AMSTERDAM – Reportage bij De Nederlandse Bank, DNB. foto: tekst DNB. ANP XTRA LEX VAN LIESHOUT Share with:
In a prepared speech by Ron Berndsen of the Dutch Central Bank (De Nederlandsche Bank) at a recent conference in The Netherlands – he revealed some interesting details on the central bank’s experiments with their Blockchain experiment with a currency they call DNBCoin. “So last year we started our DNBcoin experiment. The general idea was that by adapting the Bitcoin software ourselves we could learn deeper how an actual implementation of the Blockchain really works than if we would only perform desk research.” “And just to avoid misunderstandings – the DNBcoin is only developed for internal test purposes, it will not be put into circulation. For the experiments, we didn’t establish a traditional steering committee with working groups, mandates and budgets; we just formed a bootstrap team of intrinsically motivated colleagues coming from different parts of the Bank. If you work on innovation, you should work in an innovative way as well.” They adapted the bitcoin client software in two major ways and DNBcoin prototype 1 replicated the early days of bitcoin (Jan – Feb 2009) using five laptops in a connected network antheir home-made Genesis Block. “We were able to generate a couple of thousand blocks, to enter transactions and set transaction fees. We also established that you could easily mine blocks too quickly: every 3 minutes instead of every 10 minutes like bitcoin. Reassuringly the software then issues the warning: ‘abnormally high number of blocks generated in the last four hours’.” The second DNBcoin prototype they worked on developed the other extreme of bitcoin by jumping to the year 2140, the year when the last fraction of the 21 million bitcoins will be issued. This maximum follows mathematically from the […]
