In the continuous advancing and ever-changing world of cryptocurrency, new developments and exciting events occur, including hard forks. Since its inception, Bitcoin has opened alternative possibilities in payments, through quick access to information and the emergence of significant global online communities. Although it represents the most successful approach for establishing a currency outside of state supervision and government controls, it faces limitations because of the growing number of users and the technology’s potential assessments. For this, developers in the cryptocurrency community have sought to develop new blockchains by changing the basic principles of its source code. However, addressing these limitations is not as simple as it seems. The Bitcoin community has different opinions regarding the most effective approach, and that has brought about several Bitcoin forks, all of which have a distinct level of success and applicability.
To have a complete understanding of the impending BTC Ultimatum (BTCU) hard fork. This article will examine several Bitcoin forks, including Bitcoin Gold and Bitcoin Private, review the ideas behind each and compare them with BTC Ultimatum.
As the first unsuccessful Bitcoin fork led by Mike Hearn, Bitcoin XT attempted to introduce an alternative P2P protocol that performs UTXO lookups through what he termed the Bitcoin Improvement Proposal (BIP 64). In short, Mike Hearn was looking to increase the number of Bitcoin Transactions to 24/sec by increasing the initial Bitcoin block size from 1mb to 8mb and subsequently ensuring Bitcoin XT block size automatically doubles (in size) every 2years. Nevertheless, the Bitcoin XT proposed plan failed due to lack of support from the Bitcoin user community.
Similar to Bitcoin XT, both Bitcoin Classic and Bitcoin Unlimited were unsuccessful attempts to resolve the Bitcoin scaling puzzle. But in August 2017, Bitcoin Cash (BCH) forked away from Bitcoin with the aim of “achieving the original purpose of Bitcoin as a ‘Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash,’” the most successful Bitcoin fork so far regarding scalability. BCH advocates reiterated the need to increase BTC’s original block size to 8MB (and finally to 32MB) to fulfil the original purpose of the cryptocurrency (as a medium of exchange) opposed to it growing store of value concerns. The cryptocurrency developers promised decentralized digital cash with a high-volume transaction system that offers low fees for every user, something Bitcoin has failed to deliver.
In 2018, the debate over which vision to conform to (either Bitcoin or Bitcoin Cash) became more complex, which resulted in creating Bitcoin SV (BSV) from Bitcoin Cash. Bitcoin SV emergence was due to the opposition of several improvements that were set to be implemented to the BCH protocol. The opposition claimed the upgrades would alter the original vision for Bitcoin as digital cash, as a result, they launched a new chain, “Bitcoin Satoshi’s Vision” that reverted such changes and offered block size of 128MB.
Bitcoin Gold (BTG) is another Bitcoin fork that took place on 24th October 2017 at block 491407. The purpose of this fork was to address and restore Bitcoin mining decentralization. The fork changed the Bitcoin mining network’s Proof of Work algorithm to Equihash, which restricts the use of dedicated hardware like ASICs for mining. For this, ASICs could not mine BTG but through widespread consumer hardware (GPUs) found in many home computers.
Then came the quest to make Bitcoin transactions completely anonymous. Bitcoin Private (BTCP) occurred on January 5th, 2019 at block 455500. It is a combination of zk Snarks (the privacy-enhancing technology that has been implemented in the Z class of coins) and Bitcoin. It gives users the ability to conduct anonymous transactions. The developers created it as an improvement over both Zclassic and Bitcoin by considering the flaws and errors of both cryptocurrencies (Hive 2018).
What do we know about the upcoming BTC Ultimatum (BTCU) fork? It combines the most advanced Bitcoin solutions into a single fork. The BTCU blockchain is similar to the Etherium concept. Like the Etherium blockchain, it opposes Bitcoin methods of using cryptocurrency mining capabilities. It also has the additional functionality of creating smart contracts, and the implementation of atomic swaps will enable transactions to interact with several other protocols- this will give a qualitatively new level of creation and development of dAPP solutions. The fork will address the Bitcoin privacy issue by offering users the option to switch between public and private ledgers when conducting transactions on the network.
