What Is Bitcoin Diamond?

For the people who assumed we were done with ridiculous Bitcoin fork names, the reality looks very different. More specifically, the launch of Bitcoin Diamond is almost upon us, and it will serve as yet another airdrop for existing Bitcoin users. After Bitcoin Gold and Bitcoin Diamond, there are still a lot of precious metals to use for new fork names. This is all a bit immature, but if it makes people money, no one will complain too much.

Bitcoin Diamond is a Privacy-oriented Bitcoin Fork

There are many things we do not find in Bitcoin in its current form. That shouldn’t really surprise anyone, as Bitcoin was never designed to be the perfect cryptocurrency. It has gotten a lot of attention over the years for being the first major cryptocurrency of its generation, but there are still a lot of glaring issues which need to be resolved. First of all, there is no such thing as anonymity or privacy when using Bitcoin. For many people, this is perhaps the biggest issue to deal with right now.

Bitcoin Diamond, another hard fork of Bitcoin, claims to solve this problem. The soon-to-be-released altcoin will fork once the Bitcoin network hits block height 495,866. By the time you read this article, that network block should have been discovered by miners already. It is the third major airdrop Bitcoin users will receive this year, not counting the B2X coins from the borked SegWit2x launch. It has been a profitable year for BTC holders in many different ways; that much is certain.

What Bitcoin Diamond claims to offer is privacy first and foremost. It seems this fork’s developers have found a way to encrypt the transaction amounts and balances of all BCD users. It sounds somewhat similar to Monero, but it is doubtful the Bitcoin Diamond implementation is even half as competent. A GitHub repo has yet to be created for this altcoin, but that may change once the correct block is found on the Bitcoin network.

Bitcoin Diamond boasts it will provide fast transactions thanks to its 8MB block size limit. This means the new fork has copied some code from Bitcoin Cash in this regard. On-chain scaling will always be debatable, as there are many reasons why it is not a long-term solution whatsoever. At the same time, it can alleviate network congestion until a more future-oriented solution can be implemented. It does not appear as if Bitcoin Diamond has plans to further increase the capacity of blocks.

What is rather worrisome is how there will be 210 million BCD in circulation. This supply is 10 times as large as Bitcoin’s, further confirming this is not a direct hard fork. It is another altcoin riding the coattails of Bitcoin in an attempt to net the developers a lot of money in short order. It uses the X13 mining algorithm, which should give GPU miners something to do. Surprisingly, Bitcoin Diamond also supports SegWit, according to its website. That’s quite remarkable, although this is not necessarily a currency capable of dethroning Bitcoin.

The website also mentions that Bitcoin Diamond will be supported on several exchanges right out of the gate. That’s very suspicious, as it indicates that exchange owners are colluding with these developers to make a quick buck. It remains to be seen whether or not entities such as Huobi, OKEX, and ZB.com will actually support this currency. Moreover, the list of supported wallets seems very dubious as well. BitGo has not indicated it will support any other currencies, and certainly not Bitcoin Diamond. Be very wary of this project, as the number of lies is quite high.