This week the BitMEX team has published a lengthy post in their official blog on the issue of competition with the Bitcoin Core software project. Having analyzed the capacities and development of the project under consideration, the BitMEX team has found clear differences between the ways of competeing with it.
One of the main conclusions is that belief in Bitcoin Core’s exclusive ability to affect Bitcoin is a misconception, so, even if something happens to Bitcoin Core, if it is hacked or deactivated, it won’t have a huge impact on Bitcoin.
Types of competing projects
Researches has defined the main approaches to competing with the Core project and united them in three main categories.
The first type defined is competition between chains. In this very case we are speaking about projects that are trying to change the consensus rules. For example, soft and hard forks can be included into this category. Nevertheless, such an approach can be considered to be rather risky as due to it the existing coin may be splitted into two separate chains.
This method can be implemented only with active support of a wide audience or through introduction of a new coin, otherwise, the existing threats may negatively influence the stability of the coin leading to the lack of confidence in it.
The second approach is competition between independent implementations. It presupposes a new trial to implement Bitcoin excluding the usage of the core code. This approach includes utilizing the potential and opportunities of another programming language. As the first rype, this one is also rather risky as it may result in an accidental chain split in case even of a slight difference in approaches to the consensus behavior.
But it’s worth mentioning that this great number of clients is a very important benefit from the perspective of omitting/fixing bugs that were found in dominant implementation.
There is also the third type mentioned. All other competing software project that do not work neither with the consensus rules changes nor with the codebase reimplementation are included into this group. According to BitMEX, these projects are not so risky and controversial as those that are described above.
BitMEX new client
To compete with Bitcoin Core, BitMex Research has announced its own new client called Bitcoin BitMEX Research. There are no plans to introduce consensus changes that could lead to a strong necessity to conduct a hard fork or to try to repeat the implementation the protocol through rewriting the codebase.
The company offers a software fork of Bitcoin Core which can be included into the third group of “Other competing software projects” and is rather safe as it doesn’t have any risks that can be brought to the network with the projects of other two types.
