Fractal Bitcoin is a just lately launched undertaking that payments itself as “the one native scaling answer utterly and immediately appropriate with Bitcoin. In essence it’s a merge mined system portraying itself as a second layer sidechain for Bitcoin, the place a number of ranges of “sidechains” might be stacked on prime of one another. So consider a sidechain of the mainchain, a sidechain of the sidechain, a sidechain of the sidechain of the sidechain, and so forth. It’s not.
Shitcoins Are Not Second Layers
Firstly, the whole system is constructed round a brand new native token, Fractal Bitcoin, that’s issued utterly unbiased of Bitcoin. It even comes with an enormous pre-mine of fifty% of the provision being cut up between an “ecosystem treasury”, a pre-sale, advisors, grants for the group, and builders. That is primarily the equal of the whole first halving interval of Bitcoin when the block subsidy was 50 BTC per block. From right here the community jumps to 25 Fractal Bitcoin (FB) per block.
Secondly, there may be no peg mechanism for transferring precise bitcoin into the “sidechain.” Sure, you learn that appropriately. They’re framing themselves as a sidechain/layer two, however there is no such thing as a precise mechanism to maneuver your bitcoin forwards and backwards between the mainchain and “the sidechain” Fractal Bitcoin. It’s a utterly unbiased system with no precise potential to maneuver funds forwards and backwards. One of many core elements of a sidechain is the flexibility to peg, or “lock,” your bitcoin from the mainchain and transfer it right into a sidechain system as a way to make use of it there, finally transferring these funds again to the mainchain.
Fractal Bitcoin has no such mechanism, and never solely that, the dialogue across the matter of their “technical litepaper” is totally incoherent. They talk about Discreet Log Contracts (DLCs) as a mechanism for “bridging” between completely different ranges of Fractal sidechains. DLCs aren’t an acceptable mechanism for a peg in any respect. DLCs perform by pre-defining the place cash shall be despatched primarily based on a signature from an oracle or a set of oracles anticipated at a given time. They’re used for playing, monetary merchandise reminiscent of derivatives, and so forth. between two events. DLCs aren’t designed to permit funds to be despatched to any arbitrary place primarily based on the end result of the contract, they’re designed to allocate funds to certainly one of two contributors, or proportionally to every participant, primarily based on the end result of some contract or occasion that an oracle indicators off on.
This isn’t appropriate for a sidechain or different system peg, which is ideally architected to permit any present proprietor of cash within the sidechain or second layer system to freely ship cash to any vacation spot they select as long as they’ve legitimate management over them on the opposite system. So not solely is there no useful peg mechanism for the dwell system, however their hand waving about potential designs for one of their litepaper is simply utterly incoherent.
The entire “design” is a clown present designed to pump baggage for pre-mine holders.
“Cadence” Mining
One other troubling facet of the system is its variation on merge mining, Cadence mining. The community makes use of SHA256 because the hashing algorithm, and it does assist standard Namecoin model merge mining. However there’s a catch. Just one third of the blocks produced on the community are able to being produced by Bitcoin miners engaged in merge mining. The opposite two thirds should be mined conventionally by miners switching their hashrate totally over to Fractal Bitcoin.
It is a toxic incentive construction. It primarily tries to affiliate itself with the Bitcoin community calling itself a “merge mined system”, when in actuality two thirds of the block manufacturing mandates turning hashrate away from securing the Bitcoin community and devoting it completely to securing Fractal Bitcoin. Many of the reward will not be capturable by miners who proceed mining Bitcoin, and the larger the worth of FB the larger the inducement for Bitcoin miners to defect and start mining it as an alternative of bitcoin to extend the share of the FB reward they seize.
It primarily capabilities as an incentive distortion for Bitcoin miners proportional to the worth of the general system. It additionally gives no benefit when it comes to safety in any respect. By forcing this selection it ensures that many of the community issue should stay low sufficient that no matter small portion of miners discover it worthwhile to defect from Bitcoin to FB can mine blocks on the focused 30 second block interval. Standard merge mining would enable the whole mining community to contribute safety with out having to cope with the chance price of not mining Bitcoin.
What’s The Level of This?
The ostensible level of the community is to facilitate issues like DeFi and Ordinals, that eat massive quantities of blockspace, by giving them a system to make the most of aside from the mainchain. The issue with this logic is the explanation these techniques are constructed on the mainchain within the first place is as a result of individuals worth the immutability and safety that it supplies. Nothing in regards to the structure of Fractal Bitcoin supplies the identical safety ensures.
Even when they did, there is no such thing as a useful pegging mechanism in any respect to facilitate these property from being interoperable between the mainchain and the Fractal Bitcoin chain. The whole system is a sequence of handwaves previous vital technical particulars to hurry one thing to market that permits insiders to revenue off of the pre-mine concerned within the launch.
No peg mechanism, an incoherent “merge mining” scheme that not solely creates a toxic incentive distortion ought to it proceed rising in worth, however really ensures a decrease stage of proof of labor safety, and a bunch of buzzwords. It does have CAT energetic, however so do testnets in existence. So even the argument as a testing floor for issues constructed utilizing CAT is simply incoherent and a half assed rationalization for a pre-mined token pump.
Calling this a sidechain, or a layer of Bitcoin, is past ridiculous. It’s a token scheme, pure and easy.
