Bitcoin Diamond: Unearthing Opportunity for All

Bitcoin Diamond (BCD) is a fork of Bitcoin; at predetermined block height 495866, the new chain was created. As the original Bitcoin (BTC) blockchain continues on unaltered, this new cryptocurrency now operates on its own chain called “Bitcoin Diamond”. With Bitcoin Diamond, miners will begin creating blocks using a new proof-of-work algorithm which better serves Satoshi’s original goal of keeping Bitcoin decentralized. Bitcoin Diamond offers several technical advancements in scalability along with anti-replay protection and wallet enhancements. With these changes to the Bitcoin protocol, Bitcoin Diamond seeks to achieve Satoshi Nakamoto's vision for a peer-to-peer electronic cash system that’s accessible and usable to everyone, regardless of economic status or country of origin.

After nine years of rapid development, Bitcoin can no longer meet the demands of its rising numbers of clients. Bitcoin has high transaction fees, slow transaction confirmations, and high thresholds for new miners. Furthermore, Bitcoin has still failed to adopt scaling solutions such as SegWit, with well over half of current Bitcoin transactions still using the older, less efficient protocol. As adoption for digital currency continues to outpace Bitcoin’s ability to scale, there is a danger that Satoshi’s digital cash  will eventually fall behind other payment platforms.
Bitcoin Diamond addresses these flaws by implementing several technical improvements from the very start. By combining Segregated Witness with an 8 MB block size, BCD is capable of performing over 100 transactions per second or 4.8 million a day, over 10 times the current speed of BTC. BCD prevents the centralization of mining power by using X13 Proof of Work, a mining algorithm that is resistant to ASICs and friendly to GPUs. In addition to these starting enhancements, the BCD development team is working on an implementation of Lightning Network as well as wallet clients across multiple platforms.

Bitcoin Diamond was forked off of the Bitcoin (BTC) blockchain on November 24, 2017 at block-height 495866 after Team EVEY and Team 007 recognized Bitcoin’s shortcomings and decided on upgrades to improve upon its original framework. Bitcoin Diamond developers have incorporated a new proof-of-work algorithm and will continue to enhance original Bitcoin features with greater speed, protection and scalability.
Bitcoin Diamond raised the block size limit to 8 to 32 MB as part of a massive on-chain scaling approach to create ample capacity for higher transaction storage. The transaction capacity of blocks will be increased five-fold and the ultimate goal is to improve transaction confirmation speed for the entire blockchain. With the addition of SegWit, transactions can now scale at a far greater pace than any Bitcoin chain before it. Bitcoin Diamond also offers replay protection as the format for transactions has been changed since the BCD fork. This means that BTC transactions cannot be replayed in the BCD network as a way to steal user funds.

BCD’s primary objective is to lower the cost of participation thresholds by reducing the transaction fees and increasing the supply. The total amount of Bitcoin diamond is ten times that of Bitcoin, which translates into a cost reduction for new participation and a reduction of necessary thresholds. Regardless of scalability, a chain is only as strong as its consensus. To reduce the danger of mining centralization, Bitcoin Diamond uses an algorithm that makes it incredibly difficult for single entities to command large stakes of the processing power for block validation.

While Bitcoin Diamond protocol provides faster transactions, additional scaling solutions are still required for the protocol to compete with traditional payment methods. To accomplish this, the BCD development team is working to implement Lightning Network, a "second layer" payment protocol first proposed by Joseph Poon and Thaddeus Dryja in 2016. This solution allows users to open “payment channels” by committing an amount of Bitcoin that can then be sent to other participants on the channel without being confirmed on the main chain. Using Lightning Network, Bitcoin Diamond can enable users to make instant transactions at a nearly limitless pace for a very low cost.

