BCH2020 — A Retrospective On The Craziest of Years
BCH2020 — A Retrospective On The Craziest of Years
2020 has been an exciting year for Bitcoin Cash, and we’d like to take a moment to recognize how far we’ve come as a coin, and as a community. While BCH may have gotten more attention this year from internal struggles, there were numerous successes in adoption, privacy, events, and development!
Let’s dive into the cray year that was 2020.
Platforms and adoption
The more ways there are to use Bitcoin Cash, the more useful it is a digital money.
One new arrival this year is VenezuelaWorkers.com, a freelancing platform that connects Venezuelan freelancers to the global market. You can hear more about VenezuelaWorkers and their plans for the future in this episode of the Unlimit Podcast:
Funding was a hot topic in 2020, leading to the development and release of Flipstarter, a decentralized Bitcoin Cash crowdfunding tool. Anyone can host a campaign themselves, either using their own server, or getting set up in just a few clicks with paid hosting.
Flipstarter works similarly to Kickstarter: campaigns choose a funding goal, and then pledges are only finalized if the project reaches that goal. But Flipstarter doesn’t require a trusted third party. Instead, with a clever bit of Bitcoin Script, the funding transaction will simply not be valid unless the campaign reaches its goal. So far, over 40 projects have been successfully funded using Flipstarter, with almost 6000 BCH raised in total.
Learn more about Flipstarter from imaginary_username on the Unlimit podcast:
Also new to the Bitcoin Cash ecosystem is Playmo.gg, a platform for hosting competitive video game events with cryptocurrency prize pools. With its young and tech-savvy demographic, the gaming community may be a perfect opportunity for electronic cash. Best of luck to them on that front.
A particularly recent addition to the Bitcoin Cash ecosystem is ShareTip.me, brought to you by the same developer that maintains u/chaintip on Reddit and @chaintip on Twitter, two of BCH’s most popular tipping tools. The goal for ShareTip.me is to allow you to tip anyone on the internet, and it’s implementing an interesting incentive system to enable that.
Blockchain.poker was founded in 2015, but this year they saw explosive growth in the number of games played, with the vast majority of that growth coming from Bitcoin Cash games. You can see the numbers and a list of features added this year in their 2020 recap.
The Bitcoin Cash friendly payment processor GoCrypto has also been making waves, most notably onboarding Burger King to their point of sale system in their home country of Slovenia, where they also surpassed 1,000 onboarded locations this year.
Thanks to a collaboration between Bitcoin.com, Bitfinex, and the SLP Foundation, the US Dollar stablecoin USDT, aka “Tether”, has been launched as an SLP token on Bitcoin Cash. While a controversial token, there’s no doubt that Tether is the most popular stable coin, used to trade on exchanges all over the world. Its launch on Bitcoin Cash as an SLP token is a testament to the protocol’s success.
Privacy
Upon passing its security audit, CashFusion was released in the Electron Cash desktop wallet this summer, solidifying Bitcoin Cash’s position as a privacy coin. (Credit to Bitcoin.com for matching contributions to the audit fundraiser!) CashFusion is a coin-mixing protocol that significantly improves on CashShuffle.
So far, CashFusion transactions have processed over 2.5 million BCH. (And as a side effect, CashFusion has also reduced the UTXO set by over 40 thousand outputs.)
Events
With governments around the world restricting travel due to COVID-19, in-person events were far and few between this year. But that didn’t stop Bitcoin Cash from continuing its momentum with online events and meetups!
The Block Hack Global 2020 hackathon was held over a six week period starting October 5th with fifty thousand dollars in seed funding up for grabs. The SLP foundation was an Adoption Partner for the event, providing a $5k project bounty. Two presentations on the Simple Ledger Protocol were given for hackers, in addition to an introduction to Bitcoin Cash application development.
Bitcoin Cash DevCon III, a 72 Bitcoin Cash hackathon, was held in early November. The event featured workshops for participants on various BCH-related development topics like SLP tokens, Cashscript, the SWAP protocol, and several development resources. Congratulations to all teams for their completed projects; you can see their final presentations here.
Bitcoin Cash also underwent its third halving this year, its first since the 2017 split with BTC. While not a particularly exciting event in and of itself, it’s a reminder that Bitcoin Cash has a limited supply, and that we need to reach global scales if the miners are going to be incentivized by transaction fees alone by 2140 when the block reward runs out.
Protocol Development
Bitcoin was a remarkable innovation, and Bitcoin Cash carries on that tradition with evidence-based, decentralized protocol development.
