Bitcoin Forum

I recently read that the bitcoins on the address associated with the Genesis block are unspendable.

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I believe this was made so on purpose as a feature to fork bitcoin-like networks without inflation.

For example, I think Zerocoin is an interesting concept, but creating another Bitcoin "metoo" always seems opportunistic.

However, if the new Bitcoin Clone community were to put its money where its mouth is, they could inject coins into the new bitcoin network by transferring them to the classical Bitcoin Genesis address, thereby destroying them - they  become unspendable. However, the address from which they came could then be credited with exactly that balance in the forked blockchain.

If a community believes strongly enough in their new client and protocol, they could show it by destroying a substantial amount of bitcoins. The market would decide whether the value of those destroyed bitcoins is then transferred to the new network, or simply causes deflation in the old network.

Any thoughts?

 

It could be done but your approach won't work at all. To destroy coin the simplest way to send to OP_RETURN

Only the "coinbase" is unspendable - all other amounts sent to that address could be spent (although Satoshi has chosen not to spend those UTXO's nor any of the other coinbase in the blocks he mined).

Just because a transaction exists that destroys a Bitcoin doesn't mean that it is accepted in the main chain. So how would the altchain ensure that only valid bitcoin transactions count? I think this is possible, but it would be strange for an altcoin to have to rely on bitcoin validation as well. For example, validators on the altchain would also have to validate the bitcoin chain. A couple months ago there was a large fork in which dozens of blocks were rewound. This would affect the altchain too?

I don't think this is strange at all.  IMHO the technical underpinnings are far less important than the economic properties of the currency.  If achieving a desired economic property (supporting Bitcoin's unit of account, instead of competing with it) comes at the expense of a bit more technical complexity, then that could be a valid trade off.

Getting at least one cryptocurrency to have a usable, resilient unit of account is a damn hard problem, requiring a massive network effect.  If not all useful innovations can be incorporated into Bitcoin directly, then it'd certainly inspire confidence to know that their implementation doesn't constitute a financial risk.