Bitcoin Cash has released a roadmap that potentially takes the blockchain in the direction of the Ethereum project, by developing out its own token economy.
The roadmap shows the status of planned and complete development activities under the scaling, usability, and extensibility legs of the Bitcoin ABC protocol.
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Scaling
The scaling roadmap includes projects to improve transaction ordering (via scalable block processing) and also a plan to improve block propagation times between nodes and miners.
Other planned development activities include Meklix trees and the potentially controversial adjustable block cap, which will target growth up to 1TB blocks. The ABC in the protocol’s name stands for adjustable block caps. Any change to block size will most probably require a hard fork upgrade to the code, which would require a level of consensus between miners and node operators.
Usability
The usability roadmap has projects for improved hardware wallet security (with sighash) and also has plans for fee improvements to improve transaction costs for data on the blockchain. The ABC team also think they can break down the lowest unit available on the Bitcoin blockchain (1 Satoshi) by aiming to secure “low fees forever” through fractional satoshis.
The overarching usability goal is still to head towards improved confirmation times. The team hope to be able to provide enough trust for merchants to finalise transactions in only three seconds. If they can achieve these times, it will put Bitcoin Cash blockchain confirmations in line with leading merchant payment solutions currently operational throughout the world.
Extensibility
One of the goals for the ABC team is to create a fully fledged token economy, where all classes of assets can be traded on top of the Bitcoin Cash blockchain. This will be enabled through a revised transaction format and also the release and development of various opcodes like OP_CHECKDATASIG.
These opcode releases will allow things like Oracles to be programmed into the blockchain. Oracles are key to gaining consensus around the status of a third-party outcome. Projects like Auger require Oracles to determine the outcomes of current events linked to an actively traded betting market on the platform.
Continued war with Bitcoin SV
Just yesterday, it was reported on Reddit that the Calvin Ayre-backed mining pool CoinGeek are back to mining Bitcoin Cash blocks. Yesterday they found 0.7% of the blocks mined in a 24-hour period.
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If hard or soft forks are required as part of any proposed upgrades, we could see Calvin step back in to cause mayhem with more chain split attacks.
Both Calvin Ayre and Craig Wright have been pretty vocal over the past few months. They openly opposed the move towards an ERC-20-style token economy built on top of the BCH chain, and this disagreement led to the eventual chain split which created the Bitcoin Cash and Bitcoin SV chains. Just last week, Coin Rivet covered the story of the Metanet project announced for Bitcoin SV.
We saw a lot of flippening in market cap between the two competing blockchains last week. At the time of writing, BCH is ahead in terms of market cap, but the eventual winner will probably be decided by the project that actually ends up providing the highest utility for users in the long run.
Disclaimer: The views and opinions expressed by the author should not be considered as financial advice. We do not give advice on financial products.