Statement From Calvin Ayre and CoinGeek About Bitcoin Protocol

LONDON, August 13, 2018 — CoinGeek is committed to global success of the original Bitcoin (now restored in the form of Bitcoin Cash BCH), and that requires restoring the Bitcoin protocol to its original design. Once restored, the Bitcoin protocol should be locked so that businesses and developers around the world can reliably build on top of it – just as they do on the Internet protocol. This will help professionalize the Bitcoin ecosystem to enable its next stage of growth.

In keeping with these goals, here is a statement of consensus changes that CoinGeek, as a significant miner, will support in the November 2018 protocol upgrade:

1. Continuing the program to re-enable the original set of op codes. Specifically for November, CoinGeek supports re-enabling: OP_MUL, OP_LSHIFT, OP_RSHIFT and OP_INVERT
2. Removing the current limit of 201 op codes per script
3. Raising the maximum block size to 128MB

We note that additional changes have been proposed by several implementation teams that are not part of the original Bitcoin protocol. We will not support the following changes or commit our hash power to running software that implements them:

1. OP_DATASIGVERIFY
2. Canonical transaction ordering (We are committed to investigating the removal of topological ordering as a potential barrier to scaling but this requires more detailed examination)

In the longer term, CoinGeek will continue to support only consensus changes that restore the original Bitcoin protocol, and those that may be demonstrated as absolutely necessary to meeting the goal of massive on-chain scaling to terabyte+ blocks.

This can be broadly summarized as removing all of the artificially imposed limits and restoring previously-disabled functionality where safe to do so. Limitations on protocol parameters such as block size should be determined by miners in a competitive spirit. The natural tension between the economic incentive to handle unbounded limits and the technical challenges to doing so are how we envisage Bitcoin miners governing these limits. Investment equals competitive advantage. As we previously announced, CoinGeek believes in miner choice, and a healthy competitive marketplace for miners.

Non-consensus changes:

CoinGeek is committed to enabling massive on-chain scaling and safe instantaneous Bitcoin transactions. As such, we will be encouraging the non-consensus changes that meet these requirements. Specifically, we encourage the following:

1. Remove transaction relay delays.
2. Plug-in transaction selection and quotation modules to enable miners to control fee policies more easily. e.g.
   • Free or cheaper fees for transactions that either shrink or do not expand the UTXO set.
   • Storage or computational cost based fee calculation.
3. Implementation of a secondary transaction cache to allow double spend monitoring for transactions that don’t meet a miner’s acceptance policy. This mechanism is dependent on the principle of 0-conf transactions being considered a premium service with stricter requirements over and above those of transactions where instant acceptance is not a requirement.

Additionally, in order to facilitate safe 0-conf transactions, CoinGeek will encourage and support development of a comprehensive technical roadmap to deliver all of the tools necessary for demonstrably safe 0-conf transactions.

CoinGeek will continue to use its resources to support the original vision of Bitcoin, and invites other miners to take these same positions. Miners invest significantly to maintain the Bitcoin BCH network with their hash, and should make their voice heard on these issues to ensure the global growth of Bitcoin.

If this path is not followed Bitcoin will not ever be able to fulfil its destiny as a peer to peer Electronic cash system for the world. If Bitcoin is not used for this purpose then then Bitcoin will not be viable economically for miners in the future and the economic freedom associated with this will not happen for the world’s most vulnerable and the Cambrian explosion of innovation will not happen on top of Bitcoin as intended. If this path is followed the world benefits and competitive Miners prosper. CoinGeek’s suggested path is in the best interest of all Enterprise level mining operations and we welcome working together to support this now.

CoinGeek also wants to announce: that we have designed a super energy efficient, next generation ASIC chip design that will be released later this year. This Chip will be optimized for Enterprise level mining on Bitcoin using the original Satoshi Protocol. We will have a booth demonstrating this at the CoinGeek Week Conference last week of Nov in London and invite all miners to join us in planning for the future of this industry at this event.

Miners drive road maps in this space, so let’s drive this together!

NB: Details on CoinGeek Week in London this November & how to join the (free) bComm Association.