The Future of Bitcoin Private BTCP
Improving privacy across the board is an important piece of the Bitcoin Private project. Currently, zk-SNARKs are quite RAM and CPU intensive during the signing of the transaction, which can take up to a few minutes. One of the first improvements to be implemented post-fork is the new sapling, termed “Jubjub,” currently under development by the Zcash core development team.
This new sapling will allow for a significant improvement in the speed and user-friendliness of shielded transactions for zk-SNARKs privacy coins. Another methodology for improving the privacy of Bitcoin Private is to utilize the “Dandelion” privacy project currently under development.17 This technique involves the “stem” (the transactions) and the “fluff” (obfuscation).
While any obfuscation procedure is inherently less secure than zk-SNARKs, Dandelion obfuscation could be added to both transparent and shielded transactions of Bitcoin Private, improving privacy across the board. Allowing for blockchain improvements to Bitcoin Private is of great importance to the project. BIP9 has been incorporated into the blockchain to allow for soft forks and thus, improvements.18 After the proper coding for improvements has been finished, the miners are asked to signal readiness to accept the chain code change. When 95% of miners accept the change, it becomes 8 “locked-in” and the soft fork is completed.
However, if the miners do not signal readiness within the specified time, the soft fork will fail, and no changes will take place. Support and development of the Bitcoin Private project will rely on continued treasury fund collection in a manner other than mining pool donations. However, the Bitcoin Private contribution team strongly opposes any sort of imposed taxation on its community without a democratic vote in favor of such.
Therefore, one of the first proposed changes via BIP9 will involve treasury fund collection parameters. In this way, the miners are able to choose what is a suitable amount they are willing to donate as a collective to ensure the future success of the program. As stated in Section 2, the low amount of mineable Bitcoin Private remaining after the fork could cause some problems, including extremely low network hash rate. A possible solution is to offer the removal of coins that remain unmoved from before the fork.
If this implementation is chosen, approximately 0.14% of all unmoved Bitcoin Private coins from the fork would be removed daily over the course of two years. In this scenario, Bitcoin Private coins would be removed equally across all wallets: each wallet with unmoved Bitcoin Private will lose ca. 0.14% of its coins per day for 2 years. This methodology would free up a significant portion of coins for miners while giving ample time for users to move their forked coins.
Furthermore, the low percentage of daily removal should prevent any shock to the market cap occurring. As a backup measure, a “difficulty bomb” has been implemented into Bitcoin Private to allow for significant future development, in a similar manner as with Ethereum.19 When utilized, the difficulty bomb will be applied to the old blockchain code, reminding miners to adopt new code base for continued improvements. This method is considered a last resort and will only be used under extreme circumstances.
Potentially, the bomb could be implemented to introduce a new governance system, such as, but not limited to, the system featured by Decred.20 This will allow for further democratization and decentralization of the Bitcoin Private blockchain. Currently, the difficulty bomb date is set for March 2, 2019, however, hardforks can be utilized to extend this date indefinitely. Noncoincidentally, the first halving will occur around the date of the difficulty bomb; this will allow for changes to be made should the low inflation experiment prove to be unsuccessful.
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