Author: Hiro Midas
Background
Bitcoin is by far the most successful cryptocurrency. After ten years of development, the concept of Bitcoin as a community currency has gained widespread acceptance. With the participation of more and more miners, exchanges, developers, and ordinary users, the network effect of Bitcoin is strong and growing. According to the latest data from CoinMarketCap, Bitcoin Dominance accounts for 65.4% of the total market value of cryptocurrency, which is unmatched by any other blockchain project.
However, this huge network effect has not spawned more valuable applications on the Bitcoin network. This is mainly due to the non-Turing complete script of Bitcoin, which cannot support the implementation of complex logic. Although Bitcoin uses non-Turing-complete scripts for security reasons, this undoubtedly sacrifices more possibilities for the Bitcoin ecosystem and hinders the further expansion of its network effect.
Smart contracts are Turing complete and can be used to develop complex DApps. But even though Ethereum and other blockchain projects support smart contracts, the user base and network effects pale in comparison to Bitcoin.
BSC = Bitcoin Users + Smart Contracts
We propose BSC (Bitcoin Smart Contract) in the whitepaper https://docs.bsc.net/en/bsc_en.pdf BSC will be a hard fork of Bitcoin, inheriting all the transaction history of Bitcoin, and will support smart contracts with unlimited flexibility. With the original user base and network effects of Bitcoin, BSC will enable DApps with real value.
Bitcoin users + smart contracts are likely to bring the entire industry into a new phase. Applications in the original smart contract ecosystem will likely bring qualitative changes with the help of Bitcoin’s network effect:
- BTC + Digital Assets. Bitcoin users and developers will be able to issue digital assets similar to ERC-20 on the BSC network. The Bitcoin network effect makes these assets potentially more useful and valuable.
- BTC + DeFi. Similar to MakerDAO, decentralized lending and fund custody, stablecoins, etc. will be built on the user base of Bitcoin to gain greater scale and visibility with the leading crypto asset.
- BTC + Privacy Protocol. Since Bitcoin assets account for a very high proportion in the entire industry, Bitcoin users’ need for privacy is even more urgent. A smart contract-based privacy protocol can be built in the BSC ecosystem, and Bitcoin users can use this to achieve asset privacy.
- BTC + DApp. Bitcoin users can directly create various DApps in the BSC network, such as decentralized exchanges, decentralized games, and decentralized domain name services. These applications are not mainstream now, but given the huge network effect of Bitcoin, there will be more DApps that can prove their value.
Compatibility with Bitcoin Ecosystem
To provide the huge network effect of Bitcoin, BSC is technically compatible with Bitcoin in terms of the underlying architecture and network parameters:
The infrastructure layer of the BSC adopts the UTXO (Unspent Transaction Output) model that is completely consistent with Bitcoin, supports all script types of Bitcoin, and naturally supports SegWit, multi-sig, etc. Compared with the account model, the UTXO model has certain advantages in terms of security, anonymity, and parallelism, and supports SPV (Simple Payment Verification), which makes it easier to support light wallets.
Due to the consistency of the underlying architecture, BSC is naturally compatible with the Bitcoin ecosystem. For example, all types of Bitcoin wallets, browsers, and Layer-2 protocols (such as the Lightning Network) can directly support BSC, and users have no limits.
Also, the upper limit of the total supply of BSC, the inflation rate, and the halving period are all consistent with Bitcoin. BSC will also inherit all the transaction history data of Bitcoin. Bitcoin users will obtain the equivalent BSC 1: 1. All subsequent BSC coins will be generated by PoW mining, and the development team will not have any pre-mining or pre-allocation of any coins.
Compatibility with Smart Contracts
Virtual machines are the execution environment of smart contracts. Based on maintaining the above compatibility with Bitcoin’s underlying infrastructure, BSC has achieved compatibility with EVM (Ethereum Virtual Machine) by adding additional scripts and intermediate layers, so that it can theoretically support all smart contracts in the Ethereum ecosystem. Popular applications in the Ethereum ecosystem, such as MakerDAO, AZTEC privacy protocol, decentralized stablecoins, etc., can be directly ported to the BSC network. Although these applications have received some attention on Ethereum, restrictions on the Ethereum network has significantly limited their further development. For example, decentralized lending, if you rely on the stability of Bitcoin assets and the participation of Bitcoin users, you will get more room for development.
Mining Algorithm and Reward
BSC uses the PoW consensus mechanism. Unlike Bitcoin, BSC uses the newer SHA-3 + Blake2b mining algorithm. Bitcoin’s computing power is mainly controlled by several large Bitcoin mining pools. If BSC used a PoW mining algorithm the same as Bitcoin or any mining algorithm that already has ASIC miners, there would be a good possibility for the network to suffer 51% attacks during the initial startup. To reduce the risk of attack and keep the network sufficiently decentralized, BSC uses the SHA-3 + Blake2b hash algorithm. This algorithm has been verified in projects such as Handshake, and currently, there is no ASIC miner available, which helps ensure the stable development of the BSC network.
As a BSC miner, in addition to the block rewards and transaction fees like Bitcoin, the block rewards will include the gas cost of smart contracts. Every halving of bitcoin brings significant challenges to miners. When the future bitcoin block reward is reduced to zero, whether transaction fees can support miners’ income is still unknown. The introduction of smart contracts will give BSC miners a source of additional revenue, further encourage miners to participate in mining, and protect the security of the network.
Community Governance
The BSC project is initiated by the developers from its community, and they no economic benefits. Therefore, to show interest, BSC will collect digital signatures from the Bitcoin community on the official website (https://bsc.net/).
After the project was released on Bitcointalk https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5231921.0 , the BSC project gained more and more attention in the Bitcoin community, and the number of signatures collected is steadily increasing, proving that more and more Bitcoin holders have recognized the idea of Bitcoin Smart Contract. From https://bsc.net/:
