Bitcoin and the cryptocurrency industry has been a remarkable success by many metrics. We have mainstream consciousness, regulatory clarity, and huge amounts of apps for users and open-source software for developers.
However, no project, not even Bitcoin, has delivered on the idea sketched out by Satoshi Nakamoto in the original white paper, emails, and forum posts. Although Bitcoin has a large market cap, the maximum block size was limited a long time ago leading to extraordinarily high fees today. Our goal is to launch a new blockchain in 2024 that is architecturally identical to the original Bitcoin, but with parameters adjusted to the conditions of 2024.
This original idea has not been tried, not even by Bitcoin, which has been throttled for most of its history. By unthrottling the caps, this enables the “small casual transactions” and “micropayments” that Satoshi Nakamoto described.
By launching a new blockchain with a new genesis block, we solve many problems:
Starting over with the mining subsidy means everyone has a chance to participate in mining early on. When Bitcoin launched almost no one heard about it or cared. However, today, everyone knows about Bitcoin and everyone would be eager to mine it. By starting over, we give everyone a chance to mine on day one.
We can keep the maximum block size, maximum transaction size, and maximum script size uncapped. This eliminates the developer consensus issue needed to change Bitcoin and reflects the original design of Bitcoin which assumed these values would be miner-adjustable policy decisions.
By enabling Script, we will be able to use the full flexibility of the Bitcoin scripting language. This will enable us to build more complex applications on top of the blockchain.
We can use the latest technology. Bitcoin was written in C++ and has a lot of technical debt. We are writing the new blockchain in Rust and TypeScript simultaneously. This will enable us to build a fast node software and a toolkit for developers to build web apps on launch. The peer-to-peer protocol will be web-based from day one, which is far easier and familiar for all developers.
Thanks to modern tooling, especially AI, the project is proceeding very quickly. I am optimistic we will be able to launch the first version in just a few months.
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