Do you remember my last article on Super Bitcoin?
I talked about how 2017 is going to be the year of hard forks. I was still a bit doubtful back then but after the recent revelation, I am no more. It’s the fourth hard fork in a single year for the Bitcoin blockchain.
At first, it was Bitcoin cash. This hard fork took place in August 2017. Because a group of Bitcoin enthusiasts found the Bitcoin’s 1 MB block size not suitable for SegWit implementation. And they feared that it will further slow down the Bitcoin network, creating more chaos.
After that, we saw the Bitcoin Gold hard fork. This hard fork took place on 25th October 2017 and was launched on a mission to “decentralize” the Bitcoin platform once again. Led by Jack Liao, Bitcoin Gold is already supported by a handful of exchanges including Bitfinex, Binance, Bittrex etc.
Several wallets already support it too including hardware wallets like Ledger and Trezor. The main goal of this hard fork was to solve a few issues Bitcoin has been facing for the last couple of years. For example, the mining issue.
And then I heard about another hard fork called super Bitcoin or SBTC. It is due to launch in this December. Super Bitcoin is going a step forward and incorporating advanced features like smart contracts, lightning network, zero-knowledge proofs etc to the Bitcoin blockchain.
Last updated on 16th February 2018
And just when I thought it was going to be the last hard fork of this year, Bitcoin Diamond popped up literally out of nowhere. I haven’t seen a lot of threads or hype regarding Bitcoin Diamond, that’s why I was effectively missing out on it. But now that I have found out about it somehow, I cannot help but share it with you.
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What Is Bitcoin Diamond Or BCD?
Just like Bitcoin cash, Bitcoin Gold, and super Bitcoin, Bitcoin Diamond is a derivative of the Bitcoin blockchain. The hard fork is going to occur at the block height of 495866 of the original Bitcoin blockchain.
The Bitcoin Diamond Foundation has already successfully carried out the hard fork today (24th November at 9:20am GMT).
Now we are just waiting for it to be released to the exchanges and fully supported on the mentioned wallets. As soon these two happen, the miners will be able to jump on in the game.
When the miners start mining only then the Bitcoin Diamond blockchain gets bifurcated from the original blockchain.
According to the development team, Bitcoin Diamond is not competing against Bitcoin. Instead, BCD is improving upon the foundations of Bitcoin and carrying the legacy of it.
Who Are Behind Bitcoin Diamond?
As far as I know, the main founding members of Bitcoin Diamond are two miner teams – team EVEY and team 007. But I believe there are other anonymous members actively participating in the project too.
As a matter of fact, you can also join their team as they are looking for more passionate members for guiding the project.
Why Do We Need Bitcoin Diamond?
In the recent years, it has become quite evident that Bitcoin which was introduced way back in 2009 has become extremely saturated in terms of scalability and further development. Neither it has the framework, nor the network capabilities to incorporate new industry standards like lightning network, zero-knowledge proofs etc.
Bitcoin doesn’t even support the creation of smart contracts and decentralized applications. And actually, this is what made Vitalik create Ethereum.
Bitcoin has somewhat drifted away from Satoshi’s original promise of one CPU/node one vote too. Currently, ASICs completely dominate the mining side of Bitcoin.
Bitcoin Diamond looks forward to addressing all of the issues mentioned above, as well as make some new amends.
How Is Bitcoin Diamond Going To Solve The Issues With Bitcoin?
According to the official website, Bitcoin Diamond is going to solve –
- Lack of privacy protection.
- Slow transaction confirmations.
- High threshold for new members.
Scalability
First of all, let’s address the problem of scalability. Bitcoin Diamond is hoping to solve the problem of scalability by introducing increased block size of 8 MB against Bitcoin’s 1 MB. This will prove to be immensely helpful as Bitcoin Diamond supports segregated witness.
Supply
Bitcoin Diamond will also have a maximum of 210 million BCD in supply, a tenfold increase over Bitcoin’s 21 million BTC. The development team argues that they are doing this to lower the cost of participation.
This will lower the fees and prices by ten times and eventually interest more newcomers to invest to create a healthy economy. Out of this 210 million BCD, only 170 million will be available for purchase.
The rest 40 million will be distributed among community reward pools as tributes and mining rewards.
Encryption Of Amount
Apart from this, Bitcoin Diamond will also support encryption of transaction and balance information. So looks look it is going to implement some form of ZkSNARK.
Faster Transactions
Bitcoin Diamond will also be able to process transactions faster than Bitcoin, thanks to a bigger block size. The development team claims that it will be able to handle 4.8 million transactions per day. This means transaction confirmations will be faster too.
New Mining Algorithm
Bitcoin Diamond has also moved on from Bitcoin’s SHA-256 algorithm and is using an improved version of X13 for mining.
This version will only allow GPU mining, completely blocking off ASICs.
This way the initial cost of participation for miners will also be low. The mining difficulty will get adjusted every 2 weeks.
Replay Protection
As Bitcoin Diamond is a hard fork of Bitcoin, it needs some sort of replay protection to prevent the network against attacks. So the development team has already implemented this.
Supported Exchanges And Wallets
It looks like several prominent exchanges are supporting Bitcoin Diamond from its humble beginning.
The list includes popular exchanges like Binance, Cex, etc.
Right now only a handful of wallets support or are going to support Bitcoin Diamond. There are no paper or brain wallet at the moment. And there are no hardware wallets either. It looks like there are only web wallets like QoinPro, Bitgo.cc etc available at the moment.
How To Acquire Bitcoin Diamond?
You can buy Bitcoin Diamond from the exchanges mentioned on the website.
There is also a special airdrop scheme for Bitcoin users who held on to their BTC during the hard fork. If you happen to be one of the lucky people who held, then you can claim BCD against your BTC in 1:10 ratio. Yes, you read that right – they are giving 10 BCD for every 1 BTC. This is because the Bitcoin Diamond project has 10x more coin supply than Bitcoin.
You can also earn BCD by mining. And the mining will be fairly rewarding right now since the project just started. Plus you can only mine with GPU rigs.
So that means low initial setup cost. But be aware that X13 mining algorithm mainly favors AMD graphics card.
The website also claims that you can earn BCD by taking part in the ecological construction of Bitcoin Diamond.
Final Words
Bitcoin Diamond looks like a promising project. It has already been successfully hard fork-ed. So let’s hope everything goes as planned and Bitcoin Diamond turns out to be a good cryptocurrency.
Currently, Bitcoin Diamond is trading for about $31.
Personally, I’m not a big fan of the name. In my opinion, any cryptocurrency that uses “Bitcoin” in its name is begging for publicity. I realize that this a hard fork of the original Bitcoin blockchain but it is introducing so many new features too.
So why not name it something completely different?
Plus the name “Bitcoin Diamond” sounds like they are in a direct competition against “Bitcoin Gold”.
But anyway, I wish nothing but good luck to the project and I hope this goes far.