Mempool founder: Fractal Bitcoin is just another shitfork

Author: mononaut, founder of mempool; Compiler: 0xjs@黄金财经

Fractal Bitcoin launched its mainnet on September 9.

Fractal Bitcoin appears to be a hastily cloned copy of Bitcoin Core v24.0.1, with some consensus adjustments and some code stolen from Namecoin and Bitcoin cash.

Fractal Bitcoin also starts with a large and immediately usable 50% pre-mine.

Main changes in Fractal Bitcoin

• A mix of standard PoW and merged-mined blocks;

• 30 second target block time;

• Continuous difficulty adjustment, copied from Bitcoin cash;

• Maximum supply of 210 million coins;

• Initial block reward of 25 coins per block;

• Halving every 2.1 million blocks;

• OP_CAT is activated.

Note that the premine accounts for 50% of the fully diluted supply of Fractal Bitcoin.

If everything goes according to plan, miners will need two full years (the entire Fractal Bitcoin halving era) to barely get half of what the founding team rewarded themselves on day one.

The Fractal Bitcoin Lite whitepaper has a lot of meaningless technical terms about "virtualization" and "recursion" and "layered expansion", but the actual implementation bears little resemblance. As far as I can tell, this is just another shitfork.

Fractal Bitcoin is neither Layer 2 nor an extension of Bitcoin

Netizen Gringo HodL said: I thought it was not Layer 2 or a fork at all, but an extension of Bitcoin? In addition, didn’t Satoshi Nakamoto himself create OP_CAT, but it was not available until Fractal Bitcoin was deployed? I'm not a technologist, but there are a lot of technologists on the UniSat team who have done amazing things with Bitcoin. I'll give Fractal Bitcoin a chance

mononaut replied: Fractal Bitcoin is neither Layer 2 nor an extension of Bitcoin. It is a completely separate blockchain that is a fork running the Bitcoin Core codebase.

OP_DOG | BIP-119 says:This is Layer 1.5 that kills BIP-420. The idea of ​​Layer 1.5 is that assets on the Bitcoin mainnet remain on Fractalnet and vice versa, so it helps scale Bitcoin like "Layer 2", but unlike Lightning's scaling solution, it uses the same Bitcoin addresses.

mononaut replied: It is not a Bitcoin layer in any sense of the word.

This is certainly hinted at in the Fractal Bitcoin marketing materials, but nothing of the sort is actually implemented in the Fractal Bitcoin code. Frankly, this is understandable, since it is technically impossible to transfer existing UTXO-based assets between unrelated blockchains.