Satoshi Nakamoto designed Bitcoin’s mining system as a way for majority decisions to be made on a peer-to-peer basis. This Proof-of-Work used CPU power to guarantee that nodes were fairly represented with “one-CPU-one-vote”.
Satoshi decided to use SHA-256 as the algorithm for this Proof-of-work, which worked well for a number of years. However, as Bitcoin gained popularity, the mining sector has become more and more competitive. The development of Application Specific Integrated Circuits (ASICs) now means that anyone with access to the latest mining hardware can outpace traditional CPU miners with ease.
For Bitcoin to remain decentralized, a new mining algorithm must be implemented that can resist attempts by hardware manufacturers to outpace traditional miners.
To restore fair mining practices, Bitcoin Diamond utilizes and has improved upon the X13 Proof-of-Work algorithm. This means that all ASICs designed for Bitcoin SHA-256 are now entirely ineffective on BCD. With X13, creating new ASIC hardware is made incredibly difficult by a high level of complexity, reducing the threat of mining centralization. X13 was specifically created for graphics card mining, a standard of hardware that is widely accessible so that competition for mining is fair for the average user.
While the X13 algorithm existed before BCD’s launch, the X13 development team has added additional improvements to BCD’s version to bolster and ensure security. This includes the SM3 hash algorithm, issued by the Chinese Cryptography Administration in 2016 as the national standard for cryptographic applications. Currently, BCD is the only cryptocurrency to utilize the X13 algorithm in this manner. As time goes on, BCD’s development team will continue to improve its mining algorithm to ensure that Satoshi’s original vision for distributed consensus remains intact.
Electrum Integration
Electrum is a lightweight Bitcoin wallet that has been developed and supported since 2011. By operating in conjunction with servers that index the blockchain, Electrum clients can run with instant startup times and low resource usage. Electrum also offers a wide range of functionality including cold storage, multisig security and integration with hardware wallets. To capitalize on Electrum’s feature-set, Bitcoin Diamond has released its own version of the Electrum wallet. After downloading the wallet, users can quickly connect to the BCD network and claim any coins that they may have earned from the November fork.
HD Wallet Generation
Hierarchical deterministic wallets, otherwise known as HD wallets, is a feature available with BCD on Electrum to create multiple accounts from a single root key. With this rule, clients only need to save a master private key, which can generate multiple sub-private keys and sub-addresses. Clients can now easily manage the balances of all accounts under this one master private key and selectively issue child keys with limited access. This helps reduce the possibility of a master private key exposure, ensuring the safety of funds.
BCD Pay app
To ensure that all users can easily perform payments, Bitcoin Diamond will be the first Bitcoin project to support an official mobile wallet. An Android wallet based on Electrum has already been released with an iOS version currently under development. Current wallet features include wallet name modification, account switching, and QR scanning. With BCD Pay, digital currency will be made accessible to millions of unbanked individuals in emerging markets, bypassing the financial barriers that had previously excluded them from the global economy.BCD Pay Wallet is an easy-to-use app that anybody can use to send and receive cryptocurrency. Use this wallet to pay for food, gas, taxi, rentals, tickets, and other services around the world.
As of right now, the wallet supports 10 cryptocurrencies: Bitcoin, Litecoin, Ethereum, Dash, NEM, Waves, ZCoin, EOS, Horizen (formerly known as ZenCash) and Bitcore.
BCD Pay Wallet uses the latest industry standards for security and does not keep the user’s private keys.
The Bitcoin Diamond team is integral to the success of the coin and its surrounding ecosystem. The team has a wealth of experience from a variety of backgrounds. The core and management teams are comprised of board members from prominent organizations and top influencers in the cryptocurrency industry, particularly from the Asia region.
Consistent with Bitcoin Diamond’s inherent emphasis on privacy, the team has decided to remain anonymous to preserve their personal privacy. Each team member’s name is inspired by the secret identity of an action hero. If you are looking to partner with Bitcoin Diamond and require a KYC process, it is available upon request.

Users who held BTC at the time Bitcoin Diamond was created have automatically become owners of BCD. Please note that a wallet with 1 BTC will hold 10 BCD based on the supply change. Users may also earn BCD by mining with graphics cards or buying coins from an exchange or secondary market. To encourage the community to assist in the construction of BCD’s ecosystem, contributors will receive specific amounts of BCD as a reward as well.

