( Rough Draft )

CopyCoin

CopyCoin (CPC) is a hard fork of Bitcoin Core, planned for July 1st, 2019. It supports txns that spend to Drivechain scripts. These scripts allow BTC to travel among “copies” of rival blockchain projects (such as BCH, ETH, and XMR) – called “sidechains”.

Unlike previous hard forks:

  1. It will NOT compete on: development; usage; being listed on an exchange; or the “Bitcoin” name.
  2. It won’t actually change any consensus rules. It just resets the difficulty one time (to force a second network to appear). On that new network, Drivechain activates as a soft fork.

FAQ

1. Are you abandoning the idea of “sidechains on BTC”?

No. This is something I am doing in addition to pushing for sidechains on BTC.

Some supporters are skeptical that BTC will add Drivechain. These people have been clamoring for a hard fork, so I (Paul Sztorc) throw my weight behind this new project. I’m a little reluctant about it, but if Riccardo, Charlie, David, Bram, Zooko, and Ignotious can do new projects then I can’t find anything wrong with this.

2. How many developers do you have?

This project is not competing on development.

The non-Drivechain parts of the codebase will always be identical to Bitcoin Core (currently 0.16.99). When/if future inventions are merged into Core (such as: sighash-noinput, Confidential Transactions, etc.), we will just click the merge button ourselves.

This also goes for any Altcoins that CPC expropriates as sidechains. So, the plan is to take the industry’s R&D while doing as little work as possible.

3. How does your user-controlled opt-in replay protection work?

RP exists, but is off by default. Transactions in the next Bitcoin Core block, can all be immediately replayed into next CPC block. All BTC users are also transacting on CPC, whether they realize it or not.

Users can however choose to “split” their coins, and henceforth they will have RP and behave as Altcoins.

4. Won’t that make exchanges vulnerable to replay attacks?

Yes. Exchanges that ignore CPC might accidentally start giving it out for free.

5. Why not join with a previous hard fork (BCH or BSV)?

BTC-owners are most politically/economically influential of all crypto-communities.

Our code is free for anyone to use – this is how BCH could best use it.

6. If CPC succeeds, won’t BTC just install Drivechain? If so, how can this project have any upside?

I have tried to arrange for BTC-mining to collapse, in the event of CPC’s success. The strategy for achieving this involves: identical PoW-algos; a lower CPC difficulty; and the fact that financial losses are only experienced by those users who split their coins and intentionally bet against Drivechain.

Drivechain can only be added to BTC via a MASF (miner-activated soft fork). But if miners believed in Drivechain, they could instead just switch to mining CPC. And, if someone wanted to add DC via hard fork, well: this is that hard fork.

7. Isn’t “CopyCoin” a lame brand? Are you taking this seriously?

If CPC’s marketcap exceeds BTC’s for 15 uninterrupted days, I will rename “CopyCoin” to “Bitcoin Extended (BEX)”. I would expect “Bitcoin” to colloquially refer to BEX (BTC would become “Bitcoin Core”). The “CopyCoin” name would become an obscure bit of Bitcoin history.

So, the “CopyCoin” brand only describes the period before this usurping takes place. So I named it after my critique of BTC – its refusal to copy other interesting blockchain designs.