Show HN: Emulating Bitcoin on Ethereum

5 points by buttershakes 8 years ago | 6 comments

Hi guys,

It is no secret that I'm pretty tired of the political infighting around Bitcoin. The environment got so toxic that I stopped most of my Bitcoin-centric development to focus on other projects. I'm pretty sure there are many developers who have felt the same way, and the result has been an explosion in alternative coins and technologies as developer resources have gone elsewhere.

So, I started a simple experiment. What if we got rid of developers entirely, and just replicated and adapted the deflationary structure of Bitcoin on Ethereum. We could model the entire process as an autonomous smart contract, and build a deflationary kernel into Ethereum itself. This would give us a 'store-of-value' token that had access to Ethereum's smart contract language and ecosystem. Just like USD and other inflationary currencies are spent to "mine" Bitcoin, we could spend Ether in an algorithmic way to "mine" a Bitcoin clone. This clone would merge the benefits of both, and deliver a working product quickly.

The end result is my ERC20 Token Bitcoineum. More information available on www.bitcoineum.com, come join us in telegram at https://t.me/bitcoineum So far upwards of $250,000 USD has been committed to mining. This is made simple through on-chain smart contract pools that aggregate individual users and remove the need for client software.

This is the first completely mobile mined currency. It is decentralized in the sense that anyone with an Ethereum wallet can mine it. It borrows its security and capabilities from the Ethereum network itself, and it is working right now. If you are interested in the development of this type of ecosystem come join us :)

tree_of_item 8 years ago |

Genuinely can't tell if this is a joke or not. Well played.

buttershakes 8 years ago | |

It's not :). It is also a running commentary on the idea that Bitcoin can survive simply as a store-of-value when that functionality can be replicated.

https://etherscan.io/address/0x73dd069c299a5d691e9836243bcae...

https://etherscan.io/address/0xdeaddeaddeaddeaddeaddeaddeadd...

fiatjaf 8 years ago |

Wait, people have spent 250000 USD on that? This can't be serious.

So "mining" is burning ETH by sending it to the contract? How can this be a good idea if you're already relying on the mining that happens on the Ethereum network? Basically you're just trading a valuable asset, ETH, for a token that has no value and no useful properties.

buttershakes 8 years ago | |

You should read up on it before you draw conclusions. It does have useful properties, it structurally is similar to Bitcoin while having the smart contract capabilities of Ethereum. Eth is inflationary, and being valuable is really not what you want in the token that drives your smart contract ecosystem. It's value is almost entirely driven by speculation. Further, it's designed to virtualize the mining process for all tokens that derive from it, that keeps work on chain and creates long term value rather than the ICO which is designed to remove as much money from people as quickly as possible.

Whether those properties matter to you is up for debate, but we have replicated the semantics of Bitcoin very closely, on a network that does more transactions. It makes the store-of-value argument for Bitcoin very weak indeed.

fiatjaf 8 years ago | | |

Sorry, I didn't want to sound like a jerk, but my criticism still applies and I mean it wholeheartedly.

You are right about the up-to-debate value of the thing, so what I've said is my part in the debate.

You are also right that I didn't read everything, but perhaps a superficial view of the thing is missing from your perspective, since you've clearly devoted long hours thinking about this :P