The ultimate goal of Bitcoin Diamond is to become the “Bitcoin” that achieves Satoshi’s vision of becoming a globally accepted digital cash. With this in mind, Bitcoin Diamond will strive to provide better solutions for financial services worldwide.
 This plan (Dec 2017 ~ 2018 Q2) is generated by Bitcoin Diamond Community, based on the communication with the BCD development teams EVEY and 007.

Recently, COINCHECK announced the delisting of three encrypted digital currencies — Monero, Dash, and Zcash. According to the Japan Times report, this move might be in response to requirements for improving exchanges security proposed by the Japan Financial Services Agency (FSA). Also, according to Reuters report, the Court of Moscow gave a national order to block the use of communicative software- Telegram, due to its refusal to provide encrypted data to the government.

Encryption of cryptocurrencies in most cases leads to concealment of transaction details which makes it difficult for third party organizations or individuals to trace source of payments and transfers within the network ecosystem, thereby facilitating black market transactions and money laundering. Recently, The Bitcoin Diamond Foundation and its team realized that more exchanges might delist anonymous cryptocurrencies in future, which will adversely affect all anonymous digital currencies.

Bitcoin on the other hand, has become too expensive for small-scale payments due to very high fees and low transfer speed, but with Bitcoin Diamond, our goal is to create an application ecosystem, where economical and high-frequency real-time payment is implemented to improve on the bitcoin network.

However, being an anonymous digital currency may not favor effective inspection of payment information and compliance to regulations. In order to adapt to high-frequency transactions, developers of Bitcoin Diamond are adopting ‘Lightning Network’ where massive real-time transaction network will be implemented.

Lightning Network is a second layer payment protocol that works on the blockchain. It is designed for fast real-time transactions between the two parties. The main idea of the Lightning Network is to place a large number of transactions outside the blockchain which refines the off-chain transaction channels through smart contracts. Throughout the transaction, smart contracts play an important role as an intermediary, while blockchain ensures that the final transaction results are confirmed.

In view of the reasons above, The Bitcoin Diamond Foundation has decided to suspend the ongoing encryption implementation and focus on development of Lightning Network, while considering future improvements to benefit its network ecosystem, compliance to regulations as well as approval by BCD community and developers. Bitcoin Diamond version of Lightning Network is expected to be deployed on July 31, 2018, after complete assessment by developers and testers.

