Don’t buy 0xBTC
Unless you understand it’s history and purpose. Its a beautiful and immortal experiment on Ethereum Mainnet. Here’s why:
In 2018 my goal was to create a purely decentralized token. For fun. I was sick of the ICO/Airdrop tokens which allocated 40% of their supply to the devs. I needed to make a token that allocated 0% to devs and PROVED it. Transparently and trustlessly. That is not easy to do and had never been done before inside Ethereum. Only Bitcoin and doge and similar external coins had done that.
To get started, I fired up my code editor with an ERC20 Token template and deleted the line of code which gives the deployer the entire token supply. Because I hate it. Its centralizing. [1] However then, the supply would always be zero! I needed a decentralized way to create a supply.
I opted to make a mint() method that anyone can call which rewards them with new tokens. However if the token became valuable, people would just spam call this method like crazy and so it would be bounded only by eth blockspace and gas fees. Thats silly and harmful to the network. Instead, I realized I could gate the method and bound it by something else. Mathematics. I added a proof of work gate to the Mint() method with auto-adjusting difficulty and halvenings. Since the max supply would be 21m, the initial reward 50, and it would be a PoW coin on Ethereum, I named the token '0xbitcoin' as it is a bitcoin-inspired altcoin as a smart contract. It should have been an animal name but… eh it will have to do.
As the first provably neutral currency on the network, I thought adoption would be rapid and would spread. However, not so. Inflation in the beginning has been massive and very detrimental (as expected) while almost all projects would rather launch their own centralized tokens versus adopting a decentralized one. Regardless, a group of brainiac developers and I have built out infrastructure since 2018 including token mining pools, stats pages, APIs, bridges to polygon and optimism, and documentation for this open source and neutral experiment for Ethereum. This is a benevolent and philanthropic open source coin that we are gifting to the Ethereum community. Always has been. It will never stop, it has no human control or key ownership and it is still being mined 3.5+ years later. You can join us to chat here or just say 'gm' 👌
https://discord.0xbtc.io
https://docs.0xbitcoin.org
[1] When a token is distributed all to the deployer in the solidity, as almost all other tokens are, the supply is unauditable. The factors that control distribution are offchain so distribution can’t be proven to be fair. The airdrop could have been rigged to give more to secret accounts controlled by devs, the devs could have bought into the ICO to get their eth back, and so forth. Only by using PoW minting can the contract be self-auditing and provably Trustless. That is what makes it beautiful. Its an experiment to be the most trustworthy and neutral token in the EVM multiverse and it does it by following the teachings of satoshi