In the May 2020 upgrade, there were two consensus rule updates. First, the “SigOps” limit was replaced with “SigChecks”, which directly limits the number of signature checks that need to be performed in a block. Second, a new opcode, OP_REVERSEBYTES, was added to the protocol. It reverses the order of bytes in a string, and can be used to change what’s called “endianness” in Bitcoin script. The recommended limit for chains of transactions in the mempool was also raised from 25 to 50.
For the November 2020 upgrade, the difficulty adjustment algorithm was updated to an exponentially weighted function which drastically reduces oscillation between high and low hashrate that was occurring due to the previous algorithm. That oscillation led to high confirmation times, a frustrating experience for users.
Bitcoin Cash also boasts multiple full node development teams, each with their own strengths, use cases, and development teams. Full nodes are used for mining (among other things), and so are the point of focus when it comes to scaling Bitcoin Cash to handle more and more transactions.
Bitcoin Unlimited is proud to be one of those teams. This year, BU has completed work on scaling the unconfirmed transaction limit, removing the infamous “cs_main” serialization point from the block acceptance code, and implementing double-spend proofs. BU has also broadened its offerings with Electrscash and bch-rpc-explorer, and has announced the forthcoming “Wally Wallet” for Android and desktop computers.
Bitcoin Verde celebrated the release of version 2.0 of their full node this year with drastically reduced system requirements, including storage space requirements. (This was the largest feature from their Flipstarter campaign.) Bitcoin Verde will also be compatible with testnet in its next release, with plans to add scalenet support soon.
Flowee is a suite of software products, including Flowee the Hub, a Bitcoin Cash full node client. Improvements made this year include new stability and performance features related to the UTXO database, increased reliability of the Hub and Indexer, fixes to the Double Spend proof components, and the addition of a library focused on features needed for SPV wallets. Flowee also released the first beta of its own SPV wallet called “Flowee Pay”.
In addition to various bugfixes and supporting the bi-annual upgrades, BCHD has implemented several changes that bring it in line with other BCH nodes, including allowing unknown protocol messages and changing several RPC methods. Additionally, there’s a new fastsync checkpoint, documentation has been improved, and all known issues with using BCHD as a back-end for Fulcrum have been resolved. SLP support is also nearing the end of beta, and will be released in a forthcoming update.
Knuth is a BCH node implementation written in C++, with an emphasis on performance and modern C++ development. Knuth is also a set of libraries, and it now has 3 APIs available: C++17, C(11), and C#. Python, Rust, and GoLang APIs are in development. Achievements this year include the addition of the C and C# libraries, testnet4 support, scalenet support, the addition of a package management system, various bugfixes, code modernization, and performance improvements.
Bitcoin Cash Node, BCHN for short, is the newest addition to the BCH full node roster. It started as a drop-in replacement for Bitcoin ABC without the “Infrastructure Funding Plan”. Since then, they have established themselves as an invaluable asset to the BCH ecosystem. BCHN has made improvements to various scaling-related functions including block generation, propagation of messages, RPC calls, and mempool acceptance. There has also been significant progress made towards implementing Double Spend Proofs.
IFP
The most widely publicized event in the BCH ecosystem this year was the rejection of the “Infrastructure Funding Plan” as proposed by Bitcoin ABC, and the resulting chain split. In the process, the Bitcoin Cash community proved its resilience, and the decentralized nature of BCH itself. Even when starting with significant market dominance in the Bitcoin Cash mining ecosystem, Bitcoin ABC was unable to unilaterally force unacceptable changes into the Bitcoin Cash protocol. The BCH community should take pride in doing what few (if any) other projects have managed to do. (Bitcoin Unlimited voted to reject the IFP with the passing of BUIP143 early on this year.)
Media
Bitcoin Unlimited also launched its Unlimit podcast. The Unlimit podcast is aimed at the topics of BU development, Bitcoin Cash, and even more in the coming year. You can see all the podcasts on Youtube at:
You can also listen to the Unlimit podcast on Spotify at:
https://open.spotify.com/show/09znY8OmFhmBhDF6ixQfRp
And you can subscribe to the podcast RSS feed at:
https://feed.podbean.com/bitcoinunlimited/feed.xml
On To 2021
It’s the dedication of the Bitcoin Cash community that makes BCH so valuable, and it’s what gives us hope that we will succeed in empowering the unbanked and underprivileged with Peer to Peer Electronic Cash. We look forward to scaling Bitcoin Cash to global adoption in 2021 and beyond!
Let’s build Bitcoin Cash into the most useful money the world has ever seen!
