Super Bitcoin? Another Bitcoin Fork!?

No, you didn’t hear me wrong, and No, I’m not kidding either; there will soon be another bitcoin fork – Super Bitcoin, scheduled to take place on December 17, 2017.

2017 can now be officially called the year of the Bitcoin Forks as several groups have taken advantage of the inadequacies and shortcomings of bitcoin, using them as an excuse to create new Bitcoin forks, and just like the ICOs, the bitcoin forks just keep coming.

First there was Bitcoin cash in August, Bitcoin Gold in October, Bitcoin SegWit2x in November (cancelled though the futures are still trading on exchanges), Bitcoin Diamond also in November, now Super Bitcoin in December.

What is Super Bitcoin?

Super Bitcoin (SBTC) is a new fork of bitcoin scheduled to take place on December 17, 2017 at block 498888 of the bitcoin blockchain. It is meant to implement all the solutions to bitcoin issues that have been proposed by the bitcoin community, which include; Smart contracts, Lightning Network, zero knowledge proofs, and larger block sizes all at once, and hence the name “Super Bitcoin”.

How will Super Bitcoin Work?

There will be a total supply of 21,210,000 SBTC, of which 210,000 being pre-mined. According to the website, the pre-mined SBTC, “shall be managed by the foundation to encourage the early developers, invest ecological construction and operate the foundation.”

The Super Bitcoin development team believe that over the years bitcoin has lost a lot of market share to competitors like Ethereum and they see this as a problem. Smart contracts have made Ethereum the ideal platform for creating decentralized apps which bitcoin currently can’t handle. Hence, their goal to create a version of bitcoin with smart contracts and other major features.

However, there is currently no information as to how they plan on achieving these goals. There is no whitepaper, no publicized code or GitHub repo submission. All that is available is just a basic timeline of the development goals on their website.

Features of Super Bitcoin

Fig. 1: Features of Super Bitcoin (Source: supersmartbitcoin.com)

• SMART CONTRACTS: This appears to be Super Bitcoin’s most promising feature, and will be integrated into the platform by March 31, 2018, according to the website. However, how they plan to pull this off using the original bitcoin blockchain still remains a mystery.

• LIGHTENING NETWORK: Although still in alpha build level, lightening network is the ultimate solution to bitcoin’s slow transaction and scalability issues. If Super bitcoin succeeds in implementing the lightening network, the entire system would become more scalable and reliable. Transaction would also become much faster.

• BIGGER BLOCKS: Maximum block size will be increased from 1MB to 8MB in order to increase the overall capacity of the system and accommodate all the upgrades and new features being added.

• PRIVACY: Super Bitcoin will be able to carry out zero-knowledge proofs by introducing “Zero-knowledge Succinct Non-Interactive Argument of Knowledge” (ZkSNARK) to Bitcoin, thereby allowing transactions to be verified on the blockchain without giving away private details like wallet address. According to the website, this feature will be added by May 31, 2018.

Fig. 2: Super Bitcoin Roadmap (Source: supersmartbitcoin.com)

Who’s behind the project?

According to the website, the project is being developed by Ranger Shi (Chief scientist), Li Xiao Lai (Foundation Member), and JiaPeng Lin (Foundation Member); all of Chinese Nationality.

Fig. 3: Super Bitcoin development team (Source: supersmartbitcoin.com)

Conclusion

Although the Super Bitcoin project sounds very promising at first, there are obviously many red flags.

1. To start with, the website is so scanty and vague for a website for such a huge project. There is little or no information concerning how they plan to achieve their set goals and objectives.
2. There is no information on subjects like the algorithm that would be used by the cryptocurrency, the exchanges and wallet software that will support it etc. Moreover, there is no whitepaper available for the project.
3. The 210,000 premined bitcoins is quite unreasonable, even though the development team give the excuse of needing it to encourage early developers, operate the foundation and for ecological construction.
4. Given the level of work and time required to successfully execute a project of this magnitude, it’s quite surprising that the cryptocurrency is set to be released this December.
5. The project motto “Make Bitcoin Great Again” is so unoriginal and shallow for a financial project this significant.

This year has also been the year of the ICOs and new altcoins. In January, 2017, there were a total of 617 cryptocurrencies, with a total market cap of $17,700,314,429, but 11 months down the line, we now have 1322 cryptocurrencies with a total market cap of $302,071,718,817.

However, many of these altcoins have not been very successful, so it seems that the next strategy is to create bitcoin forks in order to take advantage of the success that the bitcoin brand has already achieved.

Honestly this new trend of hard forks is quite disturbing to say the least. They’re like ICOs in the disguise of hard forks. Might as well be called “Initial Fork Offerings”.

Anyways, it’s still quite early to draw conclusions about this Super Bitcoin. Only time will tell whether its genuine or a scam. I just pointed out obvious facts and advise you approach with caution.