We have seen three bitcoin hard forks lately, with successful forks to Bitcoin Cash, Bitcoin Gold, and an apparently unsuccessful hard fork to SegWit2. Now, Chinese Bitcoin tycoon, Li Xiaolia has partnered with Ranger Shi to develop a Bitcoin hard fork dubbed “Super Bitcoin”.
Billed as an answer to smart contract offering Ethereum, privacy coin Zcash as well as the pressure to increase transaction capacity that lead to the New York Agreement and the troubled SegWit2 hard fork. Super Bitcoin promises to incorporate smart contracts, lightening network, zero-knowledge proofs and bigger blocksize in one bitcoin-based coin. Super Bitcoin is scheduled to fork at block 498888 with ten percent of the total capacity pre-mined. Bitcoin holders will receive one Super Bitcoin (SBTC) for each Bitcoin.
With a total coin supply of 21,210,000 coins, that means that 210,000 will have been pre-mined at the fork. Super Bitcoin states on its website that the pre-mined coins will be used to fund development and operational efforts as well as “ecological construction” of an unspecified nature. The FAQs answer that “[t]he 210,000 SBTC shall be managed by the foundation to encourage the early developers, invest (sic) ecological construction and operate the foundation.”
It remains to be seen how well this fork will do in the open market or if the developers can stick to the roadmap. China has cracked down on ICOs and denounced a previous Li effort, PressOne as a scam. It may well be that the Chinese ICO crackdown has lead bitcoin developers to utilize this fork strategy to raise funds from the pre-mine now that ICOs are disfavored.