The past few days have seen the creation of the latest version of Bitcoin to enter the market. On November 23, Bitcoin Diamond (BCD) was launched amid claims that it offers solutions to the numerous problems facing Bitcoin (BTC).

Bitcoin Diamond Foundation

BCD has been developed by two mysterious teams of BTC miners who took issue with problems such as a lack of privacy protection, slow transaction speeds and high transaction fees and decided to fork BTC. Members of Team EVEY and Team 007, have gone on record to explain their objectives. An EVEY team member recently stated:

“Bitcoin Diamond miners will begin creating blocks with a new proof-of-work algorithm, and will consecutively develop and enhance the protection for account transfer and privacy based on original features of BTC. The original Bitcoin blockchain will continue on unaltered, and a new branch of the blockchain will split off from the original chain. It shares the same transaction history with Bitcoin until it starts branching and coming into a unique block from which it diverges. As a result of this process, a new cryptocurrency was created which we call Bitcoin Diamond”.

The two teams behind BCD combine to form the Bitcoin Diamond Foundation with members suggesting that BCD incorporates various improvements compared to Bitcoin. These include faster transaction confirmations as BCD utilizes an 8MB block size as part of an on-chain scaling approach, and increased user privacy. BCD allows for the encryption of transaction amounts and balances, therefore protecting users’ privacy more efficiently than BTC.

It has also been suggested that Bitcoin Diamond will lower the cost of participation thresholds, as the total amount of Bitcoin Diamond is ten times that of Bitcoin, which should allow interested parties to obtain BCD at much lower prices compared to BTC.

Support

The official Bitcoin Diamond website contains a list of compatible wallets as well as exchanges that have committed to providing access to the coin. Currently, exchanges such as Coinnest, Huobi, and OKEX have promised to support BCD and Binance has also announced plans to allow BTC holders access to BCD. A post on the Binance site states that:

“Binance has already distributed BCD, as previously announced, the distribution of BCD (at a rate of 1 BTC:10 BCD) was based on a snapshot of BTC balances at Block 495,866, which was taken at 09:20:12 (UTC) on 2017/11/24. We have distributed BCD to Binance accounts, and BCD/BTC, BCD/ETH trading pair are now available on Binance”.

Binance and Yobit are also offering Bitcoin Diamond Futures tokens, which are currently trading at a price of around $75 with a 24-hour trading volume of approximately $10 million.

BCD Comparison

Supply: 210 Million

PoW algorithm: Optimized X13

Mining Hardware: GPU

BlockTime: 10 minutes

Block size: 8M

Difficulty adjustment: 2 Weeks

SegWit: Yes

Replay protection: Yes