Babbitt Column | What are the improvements in the three major branches of Bitcoin in 2019?

BTC is now fully developed by the Bitcoin Core development team, and all protocol level changes can be seen in the Bitcoin Core version released by the Core development team.

Bitcoin Core released three new versions this year, May 2nd, August 9th, and November 24th. Among them, Bitcoin Core version 0.18.0 on May 2 was marked as the major version.

BTC's main change this year is to strengthen the Segregated Witness transaction format. Bitcoin Core version now uses Segregated Witness transaction addresses to send and receive coins by default.

Other changes are not related to productivity, and can be understood by various programmers.

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Following the core developers' comments, several major feature updates currently being discussed by BTC are Schnorr signatures, MAST Merkel abstract syntax tree, and straight-root Taproot. Schnorr is mainly aimed at protecting transaction privacy, saving transaction signature space, and submitting signature algorithm efficiency.

MAST is an extension of the BTC scripting function, enriching trading functions, and introducing more complex financial instruments for BTC.

The main effect of Taproot is to improve currency interchangeability and also improve transaction privacy. For example, make the recharge transaction of Lightning Network and other transactions look the same.

These three major features should be the next major update of BTC.

After Core developers completed UASF and Segregated Witness in 2017, the focus of their work seems to be shifting to the development and promotion of Lightning Network.

BCH's main development group is Bitcoin ABC. All protocol level changes can be upgraded from the Bitcoin Cash released by the ABC development group. The hard fork is upgraded twice a year, on May 15 and November 15.

Significant updates to BCH this year include, Schnorr signatures, and removal of transaction malleability. There is also a BCH that recovers errors sent to the Segregated Witness address. In addition, several opcodes have been upgraded, especially OP_Checkdatasig, to facilitate the introduction of Oracle into the BCH network. Others are not production related, so programmers can understand the updates.

Schnorr signature is a very big update. It can be updated before BTC, because BCH mainly uses hard forks to upgrade, which is much more efficient than soft forks.

Track the comments of BCH developers. The major feature updates they may do next are Pre-consensus, UTXO Commitments, faster block propagation technology, and more script operation codes. .

Pre-consensus is mainly to allow BCH transactions to get secure "pre-" confirmation faster. The mining pool's legality of transactions achieves consensus on the basis of no block confirmation, improving the security of zero confirmation. It is said that transactions can be secured within 3 seconds.

UTXO promises to be able to achieve sufficient security without downloading complete historical blocks, and to make prerequisites for implementing block cutting technology. This can achieve large-scale node expansion. Block propagation technology, including various memory synchronization technologies and technologies such as graphene.

More opcodes are used to enrich the programmability of BCH and introduce more complex financial instruments.

Another major update of BCH is its second-layer network, which was very hot in 2018, leaving only the SLP agreement in 2019. The SLP protocol implements the function of issuing tokens on the BCH network.

The main development of BSV is now under the leadership of nChain, and CSW is the chief scientist. In 2019, BSV released 6 versions of full nodes, of which the last two versions are currently in beta. And the version number of the last version has become 1.0.0.beta, which may mean that the development of the BSV main chain is over.

The main update of BSV this year is the maximum block size expansion and recovery script opcode to the original version of bitcoin. BSV's update on the main chain protocol is focused on these two things, expanding the capacity and restoring the protocol to version 0.1. The current block limit has reached 512M and is expected to reach 2G in February next year.

In general, the development of the BSV's underlying protocol level is agreed by community members that stability is needed.

From the BSV community discussions, the other two major directions for the development of BSV are Metanet (Supernet) and BitDB and their variants. The former was led by CSW, and advocated that the Internet be turned into a side chain of BSV, but in general, Supernet is still a conceptual product. BitDB is developed by BSV's active application layer developer_unwriter main layer, which is in the BSV layer 2 network, and is mainly based on the OP_Return field for application development.

Another important product of BSV is Tokenized, which is a protocol for issuing tokens based on the BSV network, but there have been no major updates in 2019. I only saw his official website made a new website, which is not currently available.

Moneybutton and Paymail are another hot application direction of BSV, mainly to optimize payment.

In general, the BSV consensus believes that the underlying protocol should be stable and unchanged, and the main development direction is at the application layer.

Author: Huang Shiliang

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