Bitcoin Splice: mining you can actually do

Your computer, right now

This is really mining, the same maths a mining rig does. Only the goal is made easier, so something happens while you watch.

starting

Your speed measuring…

A block on Bitcoin Splice …

A block on Bitcoin …

Found here 0

Measuring your machine…

Your browser is slow at this. A real mining program on the same computer is fifty to a hundred times faster. The comparison holds either way.

Why this exists

Mining left home, and it was never coming back on its own.

Once upon a time you mined Bitcoin on the computer you already owned. That stopped being possible a long time ago. Today a handful of pools decide what goes in most blocks, the machines live in warehouses, and the honest advice to anyone who asks "can I mine?" is no, and don't bother trying.

Nothing in the software changed to make that happen. The maths is the same maths. What changed is one number, the difficulty, which grew until only an industry could reach it.

Then, this month, a group of miners split off from Bitcoin to enforce BIP-110. They took Bitcoin's difficulty with them but almost none of its mining power. In three and a half days that chain produced four blocks. Bitcoin produced 561 in the same stretch. The difficulty was simply set to a number nobody on that chain could afford.

Bitcoin Splice picks up that stalled chain and fixes the difficulty first. It starts at 1 and adjusts on every single block, where Bitcoin adjusts once a fortnight. Too many miners and it gets harder. Too few and it gets easier. Nobody sets it, nobody votes on it, and there is no schedule to be stuck waiting for.

Several other things had to change alongside it. Splice has its own network greeting and its own ports, so a Splice node and a Bitcoin node cannot reach each other even by accident, and its signatures are deliberately incompatible with Bitcoin's so nothing signed here can ever be replayed to move your real coins.

The effect is that a chain can start from nothing and find its own level in a few hours. That is exactly the thing Bitcoin cannot do, and exactly why a fork of Bitcoin normally dies on the first day.

It was only ever one number.

What happens

Point a computer at it and this is roughly how the day goes.

First

A block in minutes

At difficulty 1 a block takes about 4.3 billion tries. It sounds enormous. A normal desktop gets through it in well under a minute, so your first block will probably arrive before your coffee does.

Then

It tightens up

Every block you find makes the next one harder, automatically. If more people join, it tightens faster. If everyone leaves, it loosens again. You don't configure any of this and neither does anyone else.

By tomorrow

Ten-minute blocks

Within a few hours the chain settles at roughly one block every ten minutes, the same rhythm as Bitcoin, at whatever difficulty matches the people actually mining. Then it just keeps going.

A worked example. A mid-range desktop running a proper mining program does about 115 million tries a second, which finds a first block in around 40 seconds. A graphics card does far better: an RTX 3090 manages 3.73 billion a second. Either way, one machine on its own settles the chain at a block every ten minutes, and every extra person who joins pushes the difficulty up. The chain works it out without being told.

Getting in

Three steps, and one of them is a download.

Step one

Run the node

One Docker command. It's a normal Bitcoin node with a different difficulty rule bolted on.

Step two

Let it catch up

The chain continues from a real Bitcoin block, so your node needs Bitcoin's history up to that point, and only a Splice node can serve it. Today that means one machine, so this is the slow bit. Everything after it is fast.

Step three

Point a miner at it

Three are known to work, unmodified: BFGMiner, cpuminer-opt and an ASIC. Give one your address and let it run.

The full instructions are short and every command is copy-pasteable.

Get started →

Who runs this

One person. That's on purpose.

Bitcoin Splice is written and maintained by one developer, kosinskihenry. There's no foundation, no company, no working group and no weekly call.

Think about what actually killed the chain we forked. A committee did. Months of process built to manufacture agreement produced 2.53% support and a chain that stopped moving. That process had plenty of developers. It had nobody with the authority to decide.

One person can obviously be wrong, and probably is about something. But one person can't be lobbied into a compromise nobody wanted or stalled for eighteen months, and when they are wrong you can see it, name it, and copy the code and do it better. Fewer developers, fewer places for the argument to hide.

Developer: kosinskihenry
Foundation: none
Company: none
Investors: none
Meetings: none
Coins premined: 0
If you disagree: fork it

Questions

The short answers.

Can I lose my real bitcoin by using this?

Not by accident. Transactions made here are built so they cannot be replayed onto Bitcoin, and the two networks can't even talk to each other. The realistic risk is you: put your seed phrase into a node you are experimenting with and that is on you. Use fresh keys.

Do I need a special mining program?

No, and nothing needs modifying for Splice. Three have actually been tested: BFGMiner, cpuminer-opt and an ASIC. Others may well work, but nobody has tried them, so treat anything else as unknown until you do. BFGMiner will also drive a GPU, which is the quickest option here.

Will an ASIC beat me?

Yes, comfortably, if someone points one at the chain. We didn't try to prevent that. Every project that has tried ended up with ASICs anyway. What starting at difficulty 1 buys is a real window where an ordinary computer counts for something.

Where do I get the coins?

You mine them. That's the only way there is. Nobody was given any, including the developer.

What do you want from me?

Run a node, point something at it, and tell the developer when they've got it wrong. In that order.

The computer you already own is enough.

Start mining Source

Goes live in …