[ANN] BITCOIN PRIME

BITCOIN PRIME

Primecoin presents the perfect vehicle to return crypto to its decentralized roots. It is fairly mined, fast, has low fees, well-balanced difficulty and reward adjustments, and uniquely useful Proof of Work. We seek to leverage these strengths along with the best cryptocurrency advancements to solve a shortlist of crypto’s most pressing problems including mainstream on-boarding and smart oracles.

The Legacy of Primecoin and Useful Proof of Work

Traditional Proof of Work (PoW) is a highly competitive computational arms race. It has become a classic example of the tragedy of the commons. As each miner attempts to increase their hashrate to boost their share of the block rewards, they increase their power consumption and the power consumption of the network as a whole. This impacts not only users but non-users and the world at large.

Increased hashrate provides security and a means to process transactions, but fails to provide more transaction throughput. Transaction throughput is limited by block time, and block size. You could have 1 hash/per second or 43,161,058 terahashes/per second (block peak hashrate), and still have the same limit on the amount of transactions possible. Bitcoin now requires more electricity than entire countries for an extremely meagre transaction throughput. For the (current) electricity consumption of a single Bitcoin transaction (1032 kWh), VISA is capable of processing 610,650 transactions. In short, Bitcoin requires ever-increasing amounts of computational power, electricity, and resources for limited results. Beyond securing the network, those resources serve no other function.

Primecoin foresaw this problem and called it an opportunity. Primecoin employs innovative and unique Proof of Work and sound game-theory structure. Unlike Bitcoin, Primecoin’s first-in-the-world useful PoW creates mathematically intriguing, cryptographically useful and significant by-products, and pursues a thoughtful inflation solution sensitive to Moore’s Law. Equilibrium for emissions is governed via mathematical mandate rather than hard arbitrary limits.

Contrary to Bitcoin, the more devoted computational power, the more useful Primecoin becomes as the increased processing power drives it to find more prime chains. This pursuit of scientific advancement also incentivizes mining beyond profit purposes. Miners can take pride in knowing that the result of their work is long lasting and long reaching, benefiting those inside and outside of their community. For many, this altruistic appeal offers an inherent “credit” in favor of mining and therefore reduces their needed marginal benefit to mine.

Keeping this extraordinary legacy in mind, we have committed ourselves to Primecoin’s ongoing success. Moving forward, we seek to leverage Primecoin’s core innovations to solve crypto’s major needs. Increased usability, decentralization, and functionality will allow our platform, creators, and crypto generally to reach mainstream status. The result will be a fully developed Primecoin true to its original potential that will introduce the crypto world to a democratic, decentralized, comprehensive, and useful PoW ecosystem.

OUR VISION IS TO ACCOMPLISH THE FOLLOWING:

Primecoin Infrastructure updates

Electrum wallet
Hardware wallet support
Compatibility with bitcoin 0.16
Tool updates such as block explorers and statistics pages

Prime Platform and DEX

Decentralized Exchange and Tokens
GUI/Wallets for Prime DEX

Prime Bridge (Cross-Chain Swaps)

Daily auction site

Prime Oracles

Federated full-nodes on Prime DEX
Validations of oracle data in PoW

Prime Universal Computation

Off-chain application and data hosting

Each of these components builds on the others and creates a greater whole. Upgrading Primecoin’s Infrastructure is paramount to the ongoing development of the coin and platform at large. Once the infrastructure is updated we will create an integrated Prime Platform and DEX, providing the means to bring crypto mainstream. This platform will empower new token creators while simultaneously addressing the crucial initial liquidity hurdle they often face. The mix of usability, functionality, and liquidity makes it the ideal starting point. Second, the Prime Bridge neatly solves any liquidity problems for the DEX as a whole. Third, Prime Oracles unlock a market now worth billions with its ability to connect the blockchain with real world inputs. It foresees and leads the future of crypto development. A smart contract unable to “see” beyond its immediate inputs proves limited at best as crypto increasingly integrates with existing institutions. Fourth, Prime Universal Computing is useful PoW in its final form: putting PoW’s engine into whatever service platform creators desire. In a world where computing power is increasingly at a premium, blockchain can again rise to the occasion.

