Author: Jeff Garzik 2013-05-22 04:12:52
Published on: 2013-05-22T04:12:52+00:00
Zooko, a cryptocurrency expert, expressed his interest in implementing an idea but failed to comprehend its unique feature. He acknowledged that assigning value to coins on the beta Bitcoin blockchain is not up to developers, except through some scheme that forces "beta bitcoins" to be exchangeable for real bitcoins. The testnet is a third iteration of a testing tool and is always available for any merge-mined chain to ensure little real value is assigned to the test chain. Without a reset-the-chain policy, a de facto "it is a real currency" policy is in place. The exciting aspect of this idea is a shared codebase that the Bitcoin core developers are paying nominal attention to, providing a common codebase for people with the "better Bitcoin bug" to aim pull requests at and fork on github. A fork of the bitcoin.git codebase makes it easy to "upstream" any useful changes that are not specific to that one alt-coin. Compared to the "go do it on an alt coin" idea, Zooko believes that most Bitcoin core devs aren't really paying that much attention to altcoins and may not be focusing on them.The creation of bitcoin opened a whole new category of technology and experimentation with the new concept of money itself. However, for the bitcoin.git reference implementation, it makes more sense to focus on supporting existing bitcoin users rather than following every alt-coin bandwagon, which can confuse users. Alt-coin changes fall into two categories: rule changes and generic bug fixes, cleanups, and changes that would benefit everybody.
Updated on: 2023-06-06T17:14:13.902136+00:00