaws present in the BTC blockchain, such as 51% block replacement attacks.
Skychain is an open infrastructure, based on blockchain, which provides the possibility to create, train and use high-quality medical neural networks. IBM estimates the artificial intelligence market in the healthcare sector to reach $200 billion in a few years. Skychain’s goal is to control more than 70% of that market! The way to achieve this goal is to create the best open infrastructure that will accumulate the resources of the majority of participants of this industry and surpass any closed corporate product. The mission of Skychain is to save 10 million patients from premature death due to medical errors within 10 years. Medical errors are the third leading cause of death, but artificial intelligence can dramatically reduce the number of such errors! Skychain intends to provide an infrastructure to radically increase the efficiency of healthcare AI development and training. It will make diagnostic AI systems far more accessible and affordable for the consumer by using blockchain technologies to facilitate safe transactions between the key parties. Skychain is unique. The project is based on the revolutionary approach of using smart contracts to bring together many healthcare big data providers whose data is vital for AI training, thousands of independent AI developers, computational resource providers (crypto miners), and millions of consumers.