The Dawn of A New Age for Bitcoin Private
The journey and the public testnet.
For the uninitiated, a pile of ashes was what they could only see. But to the knowing eyes of the Bitcoin Private (BTCP) community, something truly magnificent lay within. And now, from the ashes, BTCP rises like a phoenix preparing to spread its mighty wings and fly high. Heralding the dawn of a new age for BTCP is the release of its public testnet(https://github.com/BTCPrivate/btcpwallet/releases/tag/1.4.7) where everyone is invited to test the new BTCP testnet.
The journey towards the point where BTCP is at the moment was long and difficult. It took more than a year from the date of the snapshot at blockheight 680,000 which happened on February 5, 2020, to reach this point. Initially, J62, who is one of the veteran contributors and a member of the treasury of BTCP, was the lone dev who worked in his free time to code the new chain. Sometime in May 2020, he managed to finalize the alpha/new codebase, which was realigned to Zcash current code with Sapling transactions as shielded by default. Later, a crowdfund page with a soft cap goal was set up on July 27, 2020 in order to finance one week of full time work for J62 to at least get an internal testnet fully functional. After the soft cap was reached on September 3, 2020, J62 arranged his affairs so he could devote 1 full week of work on the project. True enough, when he started to devote 1 full week of work, progress was faster as he was able to get the algorithm change code in along with the difficulty adjustment code, fixed some bugs, gained some ground in converting UTXOs from the BTCP database to format required for the fork and finished an internal testnet.
After the internal testnet was finished, there was still a lot of work to be done, such as analyzing chain data and gearing up for public testnet, before the new chain could be launched. In order to further speed up the work, J62 needed to hire 2 devs to assist him. Since he needed funds for this, he submitted a proposal to the BTCP Treasury.
Per the proposal, after a 50% down payment is made, J62 and his associates shall commence work and receive subsequent payments based on the following milestones:
“Milestone 1: utxo database completed with removed burned coins and most illegitimate coins we could find/trace/remove, resulting in a total current supply number and utxo files in the correct format for forking into the new chain.
Milestone 2.1: Set block reward based on the final supply number of legitimate coins and launch testnet 2 on a new codebase with new utxo set to fork at a specific height.
Milestone 2.2: Release of the testnet client to bitcoin private community members to test all functions at the same time developers are running a range of tests and mining tests.
Milestone 3.1: Prep for Mainnet launch (servers, mining pool, extra nodes, explorer configured for Mainnet) and actual Mainnet launch.”
On October 8, 2020, the BTCP Treasury unanimously approved J62’s proposal. Thus, the 3 devs started to analyze the snapshot data to remove previously burned coins as well as known illegitimate coins. They completed this sometime in December 2020.
Later, the community were given the opportunity to test the new BTCP Fullnode wallet, which was an add on feature based on the aforementioned proposal of J62. Seeing the importance of a new BTCP Fullnode Wallet and the interest it generated in the community, the BTCP Treasury decided to finance the work on a new BTCP Fullnode wallet.
Indeed, the journey has been long and difficult but we finally made it!
Exciting times lie ahead as lift off of the new chain is coming very soon. Stay tuned everyone and keep checking https://progress.btcprivate.org for updates on the new BTCP Chain work progress!
