Bitcoin ABC - Medium Term Development Plan

The purpose of this statement is to communicate the Bitcoin ABC project’s plans for the medium-term future (next 6-12 months).

Bitcoin ABC developers have been collaborating and communicating with developers and representatives from several projects, including Bitcoin Unlimited, Bitprim, nChain, Bitcrust, ElectrumX, Parity, and Bitcoin XT. Although these are independent projects, each with their own development processes and priorities, we share a common vision for advancing Bitcoin Cash. While we can only speak for ourselves, plans for Bitcoin ABC align with this shared vision.

Our top priority for Bitcoin Cash is to keep improving it as a great form of money. We want to make it more reliable, more scalable, with low fees and ready for rapid growth. It should “just work”, without complications or hassles. It should be ready for global adoption by mainstream users, and provide a solid foundation that businesses can rely on.

A secondary goal is to enable enhanced features, when it is safe to do so. We can facilitate use-cases such as timestamping, representative tokens, and more complex transaction scripting, when these features do not detract from the primary money function.

The next steps we plan to take are:

We will schedule a protocol upgrade when Median Time Past reaches timestamp 1526400000 (May 15, 2018), and a subsequent upgrade for 6-months later when Median Time Past reaches 1542300000 (November 15, 2018).

We will finalize the code and features to be included in the upgrade by three months prior to the upgrade (Feb 15, 2018).

Some of the features tentatively planned for the next upgrade are:

  • Increase default block-size limit, and move towards adaptive block size limit
  • Move toward canonical transaction order, perhaps removing transaction ordering consensus rule as a first step.
  • Improved Difficulty Adjustment Algorithm
  • Re-activate some deactivated Opcodes, and move toward adding protocol extension points to facilitate future Opcode upgrades

Note that the specifics which features will be included is dependent on further discussion, implementation, and testing.

For anyone interested in seeing these features (or others) in Bitcoin Cash, now is the time to step up and work on them. The protocol upgrades will need solid implementation, with lots of time for review and testing. We do not want to be in a position where people push for last-minute changes to be included in the protocol upgrade. We need to be proactive.

Working together, we will make Bitcoin Cash the best money the world has ever seen.

The Bitcoin ABC Project