Bitcoin Verde’s 2021 Flipstarter is just over 75% funded! Thank you all for your contributions, your support and pledges are appreciated. If you have not, please consider making a donation.
Hi All!
Just wanted to give our Flipstarter a bump and to say thank all for your support. With a handful of large contributions the minimum donation came down quite a bit over the last couple weeks. It has really helped open the opportunity for some smaller holders to contribute the way they would like. Thank you for all of your contributions!
In the last couple weeks we’ve received some feedback and we’ve found we could be more vocal about ourselves and our work. As one of the few non-developers at Software Verde, I thought I’d take some time to write a post about us. For those of you who don’t know very much about Bitcoin Verde, I’m hopefully this will give a little background on our team and our motivations.
As many already know, Bitcoin Verde is a full-node implementation built from the ground up and written in Java. The majority of Verde’s initial development was at the hands of our team’s leader, Josh Green. Josh is the owner of software dev company, Software Verde, who employs the majority of Bitcoin Verde’s team full-time. Software Verde is our primary source of revenue, allowing us to spend time on Bitcoin Verde supplemented by our revenue and your contributions. As more support is received through contributions from the community, we’re able to spend more hours strictly focused on Bitcoin Verde development.
Our reasoning behind building our implementation is pretty simple. Bitcoin Verde was developed from scratch for a couple reasons. For one, it provided a good opportunity to educate ourselves about the protocol and join the conversation with a general idea of how everyone else is operating. More importantly though, a node built from scratch could help improve our networks lack of diversity in node implementations.
At the time of development (early 2018) Bitcoin Cash’s network consisted of only 3 primary node implementations: BU, XT and ABC. While all three were providing support to the network at the time, they were all forked versions of Bitcoin Core and thus all contained the same undiscovered bugs. Our hope was with a more diverse web of nodes, exploitable bugs would become less of a network concern.
Why Java? The answer really comes back to diversity. Java is a versatile, fairly widely used and well known language. Not everyone interested in bch network dev is a master in C++ and nor should that be a requirement to contribute. Our hope for choosing Java was to provide new developers, familiar with different tech stacks, an opportunity to contribute to the BCH Network. Seemed the best way we could do that was by providing a clean codebase people can easily read, understand, and maintain. Plus Josh really likes Java ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Our motivations for continuing to build upon our implementation are pretty transparent as well. We’ve been long supporters of p2p electronic cash payments, with some of us taking note and investing as early as 2011. We’ve invested countless hours developing our implementation and providing education to our community in an attempt to foster growth and adoption. We continue to work on our node and with our community because we truly believe bch has the best opportunity to become a mainstream electronic cash alternative. And when BCH ultimately reaches a critical mass, we would be elated to make our living by supporting it.
Our Goals for the future
We talk about our plans for the next year in this campaign and I encourage you to read it. In short, we have a few primary goals:
- Improve Bitcoin Verde to where node operators can reliably run our software.
- Continue to grow Bitcoin Verde as a mining node.
- Implement new and upcoming wallet features, including double-spend proofs for better zero-conf security and support for fulcrum/electron wallet servers.
The Bitcoin Cash community has been kind to our team and a genuine pleasure to work with. We’re hopeful this next cycle of development can position Bitcoin Verde as a viable option and begin to grow our user base. The more we can grow within the community, the more energy we can continue to focus on making network improvements.
An excellent example of our work supporting our goals and something we’re very proud of is the recently released BitBalancer, a component of our 2020 Flipstarter campaign. If you’re unfamiliar, the BitBalancer is a reverse-proxy/load balancer used to ensure blocks are valid before work is performed by a miner, ultimately preventing what could result in a network split. With this risk reduced, we’re hoping to improve the confidence of miners for using a more diverse selection of software in the future, without worrying about taking a potential financial risk.
We also have ambitions to improve the network through means other than software releases/improvements. We are currently strategizing with local leaders how we could improve crypto adoption among unbanked, disenfranchised, and lower SES citizens. If you look into some of Software Verde’s work you’ll find we have been quite vocal with our local municipalities on the benefits of blockchains and cryptocurrencies, even implementing an SLP reward system for the city of Dublin, OH.
In all, I’m hopeful this bit of information can help clarify who Bitcoin Verde is and what we stand for. In the coming days, Josh will also be publishing a new read.cash article elaborating on the status and plans of Bitcoin Verde. Some of this information may be repeated there, but a lot of it will be new and provide more transparency into our operations. Last, keep and eye out as we begin updating bitcoinverde.org on a more regular basis to communicate our roadmap and progress. Again, Thank you all for your support and your attention! We look forward to continuing to grow with our community.
Stay tuned!
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