Author: mononaut, founder of mempool; Translator: 0xjs@Golden Finance
Fractal Bitcoin launched its mainnet on September 9.
Fractal Bitcoin appears to be a hastily cloned copy of Bitcoin Core v24.0.1 with some consensus tweaks and some code stolen from namecoin and bcash.
Fractal Bitcoin also starts with a large and immediately usable 50% pre-mine.
Major Changes in Fractal Bitcoin
A mix of standard PoW and merged-mined blocks;
30-second target block time;
Continuous difficulty adjustment, copied from bcash;
The maximum supply is 210 million;
The initial block reward for each block is 25 tokens;
Halving every 2.1 million blocks;
OP_CAT is activated.
Please note that the premine represents 50% of the fully diluted supply of Fractal Bitcoin.
If all goes according to plan, it will take miners two full years (the entire Fractal Bitcoin halving era) to barely earn half of the founder’s reward they received on day one.
The Fractal Bitcoin Lite whitepaper has a lot of meaningless technical jargon about "virtualization" and "recursion" and "hierarchical extensions", but the actual implementation bears little resemblance. As far as I can tell, this is just another shitfork.
Fractal Bitcoin is neither Layer 2 nor an extension of Bitcoin
Netizen Gringo HodL said: I thought it was not Layer 2 or a fork at all, but an extension of Bitcoin? Also, didn’t Satoshi himself make OP_CAT, but it was not available until Fractal Bitcoin was deployed? I’m not a technical expert, but there are many technical experts on the UniSat team who have done amazing things with Bitcoin. I will give Fractal Bitcoin a chance
Mononaut responded: Fractal Bitcoin is neither Layer 2 nor an extension of Bitcoin. It is a completely independent blockchain that is a fork of the Bitcoin core code base.
OP_DOG | BIP-119 says: This is the Layer 1.5 that can kill BIP-420. The idea of Layer 1.5 is that assets on the Bitcoin mainnet remain on Fractalnet and vice versa, so it helps scale Bitcoin like a "Layer 2", but unlike Lightning's scaling solution, it uses the same Bitcoin addresses.
Mononaut responded: It is not a Bitcoin layer in any sense.
This is certainly hinted at in the Fractal Bitcoin marketing materials, but nothing of the sort is actually implemented in the Fractal Bitcoin code. Frankly, this is understandable, since it is technically impossible to transfer existing UTXO-based assets between unrelated blockchains.
