The number of active and upcoming Bitcoin hard forks is quite stunning. While most people may only be able to name one or two forks, there are quite a few other projects out there as well. Super Bitcoin, for example, is one of the more recent hard forks. Although it has flown under most people’s radars, there is a genuine interest in the project. It also has the support of quite a few cryptocurrency exchanges right now.
Super Bitcoin is a Live Hard Fork
The year 2017 has produced many different versions of Bitcoin, each with its own unique features, aspects, and goals. It is evident a lot of people are not too happy with the way Bitcoin works right now, and they all have their own ideas about how to make it better. Implementing those changes on the main Bitcoin blockchain is not always feasible, as the Bitcoin Core team has so many different options to consider these days.
As a result, we’ve seen a growing number of Bitcoin hard forks, all of which try to bring more value to the cryptocurrency ecosystem. Bitcoin Cash has been a major success so far, and Bitcoin Gold isn’t doing too badly either. Whether or not Super Bitcoin can achieve similar results remains to be determined. However, with support from exchanges right off the bat, this altcoin will see some initial success over the next few days.
Super Bitcoin went live a few days ago when the Bitcoin network discovered block 498,888, allowing exchanges to begin issuing this currency to holders of Bitcoin. OKEx, Huobi Pro, Coinut, CEX.com and a few others have all (allegedly) pledged support for this hard fork, although it remains to be seen if they will enable trading before the year is over.
On the mining front, it seems Super Bitcoin has two major mining pools helping out. Both BTCC Pool and F2Pool have set up servers for mining Super Bitcoin, which is rather interesting. All of this is according to a Medium post dated a few days ago, yet F2Pool’s main page doesn’t list SBTC as one of its mineable currencies. It will be interesting to see how many people decide to mine Super Bitcoin.
On the technical side, it seems the total supply will be 21,210,000 SBTC. This is slightly more than Bitcoin’s 21 million coins. All of the “excess” coins were pre-mined and held by the Super Bitcoin Foundation. The plan is to use these funds to encourage early developers, ensure the foundation continues to operate, and grow the ecosystem over time.
Other features of Super Bitcoin include support for smart contracts, the Lightning Network, zero-knowledge proofs, and bigger blocks. More specifically, the block size can be expanded to 8MB at its highest, although this number may still increase depending on how many transactions are processed on the network. It is quite interesting to see this project focus on so many different things, all of which are mainly borrowed from other projects.
Right now, no one knows for sure what the future will hold for Super Bitcoin. The currency is tracked on CoinMarketCap, though it’s the futures market rather than the actual currency. So far, it seems the market values these futures at close to US$327, which is a pretty solid amount for a brand new altcoin. Whether or not this reflects the actual SBTC value remains to be determined, though. If that value holds up, it seems we will have four different versions of Bitcoin in the crypto top 10. That would certainly be a sight to behold.
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