Cryptocurrency Code Review: Loki

Disclaimer: These reviews are done as is from what is on display in the master branch of the repo’s made available. This review is not a comment on the overall project, scope, or success thereof. This was done as an educational review by me and any comments in the article are simply my opinion. It should not be used as any comment or advice on the project as a whole.

Review Date: 13/03/2018

“Trade and communicate with absolute freedom. Private transactions, decentralised communication.”

So loki.network is a new privacy coin coming out. There team use github profiles instead of their linkedin profiles, so let’s have a look;

Monero clones, and 33 contributions in the last year.

Monero clones, and 14 contributions in the last year.

Electroneum clones, and 17 contributions in the last year.

If this is their github, I don’t know why they are hiding their linkedin…

Anyway, on to the code;

One repo, loki, and as expected, forked from Monero.

This is the loki testnet, we aren’t going to go through all of Monero’s code so instead let’s look at the commits they have made (this is the value that they are adding to the project)

Readme update and name changes, as expected.

Removal of monero specific data.

A nice 40000000000000000 premined tokens given to the first miner.

Nothing fancy here, a rework in the block reward, Monero does a time based trickle, loki has a mechanic split based on a certain block height. Rewarding early adopters.

Port changes and renames, nothing interesting here.

And that’s all we have.

Conclusion: While the changes they have made are only a tiny fraction, the code itself isn’t bad, but, all this is, is Monero with a different reward structure. Will they be able to update their code base fast enough to keep up?

We are seeing more and more clones (and Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery), but that being said Facebook was a clone Myspace, Google was a clone of (spider, mamma, yahoo, etc), Apple and Windows were clones of IBM.

There is very little to see here, and right now, they aren’t bringing anything new to the game, other than a clone of Monero.