Author: Adam Back 2013-10-14 18:08:07
Published on: 2013-10-14T18:08:07+00:00
The idea of staging a live beta for Bitcoin has been suggested as a way to speed up development of new features and avoid the dilution of mindshare that could occur if an alternative coin were to take off. The proposed model would allow Bitcoin to remain the primary currency, with betacoin acting as a parallel network that would allow for testing and development of new features without affecting Bitcoin's security or value-store properties. Betacoins would be capped at one BTC, but users could buy or swap them for bitcoin to facilitate moving money back from betacoin to bitcoin, with the reverse being market priced. Testing on betacoin would not be considered alpha, and people could rely on it for real-value transactions. Once bitcoin beta stabilizes, the remaining bitcoins can be moved, and the old network switched off, with mining past a flag day moving to the betacoin. The proposed model would allow for faster development, avoiding mindshare dilution, and concentrating such useful-feature alt activities into one open source and open control foundation mediated area. It would also respect the 21 million limit, starting new mining races that would dilute the artificial scarcity semantic. However, the main issue remains a lack of trustworthy high caliber testers and developers, which could be addressed by inviting alt-coin minded startups and developers to donate their time to work on something of reusable value to humanity in parallel with their startup's objectives. The Bitcoin Foundation could ask for BTC donations to hire more developers and testers full time.
Updated on: 2023-06-06T17:16:06.721350+00:00