PRIME PLATFORM and DEX (Tokens and Decentralized Exchange)

Prime DEX seeks to offer a decentralized and democratic alternative- a platform and exchange in one. Primecoin will offer a platform where new development teams can create custom tokens, with smart contract functionality included, in any programming language. This alone already offers a more democratized development path than the Ethereum Solidity-only implementation. Pivoting away from a single programming language taps into a significantly wider range of development talent by removing this hurdle to Prime DEX’s adoption.

Adding a complementary exchange and other financial instruments will allow development teams to create greater functionality and incentivize them to develop on our platform. They can focus on improving their core proposition and simply add-on the sophisticated tools and subsidiary functions below. The DEX helps solve the initial liquidity problem new teams face in trying to secure ever-more expensive exchange listings. An automated platform-to-DEX integration guarantees coin creators an effortless path from development to listing. On Prime DEX’s side, the DEX and platform should enjoy a symbiotic relationship. Teams developing on the platform will add liquidity to the DEX and the ability to easily trade on the DEX should incentivize creators to develop on the platform.

Beyond this, Prime DEX’s platform will provide usable and sophisticated tools for development teams. For example, it will support smart contracts, escrow, and crowdfunding among other features. Consider Counterparty (counterparty.io) and its ability to attract development teams with a swath of sophisticated, relatively easy-to-use financial tools for the success such an approach can have. Prime DEX will offer significantly better usability by removing the need for the native token which is an unnecessary complication. Counterparty was designed to serve as an anti-spam measure because it required Bitcoin as its native currency. Using our own native currency is already an anti-spam measure, rendering the extra currency redundant. In addition to this, our project will have the following advantages over using Counterparty on Bitcoin:

1 minute block times
10x bitcoin transaction limit
Lower fees than bitcoin
GUI/Wallet for Prime DEX

GUI/ Wallet for Prime DEX
Decentralization requires usability. Prime DEX will prioritize user experience and interfaces because those features are likely the most important and overlooked aspect of crypto today. As anyone who has used an Electrum wallet can attest, the ability to easily store and move tokens greatly enhances a platform’s appeal, especially for mainstream users. As crypto nears widespread adoption, usability will prove vital to on-boarding new users. We aim to design an intuitive, simple, fast, customizable and visually pleasing application. Our main multi-platform wallet application will feature:

An exceptional Decentralised Exchange (DEX) to trade portfolio tokens and coins
A system to create and manage your own tokens.
Hardware wallet support
From the beginning, these open source applications will allow users to create white label wallets and services for their own tokens. The result empowers new developers to create and bring their innovations to the masses.

We will build easy to use interfaces to the Prime DEX. For example, one of the friendliest counterparty wallets on Bitcoin is the Rare Pepe wallet: https://rarepepewallet.com/. There is also https://wallet.counterwallet.io/ and the Counterparty explorer: Counterparty Block Explorer

PRIME BRIDGE

Addressing DEXs’ current liquidity struggles will be key. People need a trustless decentralized way to buy and sell Primecoin for Bitcoin and other currencies. This can already be accomplished through cross chain atomic swaps. However, the process of setting up a cross chain swap currently requires a lot of technical expertise.

Swaps also are slower (have higher latency) than centralized exchange trading because it can take minutes to initiate each step of a swap on-chain. As a result, a daily auction structure would likely improve user experience for a decentralized atomic swap service. This would operate similar to the Gemini daily auction for Bitcoin. Here, people would put some amount of Primecoin for sale, and an on-chain Dutch auction could be used to buy the Primecoin with Bitcoin or another currency. At the end of the auction, all auction winners get Primecoin for the same price each day.

The result dramatically increases liquidity during predictable times and helps solve DEXs’ current liquidity issues. An auction-style function also offers significant potential to draw in traders needing to transact a large amount of funds because, unlike traditional exchanges, auction transactions will settle instantly and simultaneously as a whole. Instead of facing a sharply increased price as a result of their orders hitting the order-books or pushing the price higher, bulk traders can transact on similar terms as everyone else.

PRIME ORACLES

As blockchain moves towards mainstream acceptance, its technology increasingly requires interaction with non-blockchain entities. Getting data from outside a blockchain into a blockchain in a trustless decentralized manner is one of the biggest challenges with smart contract development right now. For example, how do you get the price of gold into a smart contract without trusting a centralized source? Further, should one source begin to dominate the oracle reference market (i.e.- Weather.com for weather), it creates a significant and overly tempting single point of failure.

