Bitcoin United (BTCX) & The Fork to End All Forks

In a recent Huffington Post article about the ongoing Bitcoin Civil War, I begged industry insiders not to split Bitcoin into multiple coins and ruin its unique status as The Gold Standard of digital currency. I pointed out that it doesn’t need to upgrade, it just needs to cooperate with other supporting chains that can already do what classic Bitcoin will never be able to do – scale to meet global transaction speeds and bandwidth.

Please don’t change Bitcoin, you’ll break it!

The digital currency markets may have dodged a bullet on August 1st , we’ll see, but this worry won’t go away. Another Time of Forking now looms in November and eventually we won’t be able to stop it. The system will grind to a halt and Bitcoin will break up in a forking crisis.

Bitshares decided the next best thing is to fix it themselves first, once and for all.

The developers at Bitshares are adding their candidate to join the other “Alt-Bitcoins” in the ongoing forking Diaspora. They call it Bitcoin United (BTCX). The purpose of Bitcoin United is to provide a solution so far advanced that there would be no reason to adopt anything else – thus avoiding a permanent breakup. Bitcoin will remain united through the sheer force of excellence of a long-proven, freely available technology.

A gift to the industry.

BTCX will be gifted one-for-one to all holders of BTC at the last unforked “classic” block when the Time of Forking inevitably arrives (they won’t fork it over until somebody else breaks the taboo – then it will happen automagically). When that final fork up occurs, Bitcoin United will come to the rescue – providing a solution so much better than what we’ve been offered by the insiders and other special interests that there will remain only one true Bitcoin.

After all, if we’re going to break Bitcoin unity for some tiny, ineffective code changes anyway, why not go all the way and fix everything at once?

Bitcoin United upgrades Bitcoin to the state of the art in blockchain technology, permanently solving more than just its intractable lack of scalability, but all twelve of Bitcoin’s most serious limitations.

Cryptonomex and Bitshares Have Solved Major Deficiencies That Plague Other Blockchains

Bitcoin United will also get an automatic free upgrade to EOS.io technology with unlimited bandwidth later that same year. But for now, we’ll settle for having all transactions under three seconds and scalability beyond 10,000 transactions per second – enough to skip Bitcoin’s next ten regularly-scheduled forking dramas.

The Great Bitcoin Dodecathon

Let’s look at how the “Alt-BTC” Olympians stack up against each other in the current Bitcoin Dodecathon (much nicer sounding than “Bitcoin Civil War,” don’t you think?).

Transaction Bandwidth. BTC classic has just 7 transactions per second for the whole world to share. The other alts seek to double this once or maybe twice. Bitcoin United can cruise beyond 10,000 transactions per second without breaking a sweat. It frequently breaks its own record for transactions per day - beyond Bitcoin and Ethereum records combined.

Bitcoin Can Perform 7 Transactions Per Second On It’s Network

Transaction Time. BTC classic can take an hour (or days) to complete one transaction unless you pay the premium Bitcoin must use to ration its bandwidth. Bitcoin United takes three seconds…tops. The other alt-BTCs merely stretch the rationing a bit.

Inflation Rate. Bitcoin United ends inflation the day it takes over. It uses DPOS technology instead of POW so there is no need to pay miners and no need to add to the supply. All other solutions keep POW to serve the needs of Big Mining, not the public. Who’s diluting what’s in your wallet?

Operating Cost. Bitcoin United has no operating costs, sipping green energy while the others guzzle hundreds of millions of dollars worth of coal-generated electricity annually.

Bitcoin Mining Energy Consumption Has Skyrocketed Costs

Counterparty Risk. The only way to trade the other candidates is to risk them on a corruptible off-chain exchange. Bitcoin United unites Bitcoin holders with hundreds of other assets on the same blockchain where they can trade at the speed of light without counterparty risk. How many more hacked cryptocurrency exchanges will it take before this sinks in?

How it Works: By now the expert reader has had enough clues to recognize that there is only one real-time industrial grade blockchain technology that can deliver this mix of performance and features. That’s right. Bitcoin United (BTC-U) will be hosted on the BitShares platform as an olive branch to the Bitcoin community. After all, they have benefited from the ecosystem that Bitcoin built and it’s time to give back.

On the day the fork occurs, BitShares will grab a “snapshot” of the state of the Bitcoin blockchain. Shortly thereafter, BitShares will distribute matching BTC-U to every BTC owner on the BitShares blockchain. All you’ll need to do is import your bitcoin keys into the BitShares wallet and claim them!

Boom! Instant upgrade to light speed. From that point on, they will let the market set the price for slow vs. fast bitcoins. But at least everyone will have a choice!

Bitcoin, Bitshares, & The HERO

After all, if we’re going to break Bitcoin unity for some tiny, ineffective code changes anyway, why not go all the way and fix everything at once?

What Makes Me Believe that Bitcoin United will be Adopted?

Well the vested interests in old code and old hardware will never accept their own obsolescence, so we aren’t going to worry about that. But Bitshares Billion Hero Campaign is giving away a billion dollars worth of BitShares to mainstream user causes in the coming year – just to draw attention to Bitcoin United and the new HERO – a stabilized Smartcoin™ that is programmed by smart contract to grow at 5% annually against the dollar.

Imagine trading your new BTC-U’s against HERO in real time on the same counterparty-free blockchain.

Then begins the rapid game of attrition. After the world gets used to green energy, low-cost three-second transactions and stably appreciating Smartcoins™ trading on a single blockchain with robotically honest built-in exchanges, it will become increasingly clear that Bitcoin United has saved the industry from a forking disaster.

Thanks to the Billion Hero Campaign, the first things most new mainstream users will learn about in the coming year is Bitcoin, BitShares and the Hero. It will be the lightspeed Bitcoins that they first experience. After that, things may never be the same for the industry.