The goal of developing cryptocurrency was to create a currency that can be used by anyone, anywhere and anytime without borders. Such cryptocurrency needs to be free from censorship. It cannot be controlled by any government, company, individual or developer. It needs to be self sustained so it can keep working even if everything build around it shuts down. This includes websites, developers, seed nodes or social media accounts.
Nerva core software has been running, mining blocks and processing transactions without any code changes for over 2 years now. Are there some issues? Sure. Things can be improved and we’ll work on making the software work better.
Nerva has good foundation. It’s set up to be censorship resistant by requiring each miner to keep a copy of the blockchain so traditional mining pools where you just start mining software and submit shares to the pool is not possible. This also greatly improves decentralization because every miner is a full node.
Nerva is also in tail emission so majority of the supply has already been distributed to miners over the years and now each block has 0.3 XNV reward. Currently it means 0.833% annual inflation. This percentage will slowly go down with time. This still gives miners incentive to mine and process transactions and miners are willing to mine as can be seen with recent hash rate increase.
Where do we go from here? We will work on making Nerva software more self sustained. The goal is to have a blockchain that only needs a community of people who are willing to use it, mine it and support it with their CPUs, a blockchain that cannot be shut down or taken offline by anybody. That’s the end goal. How close can we get to that?