We considered several possible solutions to this. One possibility is for oracles to be built into federated full nodes of the Prime DEX. Full nodes would all need to be running the same version in order to guarantee consensus. It is also possible for miners to validate oracle data along with their PoW required in block headers. This offers a positive comparison to Satoshi’s original design for miners working with nodes to determine valid blocks through consensus and Proof of Work. It extends Primecoin’s mission of useful Proof of Work to create a universal Nakamoto Consensus evolution in an area of extraordinarily significant need. However, this change would require a soft-fork of Primecoin and a majority of network miners to upgrade their nodes to support this feature.

This allows the project to be a leader in crypto’s future. Decentralized exchanges, for example, are “necessary for cryptocurrency users to exploit their full potential, aligning with the decentralized nature of blockchain itself.” Going further, “daily volume [on non-crypto decentralized markets] reaches on average $5.4T in the global foreign exchange market, $2.3B in the U.S. interest-rate derivative market, and $0.8T in the U.S. bond market.” That $2.3 billion derivative market, in the U.S. interest rate market alone and like many others, requires a scalable answer to the smart oracle problem that we aim to provide.

PRIME UNIVERSAL COMPUTATION

It is not practical to run anything other than the simplest scripts on Bitcoin or Ethereum. Ethereum is generally at around 90% of the gas limit for blocks and was at 100% capacity when Crypto Kitties was at the height of popularity. In both these cases, scripts are run on-chain.

It’s unnecessary and wasteful to put entire computations on chain if instead hashes can be used to represent the inputs and outputs of deterministic programs as this new generation of crypto projects has increasingly realized. For example, it would be possible to store the IPFS address for a deterministic program that is run with the output stored on IPFS and the address for the output is either stored in transaction metadata, or in the header of a block in the case that a miner validates the output.

Building decentralized applications and hosting through a model of computation that happens off-chain is a more scalable long-term approach. The end result fully develops the idea of useful PoW and crypto’s capabilities. It takes useful PoW’s powerful computational engine and merges it with distributed ledger technology’s natural information movement. Providing decentralized computing is useful PoW in its final form — a marriage between the increasingly insatiable demand for computing power and the computing power PoW already employs.

Our Process

To end, a brief word about decentralization, our process, and the fork. As many have seen, we intend to take decentralization to its limits. Already, we track almost all tasks publicly so the community can follow development as it happens. They can see the lists of tasks the team is working on, who is working on that task, and even how much progress has been made. Potential developers can see if there is a suitable task and contribute in their manner of choice without needing to join a formal team. This democratization both follows Satoshi’s original vision and offers significant advantages by allowing the project to tap into capability wherever it exists.

We will soon push the decentralization boundary even further with open development channels corresponding to the four goals, where development can happen openly and anyone can contribute. Of course, some tasks, such as dealing with exchanges, must remain somewhat less decentralized by nature.

In line with this and our commitment to developing Primecoin, we will focus on the four steps articulated above for the immediate future and consider a fork where it naturally falls into the discussion. We will ask if or when a fork’s advantages make sense in light of the progress thus far and a decision will be made accordingly. As with all goals and decentralization efforts, these goals may be changed or improved as circumstances dictate.

The outcome will be a democratic and democratized effort to drive useful PoW into prominence. The resulting ecosystem affords development teams of all levels and stripes comprehensive support in whatever goals they can imagine. It offers them a platform to develop, an engine to power, and an exchange to trade in one fully integrated environment. Primecoin, as the first to employ useful Proof of Work and the first to recognize PoW and crypto’s ability to more comprehensively contribute to the world at large, is the natural foundation.

We hope you join us for this journey!

Official Discord: https://discord.gg/QJMh9qj
Official Twitter: https://twitter.com/BTCPrimeCoin
Official Announcements Channel: https://t.me/BitcoinPrimeAnnouncements
Rhett’s Official Twitter: https://twitter.com/HeyRhett
Official Trello (follow development live!): https://trello.com/b/tDhSxZvG/primecoin-bitcoin-prime-community-contrib