Feathercoin

Feathercoin (code: FTC) is a cryptocurrency and open source software project released under the MIT/X11 license. It started as a clone/fork of Litecoin which was in turn inspired by Bitcoin. The lead coder, who has made minor modifications to litecoin's source code, is Peter Bushnell. The Feathercoin network generates coins at a decreasing rate and is scheduled to generate 336 million coin, 16 times more than Bitcoin, and 4 times more than Litecoin. As of December 2, 2013, Feathercoin network has generated about 25 million coins.
As of December 2, 2013, 1 FTC is worth approximately 1.02 USD, or 0.001 BTC. Feathercoin is the seventh largest cryptocurrency with a market cap of around 32 million USD.
Transactions
Every block on the Feathercoin network contains transactions. The process of block generation, known commonly as mining, requires significant computational resources. In order to encourage mining activities, every node which manages to generate a valid block is awarded with a generation fee of 200 FTC, though this value halves every 840,000 blocks (nearly every 4.1 years). The generating node is also awarded with all transaction fees, i.e. small optional payments issued by senders to get their transactions processed at higher priority. The total supply of feathercoins is finite and estimated at 336 million.
Mining Algorithm
Feathercoin and Litecoin use the scrypt hash function for proof-of-work introduced by Colin Percival. Both cryptocurrencies operate with a block target of 2.5 minutes which is 4 times faster than Bitcoin (10 minutes) allowing quicker transaction processing. Bitcoin employs a different hash function, SHA-256. The Feathercoin network adjusts the hashing difficulty every 504 blocks to maintain a given block generation speed, and this process is known as retargeting. Litecoin and Bitcoin feature a slower 2016 block retarget rate. The difficulty is adjusted according to the total network computational power which is called the hash rate. There is a limiting coefficient implemented (the square root of 2) which assures that no difficulty increase higher than 1.4142 or decrease lower than 0.7071 may take place.
Largely because Feathercoin came after Litecoin, Feathercoin has seen much slower adoption, and has significantly less miners. This means the network is inherently insecure, and has required centralization in the form of a "feature" called ACP (Advanced Check Pointing) to prevent attacks on the blockchain. Feathercoin has seen entire days of transactions erased and replaced during previous attacks, and this remains a serious concern for the network's ongoing survival.
Addresses
Payments on the Feathercoin network are made to unique addresses which are based on digital signatures. They appear as strings of 33 characters which always begin with either 6 or 7. For example, 6ktCPogK2FVVe4W21JZREndeioJSBtBV32. Every address corresponds to a unique private key known by the owner only. It's nearly impossible to find out a private key using a brute-force attack.
Confirmations
Transactions are contained in blocks. Every valid block is added to the network block chain, a list of all generated blocks starting with #1 block known as the genesis block. Every next block references one previous block, thus a chain is created. A transaction is considered complete after 6 confirmations usually, i.e. when 6 blocks have been added to the block chain after the block containing this transaction. Although this is not mandatory and confirmation policies may vary among receivers.
History
Feathercoin was announced on 16 April 2013 on the Bitcointalk.org forum. The genesis block was released immediately thereafter.
A major network update took place on 15 May 2013 (block #33,000) when a new retarget strategy became effective.
In June 2013, the Feathercoin network suffered multiple devastating 51-percent attacks - an attack where someone gains enough hash rate to create his or her own blockchain. This gave the attacker the ability to bring the authority of the original blockchain into question, and created “orphan” blocks in that blockchain. Even with the later introduced ACP, this remains a serious issue for feathercoin, and confirmations should be generally considered much less secure than a comparable number of confirmations on Bitcoin or Litecoin networks.
Advanced CheckPointing (ACP) was released on 27 August 2013 with a client/daemon update to v0.6.4.3 and to become operational at 09:00 UTC on 2 September 2013. The purpose of this update was to protect the network against 51% attacks. ACP prevents block chain forks by the attackers which orphan (invalidate) blocks produced by other miners and may lead to currency double spending. At some point, even Sunny King has contributed to this ACP implementation. At the end of August, Chris J became the new Feathercoin Community Leader.
In September 2013 it became possible to buy Feathercoin directly using US dollars, firstly on 1 September on crypto-trade.com and then on 11 September on CoinMkt.com.
In November 2013, UK Bitcoin buying service Bittylicious announced support of Feathercoin from December. Bittylicious has already expanded its service to Netherlands, South Africa and Czech Republic.

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