The Cash Consortium Launches Open Standard Initiative for Bitcoin Cash

This week a Bitcoin Cash organization was founded called the Cash Consortium (C2) that aims to be a technical group framed off of the World Wide Web Consortium’s (W3C) open standards. C2 is an international community that intends to bolster open standard development in order to provide long-term Bitcoin Cash growth.

Also read: Upgrade Time: Bitcoin Cash 32MB Fork Activates Tuesday

The Cash Consortium: Open Standards for Bitcoin Cash

Much of the cryptocurrency community understands what open source or open standard development is, and most of them embrace the idea. Furthermore, organizations like the W3C and other believers of open standards welcome the sharing of open sourced code that allows anyone the rights to study, change, and distribute OSS protocol for any purpose. Open standards also allows other developers to review a protocol’s design in order to prevent flaws and bugs within the software by coming up with sets of development standards that everyone agrees to and uses. The Cash Consortium will have engineers from leading companies to work together to build Bitcoin Cash (BCH) development standards much like how developers build on the open web with shared concepts like HTML.

“The C2’s mission is to lead Bitcoin Cash to its full potential by developing protocols and guidelines that ensure the long-term growth of the blockchain,” explains the C2 website.

Bitcoin Cash is the soundest money the world has ever known. It has scarcity, fungibility, divisibility, durability and transferability. It’s our intention that it remain the soundest money the world has ever known — Bitcoin Cash enables smart contracts/property, colored coins, tokens, ICOs and much more. We intend to standardize these emerging technologies in a way that plays to Bitcoin Cash’s strengths.

A Formal Bitcoin Standards Body

At the moment organizations that are listed as members of C2 include Cointext, Atlantis Labs, Akari Global Foundation, the Bitcoin Cash Fund, Bitbox, Blockpress, Centbee, and the social network Yours. Last night news.Bitcoin.com spoke with the creator of the Cash Consortium, Carlos Cardona, who is also the lead developer of Bitbox, the open source development toolkit for Bitcoin Cash. Cardona tells us he is a firm believer in open standards and explains why he initiated the C2 organization.

“When I was in college I was a member of the W3C’s HTML5 Working Group. There were engineers from Apple, Google (who I was with), Microsoft, Firefox and many more meeting up regularly in working groups to flesh out the next generation of technical specs for the web (HTML/CSS etc),” Cardona tells news.Bitcoin.com. “When the spec was nearing completion the teams would each implement it. Some open source like Firefox. Some closed source like Internet Explorer. But both implementing technical specs which were created together.”

When I joined the blockchain space several years ago it surprised me that there was no formal Bitcoin standards body.

Huge Forces at Play Are About to Phase the Blockchain Industry

Then Cardona says he started thinking about the upcoming Bitcoin Cash upgrade that will not only increase the block size by 4X but the fork will also add Satoshi OP_Codes that can enable the ability to create color coins and smart contract features on the BCH network.

“With the new OP_Codes coming I had recently been thinking again about how to best standardize on new transaction types and then Memo/Blockpress happened,” Cardona emphasizes. “Having recently updated Bitbox’s block explorer to support both Memo and Blockpress I was struck with the same feeling I had during IE6/FF days — writing code twice with slightly different APIs because there was no standard. With OP_RETURN going from 80 bytes to 220 bytes we’re just seeing the start of OP_RETURN prefixed protocols — That got me thinking again about a standards body.”

In my opinion our industry spent many years fighting the Blockstream wars and became complacent — Things which I would expect in any other nearly decade old tech industry (such as a tech consortium) doesn’t exist in our space. The final part which caused me to move on it was when I found out Zuckerberg created a blockchain division last week. To me that is just a sign that HUGE forces are at play which are about to phase shift our entire industry.

Cardona Believes the Opportunity to Move Quick and be Proactive is Now

The C2 website explains that if you work with a company that develops with Bitcoin Cash then they can feel free to fork this repo or reach out to Cardona to see how you can get involved.

“I believe we have the opportunity to move quick, be proactive, build bridges and standardize or some much larger player will step in an do it for us,” Cardona adds.

What do you think about the Cash Consortium (C2)? Do you think its a good idea for BCH developers to initiate open standards for protocol and application development? Let us know what you think about this subject in the comments below.

Images via Bitcoincash.org, Pixabay, The Cash Consortium, and Open Stand logos.

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