Team Evey & Team 007

Bitcoin Diamond Foundation

Telegram: https://t.me/BCDcommunity

Twitter: https://twitter.com/BitcoinDiamond_

Community Twitter: https://twitter.com/BCD_Volunteer

Open Source Code: https://github.com/eveybcd/BitcoinDiamond

Lightning Network: https://github.com/eveybcd/lightning

Website: http://btcd.io

Explorer: http://explorer.btcd.io/#/

BCD Forum: http://bbs.btcd.io/

What Does Bitcoin Diamond Have to Offer?
Lead: Bitcoin Diamond claims faster transactions, better privacy and lower costs. Does this make it a better Bitcoin?
Facebook: Bitcoin Diamond has successfully forked and established itself as a new cryptocurrency in its own right. What does it have to offer?
Twitter: Bitcoin Diamond emerges with faster transactions, lower costs and better privacy.
There is another Bitcoin on the block, Bitcoin Diamond (BCD), which was forked at block 495866 and assumed its very own chain has now seen the light of the day. The new cryptocurrency has been launched on 32 global exchanges according to information made available to Cointelegraph by the administrators of Bitcoin Diamond. The fork took place on Nov. 24, 2017, due to the efforts of Team EVEY and Team 007, two Bitcoin miners who Reuters report, “were not happy with some of the major downsides of Bitcoin.”
In a post made on Reddit, The Bitcoin Diamond Foundation, who are now responsible for the new cryptocurrency say, “After nine years of rapid development and therewith various problems with Bitcoin, such as lack of protection privacy, high transactions fees and slow transaction speed. Base on those defects, EVEY team and 007 team create Bitcoin Diamond.” They further add, “Bitcoin Diamond miners will begin creating blocks with a new proof-of-work algorithm, and will consecutively develop and enhance the protection for account transfer and privacy based on original features of BTC.”
What does BCD aim to fix?
Bitcoin (BTC) has been the most popular cryptocurrency of its times. However, it is not free from flaws. BTC transactions have been taking notoriously long time to process and they have gone expensive over time. This is because BTC blocks have been limited to one megabyte in size, which translates into around three transactions per second. BCD, on the other hand, has now raised the block size limit to eight MB, this will improve transaction capacity and blocks will be generated five times faster. The cost of BTC transactions has been rising, which has been casting a shadow on its practical applications. BCD on the other hand seeks to bring down costs related to transactions. A BCD executive was quoted at a press conference as saying, “Our primary objective is to lower the cost for participation thresholds by reducing the transaction fees and the cost of participation. The total amount of Bitcoin diamond is 10 times as much of Bitcoin, which translates into reduction of the cost for new participation and reduction of the thresholds.”
Finally, at the moment BTC transactions are visible in the public domain and anyone can see data related to how much amount is in another person’s wallet and their conducted transactions as well. BCD will encrypt the amount and balance, which will afford greater privacy to users of the new cryptocurrency.
BCD Debuts on exchanges, gains currency
At the time of the writing of this article, BCD had already been launched at 33 exchanges around the world. Some of the exchanges that have embraced this new cryptocurrency include Binance, OKEX, Huobi.Pro and Bit-Z. EXX.com has also announced futures trading of Bitcoin Diamond. There are at least 6 wallets that will support BCD, which are BitGo, Bitpie, Coldlar and ATOKEN.
The Bitcoin Diamond Foundation has also announced the accession of Linke Yang, co-founder of BTCC to the foundation. Yang, co-founded BTCC, which was the first digital currency exchange in China. It is thought that the Yang’s role as BCD advisor, would come as a shot in the arm for Bitcoin Diamond and help it gain ground in China. In an emailed communication by Bitcoin Diamond Foundation, Cointelegraph has been informed that the Chinese, Italian and Korean community teams have been established. The foundation says that the North American and Australian community are ‘progressing.’  We were also informed that more ‘pioneers’ maybe joining the BCD advisor team, which is likely to boost the cryptocurrency’s R&D efforts and also lead to an increase in popularity.
The roadmap for Bitcoin Diamond
As Bitcoin Diamond starts to go mainstream, they have a plan for the future in place. We are told that the medium term plan with a time frame of December 2017 - December 2018 (Q2), which is based on communications between BCD development teams EVERY and 007 laid out the hard fork for bitcoin block at height 495866 on November 24, 2017. This gave birth to to Bitcoin Diamond. By December 2017, there are plans to have the Bitcoin Diamond mainnet, wallet, nodes code and API release as well as the open source on Github[a] in place. (Follow BIP-044, Index999). It will be possible to mine BCD either with a full node client or alternatively with a pool. There are 3 pools that will support BCD mining and mining will commence after mainnet releases. BCD will support both AMD and Nvidia based GPU mining. Finally in December, there are plans to conduct an algorithms upgrade for BCD main chain encryption, this will encrypt both the transaction and balance amounts.
Is Bitcoin Diamond a better Bitcoin?
Whether or not Bitcoin Diamond is a better Bitcoin, depends on who you ask. In recent days, there have been hard forks that have led to the emergence of Bitcoin Cash, Bitcoin Gold and now Bitcoin Diamond. The idea behind a hardfork is that a new chain emerges, and hopefully a better one. The stated and ultimate aim of Bitcoin Diamond is to become “the better coin” which does not suffer from a lack of privacy protection, slow transaction confirmations or a high threshold for new members. This will allow them to provide better solutions to financial companies worldwide.
 The total supply of Bitcoin Diamond would be 210 mln or 10 times more than that of Bitcoin. 170 mln of these coins would be on the market, while the rest would be reserved for the community in a ‘rewards pool’ for the purposes of tributes and mining. One of the criticisms that has been made about Bitcoin Diamond has been that the teams behind the cryptocurrency have remained anonymous, but we should not forget that to date the founder of Bitcoin has remained an enigma as well. Anonymity should not come in the way of adoption and at the end of the day markets will reveal if Bitcoin Diamond offers features that they think are worth their while. For now, you can pick the Bitcoin that you like.