These words were part of the birth of Free Haven Protocol, the trolling joke coin created to poke at the integrity of the dev’s of Haven Protocol.  However, what started out as simply something for lulz has been transformed into a community project to build and bring a fair, efficient and stable blockchain to the crypto ecosystem.  We feel that most projects out in the space today cannot successfully meet all three criteria above and it is our goal to do something about it, for free.  

Fair.  What does fair mean?  If you were to define it as an adjective, it would be defined as “in accordance with the rules of standards; legitimate”.  Defined as an adverb it is “without cheating or trying to achieve unjust advantage”.  Both definitions play very much into what we are attempting to achieve with Swap.  

Almost all coins in existence are commanded and their fates set by a select few who have the means and access to dictate the coin’s direction.  This could include the developers themselves, exchanges, large farms and even eccentric personalities with the finances to support their view points.  You see them leverage their unique positions by changing the codebase of their projects to suit their needs.  Instead of allowing free market principles to reign along with the consensus mechanism built into the collection of software that makes up a coin’s environment, they checkpoint and write mechanisms to prevent democratic decision making in the blockchain’s development.  That is to be blunt, literally rewriting the rules.  What happens to rules of standards and legitimacy?  It’s gone Jack, totally out the window.

When it comes to looking at the definition as an adverb, we also want to level this playing field.  Everyone knows that (or should know!) that ultimately, profitability as a miner depends on one simple ratio which is cost per hash.  Now there are several ways to improve your cost per hash but not all of us have access to all these paths.  

The simplest way to improve your cost per hash is by paying less for your electricity.  Large farms locate to areas of cheap power for exactly this reason.  The average Joe doesn’t necessarily have the ability to do this.  Hardware is typically the next easiest way to improve your cost per hash.  You don’t really have to have any brains for this department, you just need money, lots of it.  If you have the money to burn, you WILL find ways to purchase equipment that far exceeds the capability of what the average Joe has access to.  There IS private hardware out there.  Not only do manufacturers of mining equipment sell you their used no longer latest and greatest, but there are private companies out there who build their own equipment and write their own software who are vastly more efficient than the average Joe.  

The last major piece for optimizing your cost per hash is in the mining software itself.  Do you notice how each release of mining software yields greater and greater returns?  There is always at least a single digit percent increase in mining speed over the last version.  Do you think maybe it’s possible there are other mining programs out there who have unlocked the Gordian Knot’s of the increasingly complex algorithms used by coins today?  Those knots are supposed to protect the average GPU from the FPGAs and ASICs right?  Maybe what they are really protecting are developer advantages which lead to personal profits!

So, what happens when you have a coin ecosystem that is fair?  An ecosystem where the decision and implementation of the algorithm creates fairness without the ability to have secret advantages?  What happens when there is no premine to be taken advantage of and no governance fee giving a select few a steady income for doing no work which ends up devaluing itself?  What happens when the codebase is open for all to inspect and add upon, letting the ecosystem itself decide what features should be implemented or abandoned?  What happens when no device is favored, and everyone can have access to the same cost per hash excluding what your local energy cost is?  (Somethings are simply outside of a developer’s control, right?)  Do these characteristics build a “fair” ecosystem that would attract miners of all kinds?  We think so.

All this talk of fairness sounds great, but nothing can be fair if you haven’t taken the steps to protect the underlying technology that allows your ecosystem to exist in the first place.  If you look around the coin world today, you will see that most of the coins today are broken.  What do we mean by this?  That almost all coins are vulnerable to attack from a variety of vectors and that more importantly, their dev’s either don’t care or do not have the knowledge and skill to fix their coin.  We find this to be an extremely sad state of affairs, and the fact that the general crypto populace doesn’t even consider these factors to be highly disturbing.  If you are an investor in blockchain technology, how can you accept investing into a project that cannot protect the foundation of everything it builds upon?  An old book talks about castles being built on sand.  I think that’s quite an appropriate description for the majority of current blockchain projects.

We have touched on the three major core values that we have which are fairness, efficiency, and stability.  Now we would like to discuss how we are going to achieve these objectives and what we have already accomplished to date.

