FAQ



Have any other questions about our project? Ask on our subreddit .

Is this just another [altcoin / pump and dump]? No! First of all this is not an altcoin; it is a Bitcoin implementation that forks from the main chain, preserving the same UTXO set, genesis block, and blockchain up to a certain height. While some may redefine the word "altcoin" to include any forks of the main chain outside the de facto reference implementation, we do not agree with this disingenuous use of the term.

Who is behind this project? We are a group of Bitcoin developers, users, and supporters who are frustrated by the lack of scaling and governance solutions proposed by the status quo. While many of us choose to remain anonymous and pseudonymous for fear of attack in what remains a politically loaded space, we will strive to make as much information on the development of our fork public as possible. We welcome any with time or skills to spare to join the project using the links below.

Why now? After years of stalling on the scaling issue (with solutions demanded as early as 2012), we believe the time has come to abandon ultraconservatism and move towards progress and open experimentation. With many popular Bitcoin businesses expressing concerns or pivoting out of the space, we see an existential crisis looming for Bitcoin if scaling is not improved soon. The active engagement of the community in forks as a freedom-preserving upgrade mechanism is long overdue.

What client are we using for the fork? We have not chosen a specific client for the fork. Rather, we aim to encourage all developers to propose forking clients, and wish to provide an infrastructure through which these forks can all be tested and evaluated. We support any and all technically significant forks of the current blockchain, and believe all should be discussed and submitted to consideration to the wider community.

But can't a fork cause loss of funds? No, a properly implemented and deployed fork will not cause a loss of funds in the absence of severe negligence. Because the new fork inherently has a different value than the old chain, and requires proactive upgrade actions from users and nodes, these users have an opportunity to take appropriate security protections in anticipation of the fork. Old clients will simply continue operating on the old chain, with clients intending to trade goods for fiat simply operating with the exchange value of the old chain. Several cryptocurrencies have already demonstrated successful forks with no fund loss, and we believe the fear of such forks in the Bitcoin community is unsupported by the current empirical evidence.

Why not a soft fork? We believe deploying critical protocol changes through soft forks is an inherently bloated process that is coercive to far more people than an equivalent hard fork. Soft forks activate exclusively on miner vote, disenfranchising nodes that do not hold hashpower and excluding them from the decision process. Furthermore, many soft forks decrease the security of old nodes by removing their ability to meaningfully validate an ever-increasing percentage of transactions in blocks. Lastly, soft forks are coercive to dissident miners, who are forced to either upgrade to the fork or accept the potential orphaning of all blocks they mine. On the other hand, a hard fork allows all users of the system to explicitly choose the consensus rules and blockchain with which they transact. Hard forks also mitigate the damage possible through development capture by allowing users a choice to change to a chain with values, developers, and code of their choosing. Ultimately, hard forks are an essential upgrade mechanism, and critical to the antifragility of all cryptocurrency.

But a hard fork is hard? A hard fork is hard but necessary. After the first fork is executed, we expect the ecosystem of tools surrounding the management of forks to become increasingly robust, supporting future forks in a far more seamless and low-effort fashion.