Author: Dave Scotese 2019-04-01 03:04:18
Published on: 2019-04-01T03:04:18+00:00
On April 1, 2019, Luke Dashjr proposed two Bitcoin Improvement Proposals (BIPs) to add a signed price field to bitcoin transactions and to softfork a minimum price of $50k USD/BTC a year from then. The motivation behind this was that certain parts of the community had been selling bitcoins for unreasonably low prices, which had halted Bitcoin's valuation at $20k and even driven the price down below $15k. The BIPs were aimed at fixing this problem by setting a global minimum price for bitcoins. The first BIP proposed a method to explicitly specify and sign the USD/BTC price for transactions. A new field was added to Bitcoin transactions, representing the honest and true USD/BTC rate used for the transaction. By signing the transaction, the sender legally affirmed this is the valuation of bitcoins used for the transaction. Existing nodes would ignore the new field entirely and accept transactions using it. The second BIP defined a minimum price of $50k USD/BTC for Bitcoin transactions. Beginning with block height 622370 (expected approximately April 1, 2020), a block would be rejected as invalid unless all transactions it contained both declared a USD/BTC price and specified a price that was a minimum of $50k USD/BTC. The activation for this soft fork was set a full year into the future to ensure time to upgrade both nodes and wallet software. Ricardo Filipe expressed concern that one year seemed too long and suggested that they could easily get there in six months at most, to which Luke Dashjr did not respond. The context also included a message from someone offering their tech services for free to prove their value and mentioning their ownership of Litmocracy and Meme Racing, as well as their webmaster role for The Voluntaryist and coding work for The Dollar Vigilante.
Updated on: 2023-06-13T17:51:54.218425+00:00