Pay Attention and Break Conventional Rules
While reading ‘The 4 Hour Work Week’ a book by Tim Ferris, one anecdote resonates with me continuously. Near the beginning of the book, Tim recalls winning the championship in Chinese Kickboxing after having only trained for a very short amount of time. How did he do this? By reading the rules and winning on a technicality; cutting weight only to pack it back on in 24 hours and then just throwing opponents out of the ring instead of actually fighting.
Allegedly, the tournament judges were not very pleased but Tim did win according to the rules and he actually influenced the way the sport was played from then on going forwards. Why do I tell this story?
The conventional rules of Mineable Cryptocurrencies
This time, it was not Tim Ferris who broke conventional law to progress an artform. It was me. Crazy, right? To understand why, we have to rewind to 2009. The first Pure Mined Proof-of-Work Cryptocurrency is launched named ‘bitcoin’. As coins are mined, the mining both secures the network and distributes new coins to reward those miners. To incentivize them to act ‘good’ and cooperate and reach a consensus.
In the following years, many other mineable altcoins launched such as Litecoin, Dogecoin, Peercoin, Namecoin, and about 2000+ others. These all followed the exact same mantra and preconcieved notions as Bitcoin. The miners secured the chain, were paid out in new coins (inflation). This was extremely problematic and this is what Satoshi was betting on.
You see, very few miners were mining these altcoins because they could make more money by mining OG Bitcoin. Why use or mine something else? There is a consolidating force. Therefore, the hashrates and thus security for all of these altcoins remain extremely low. They are insecure and can quite easily be 51% attacked to double spend.
The conventional rules of Cryptocurrency security were broken thanks to Ethereum
The year is 2015. Ethereum network launches. This is an altcoin network that is mined like Bitcoin but it is able to bootstrap an extremely high and healthy amount of hashrate because it has a secret trick up its sleeve. Instead of only being used for simple monetary transfers, it is a turing complete computing engine on top of which microservices can be launched and run. These microservices, including new sub-coins, (called ERC20 tokens) can launch without having to secure themselves. The Ethereum network as a whole secures these ERC20 tokens and in return, all use of these ERC20 tokens is paid to the Ethereum miners which amasses to an enormous monstrous security budget. Essentially, all of these coins/projects/services built on top of Ethereum are pooling their security resources together and then all as secure as one another — extremely so. Today, more than 10x as much security budget is paid out to secure Ethereum versus Bitcoin chain. (source: cryptofees.info 2022).
The conventional rules of Mineable Cryptocurrencies were broken in 2018 thanks to 0xBitcoin
Ethereum flipped cryptocurrency security on its head, however those ERC20 tokens that launched in 2015–2017 were distributed in a way much more similar to stocks and not similar at all to bitcoin. So much so, that the scarcity of those ERC20 tokens depended only on the centralized teams that run them, and not on the smart contract of the ERC20 token itself.
In other words, bitcoin’s network has a huge hashrate which prevents clones of bitcoin from launching an immediately being as influential. Non-mined ERC20 tokens have no hashrate or other measureable amount of activity and therefore ERC20 token contracts can be cloned at the drop of a hat. If they depend on a team, the team can be cloned and even worse still, the currency depends on a small centralized team of humans. Very unlike Bitcoin which is neutral and which depends on no centralized team of humans at all.
On February 6th of 2018, the first pure mined ERC20 token cryptocurrency launched as a smart contract on the Ethereum Network. 0xBitcoin is pure mined exactly like Bitcoin so it is neutral, decentralized, ownerless, has no team or humans that have any control over it at all. To remain neutral like bitcoin, it is distributed exactly like bitcoin via transparent rules in the solidity code. This is done with Proof of Work on the SHA3/Keccack256 algorithm as to operate just like Bitcoin. However, this mining is for only neutrality and to create the supply. Like the Martial Arts story above, the preconceived notions of Mineable Cryptocurrency were broken because 0xBitcoin mining does not secure 0xBitcoin. This token is fully secured by Ethereum Mainnet just as any other ERC20 token and is as neutral and math-based as original bitcoin. By challenging what a mineable coin could be or what it could do, 0xBTC is the first PoW mineable coin that is immune to traditional 51% attacks. It also works in Rollups like Arbitrum and Optimism, in DEXes like Uniswap, and in all other DeFi applications.
Pay attention and break conventional rules.