Free Haven Protocol was a fork of Haven Protocol which is ultimately just a fork of Monero.  However, we started with a genesis block and changed several key parameters to how the blockchain functioned in effort to begin with some basic network security.  This included a custom 15s block time and a custom version of the Cryptonight algorithm that we ended up calling CN Superfast because it is CN Heavy with a 2MB scratchpad and one quarter the iterations.  The faster block time creates many blocks a day which allows even small pools to win blocks rather frequently.  This helps with miner distribution as being on the biggest pool to get frequent payouts no longer matters as there are EIGHT times more block per day but at one eighth the reward for the same emission.  Transaction fees were also increased which gives incentives to mine more than just empty blocks but overall, the transaction fee is expected to drop for the end-user due to a much smaller transaction size.  At max block size, miner reward is expected to increase which makes up for the extra resources necessary to process the bulletproof transaction.  Meanwhile the custom algorithm change prevented us from being Nicehashable.

Once community support started to build behind the XFH project, we quickly realized this was taking on life above and beyond our initial gag.  While we had already created something interesting that beat Haven on several key points for existing technology (custom algorithm, no premine or fees, network distribution diversity and transparency), we realized we would need to step it up if we were to really make a statement as to how much shit exists in the current crypto ecosystem.  This included the need for a rebranding and some rethinking of the fundamentals of our foundation.

We have decided upon the name Swap for several reasons.  First, fundamentally, Swap is one of the most basic functions of an asset.  Assets are held to eventually Swap for another asset.  If you want to become more philosophical, you could say that Swap was chosen because people need to Swap their way of thinking about crypto.  They need to realize that the fundamental principles that created the first major digital currencies have been Swapped to something that no longer fulfills a vision of fairness and consensus, real democratic principles.  It’s time to Swap the greed and unfair playing fields back to what they were intended to be.  

We envision this project as a guide of what crypto “should” be.  Unlike the vast majority of crypto projects, the core team associated with this project is mostly not anonymous.  While none of us are actively promoting who we are, we aren’t exactly hiding it either.  We are quite transparent and all decision making processes in the birth of this coin to now is readily viewable on our Discord.  We believe this is a testament to the fact that we simply want you to base your opinions not on who we are, but on the technology this project brings to the crypto ecosystem.  We also put forth a call for any developers who would like to help build an ecosystem based on principles of fairness and openness to join us.  This is a community project after all!  Our ultimate goal is to create a stable blockchain that developers can build their products on top of without fear of some random agent bending the blockchain to their will, upsetting the desired stability necessary to take crypto to the next level of global acceptance and use.

As of this writing, our rebase to the latest Monero codebase 0.13.04 is completed and we will be activating our bulletproof fork at block 150k.  By doing this we have maintained repo integrity with Monero and adopted Haven’s changes manually so that the .13 based daemon can sync to the Free Haven chain.  At block 150k we will be feature sync with Monero with the following distinctions.  We started with RingCT at block 0.  We have version 2 transactions from block 0 along with dynamic fees.  The reward tx will not change, only other txes.  Our chain is more consistent than Monero’s as we started with the majority of improvements that Monero implemented over time.  Starting from block 150k, we can now merge their patches easily in the future yet still go our own path.
Speaking of going our own path.  We are convinced that the Cryptonight algorithm is garbage for anything but Monero.  The algorithm promotes through its virtues of obfuscation, inequalities that cannot be compensated for.  This requires us to abandon Cryptonight in search of an algorithm or algorithms that more serve our needs for fairness and openness.  We do have a compass set in the direction we intend to head in this matter however much testing and implementation will be necessary to get there.

To summarize in brief, we are exploring primarily cuckaroo algorithm variants for our proof of work.  The simpler the algorithm, the less advantage those with the means shall have.  A simple algorithm that is open source is the first step in securing the block chain as it helps to level the playing field.  We are currently targeting a 4GB memory requirement with the ability to expand that as future tech comes into play.  

In regards to the rebrand, the only thing you will need to do is download a new wallet.  There is no swap needed to convert your old XFH coins to the new XWP.  It's simply a name change and new wallet.  Your old address and keys are still perfectly valid.  Swap is simply a fork from XFH at block 150,000 which is right around the corner.

Supply & Emission
Total supply: 18,400,000 coins before tail emission.
Coin symbol: XWP
Hash algorithm: CryptoNight SuperFast (Proof-Of-Work)
Block time: 15 seconds
Monero DAA - No Zawy BS that doesn't work!

Mining your XWP Coins
Everything you need to know can be found on the Github page.  We are currently supported by every major mining software for Cryptonight.