With the eruption of digital currencies on the global scale in the recent past, people are getting more and more involved in them owing to the convenience that the digital currencies provide. Satoshi Nakamoto originally gave the idea of providing the world with a financial structure that is free from any intervention from a third party. While bitcoin seemed to fulfill this idea in the beginning, but as more and more parties stepped into the game of cryptos, the essence of Satoshi Nakamoto’s vision seemed to get lost. Even on the decentralized network, with interests and ICOs snatched up by the wealthy ones, the vision of empowering the users and community is lost. But is there anyone focused at going back to the original vision of Satoshi Nakamoto for empowering the users and community as a whole?

Say hello to “Bitcore“, a project aimed at reverting back to the original idea of the creator of cryptos, providing its users with a low cost and community-driven solution for digital payments.

Lead by their main developer Chris, who previously worked at digital currency platforms BitSend and Bitcloud, bitcore aims at providing the world with a just and fair peer-to-peer digital payment solution. Launched on April 24, 2017, the German project aims at developing the original version of bitcoin that was not marred by the incorporation of external factors and was based on Satoshi’s actual vision of relieving the users from any kind of centralization factors.

It is stated in bitcore’s white paper that:

Bitcore is the original community-driven, peer-to-peer digital payment solution, adapted to the needs of tomorrow. If Satoshi Nakamoto had known in 2008 what experience has taught the crypto community in the past 10 years, Bitcore is what Bitcoin had looked like from the very start. Today, Bitcore offers everyone the opportunity to be a part of Satoshi’s original vision, fresh and unstained by questionable economic developments of the past.

Some of the major features that Bitcore offers on the table are explained below:

Community-Driven

As advancements are being made in the world of crypto, certain forces have still managed to find a work around of decentralization. The algorithms currently used in mining can be used to somehow introduce the effect of centralization even on a decentralized network using certain techniques. The transactions can be confirmed and rewards can be snatched up by certain major forces present on the network. Bitcore tackles the problem of centralization by employing an ASIC-resistant mining algorithm at its core. This reduces the centralization issue in mining on a peer-to-peer network and restores the participation of the community.

As compared to other blockchains, the storage required in order to fully run a blockchain node is also very less for bitcore as compared to others, enabling more and more individual users to participate in this framework.

No Initial Coin Offering (ICO)

In order to raise investments for a project in the modern day, ICOs have become more alluring than ever. But as seen from the recent examples, more and more ICOs are being snatched up by the wealthy investors of the game with less opportunities given to the general public for entering the game. It is stated by the organization that:

As a hybrid fork, Bitcore’s launch was not designed as or funded by an initial coin offering (ICO). This was a conscious decision by the Bitcore community intended to foster equal opportunities and participation among potential BTX users around the world.

As bitcore is focused on the original vision of Satoshi Nakamoto to empower its users, it has skipped on raising an ICO. Its goal is to provide a more equal distribution of coins to its users, and not getting bogged down by private investors in the game. Not raising an ICO is just another portrayal of the company being focused on its community.

Furthermore, ICOs lead to an influx of wealthy private investors who buy their way into disproportionate power and influence over crypto communities. Last but not least, different regulatory frameworks apply to ICOs whose teams are based in different countries, and many of them explicitly preclude citizens of certain countries from participating in ICOs. These arbitrary limitations

Faster Transactions

Bitcore’s goal is to maintain the advantages that bitcoin currently provides and improve upon it. The framework that has been deployed underneath bitcoin has cost and time associated with each transactions that is made on the network. The transaction speed that bitcore provides is much faster than bitcoin. More surprisingly, the transaction speed offered by bitcore is even faster than Paypal. If all the nodes available on their network make their computing power available, the bitcore network is capable of handling 350 TX per second, or 550 TX per second under optimal conditions.

In addition to this, the block times on the bitcore network are also quartered as compared to bitcoin. In contrast to bitcoin’s block time of 10 minutes, bitcore provides a block time 2.5 minutes. This leads to faster confirmation of transactions on the network. The block size has also been increased to 20 MB in order to improve the overall throughput of the transactions.

The technical comparisons between the bitcoin family and bitcore BTX are given below:

Coin Supply & Transaction Fee

The total number of coins supplied by bitcore are 21 million. This number is same as the total supply of bitcoin that exists on the bitcoin blockchain framework.

As bitcore is focused on providing a low cost digital payment solution, low transaction fee of around U.S. $0.003 per kilobyte make it even more suitable for micropayments. The median fee is U.S. $0.002 per kilobyte and is significantly lower than other cryptocurrencies of the game. In the network, 1 kilobyte roughly translates to an equivalent of $0.0001 or 0.01 US-Cent per transactions. This structures fulfills bitcore’s goal of providing a low-cost digital payment solution for the general public.

Open Source Project

As bitcore’s core value is to empower the general public, the entire project has been made open source. Instead of being a property of a single person or company, bitcore is designed to be a commodity for the community.

Bitcore was developed as a result of the compliance offered by bitcoin to the Open Source Initiative, and hence as a result, it is also subject to the same conditions of free redistribution, permission of derived works, modifications and distributions, maintaining integrity of author’s source code, no discrimination against any person of group etc.

Roadmap

The roadmap for bitcore has also been displayed on bitcore’s official website with all the goals of each quarter of 2018 completely mapped out. The progress regarding each goal is also displayed. The goals mentioned for Q1 2018 have completely been achieved. Some of these goals included the development of a new website, an insight API, a press kit, a YouTube channel etc.

As for Q2, most of the goals have been achieved to near completion but progress still needs to be made. The goals of enabling the users to purchase and sell BTX directly on the website has not been fully achieved. Although Electrum Wallet has been released by the platform but minor tweaks still need to be made in order to full achieve the goal.

Regarding Q3, out of all the goals listed, only the goal of writing a white paper has been achieved and the remaining still need to be fulfilled. Lamassu ATM integration, Genesis Coin ATM integration, hardware wallet ledger integration and Travis CI integration are some of the goal that remain to be fulfilled.

As the crypto world is expanding with more and more project coming in, bitcore’s main focus is to revert back to the original vision of digital currencies provided by Satoshi Nakamoto that involved no intervention from a third party in any way. Bitcore establishes its community-driven peer-to-peer exchange platform on the same vision and provides its users with an ultimate low-cost digital payment solution. Its mining algorithm is focused at canceling out the centralization effect seen in certain cases. Low transaction fee, faster operation and its focus on the community are the factors that make bitcore stand apart among the others, and a project to look out for in the long run.