Why Blake-256?
Design
▫️The simplicity of the algorithm
▫️interface for hashing with a salt
▫️reward for mining Photon does NOT decrease over time
▫️Reward increases with block height and difficulty
▫️No reduction of mining hash rate or Power Efficiency over time
Performance
▫️Fast in both Software and Hardware
▫️Parellelism and throughput/area trade-off for hardware implentation
▫️simple speed/confidence trade-off tunable number of rounds
▫️3x faster on the GPU and just over 2x on the FPGA compared with Bitcoin
Security
▫️based on an intensively analyzed component (ChaCha)
▫️resistant to generic second-preimage attacks
▫️resistant to side-channel attacks
▫️resistant to length-extension
▫️Photon does NOT include artificial *Security* or *Resistance*