The Bitcoin Cash Roadmap
The goal for Bitcoin Cash is to become sound money that is usable by everyone in the world. This is a civilization-changing technology which will dramatically increase human freedom and prosperity.
This roadmap is intended to provide high-level technical direction, and enable different technical teams to work together towards a common goal for advancing Bitcoin Cash. The role of developers in furthering this goal is to produce high-quality professional software that serves the needs of its users, miners and merchants. We strive for continuous technical improvement, to produce reliable products providing a solid foundation for Bitcoin Cash.
The basic design of Bitcoin Cash is sound. However, this does not mean it is perfect. It is prudent to make incremental improvements to the system with technically sound design and careful engineering. By implementing optimizations and protocol upgrades, peer-to-peer digital cash will scale many orders of magnitude beyond current limits.
Roadmap
Scaling
Can. Transaction Ordering
(scalable block processing)
Faster Block Propagation
(graphene or other)
Merklix-Metadata Tree
(scalable block processing)
UTXO Commitment
(blockchain pruning)
Schnorr Signatures
(batched signature validation)
Adaptive Block Size
(market driven growth to 1TB blocks)
Mankind Scale
50 transactions / day for 10 billion humans
Usability
CashAddr
(easier & safer to user)
Sighash
(hardware wallet security)
Fee Improvements
(cheaper transactions)
Pre-consensus
(near instant security for merchants)
Fractional Satoshis
(fees low forever)
Best Money
secure within 3 seconds - transaction fees forever low
Extensibility
Basic Opcodes
223 bytes OP_RETURN
(social networks on chain)
OP_CHECKDATASIG
(oracles and advanced scripts)
More Basic Opcodes
New Transaction Format
(more capable, more compact)
Token Economy
all classes of assets traded on the blockchain
Bitcoin Cash Protocol Complete
The needed technical improvements can be divided into three categories:
- Enable Bitcoin Cash to scale from ~100 Tx/s to over 5,000,000 Tx/s. Protocol improvements must be made so that mass-parallelization can enable this level of transaction processing.
- Improving the payment experience to ensure that it is instant and reliable. Transactions should be secure within three seconds.
- Make Bitcoin Cash extensible. An extensible protocol makes future improvements less disruptive, and provides a solid base for businesses and developers to build on.
The Bitcoin Cash network has protocol upgrades twice a year, on November 15th and May 15th. These upgrades are required for all node operators. They are sometimes referred to as "hard fork upgrades", but the term "scheduled protocol upgrades" is preferred.
Rather than a specific block height, the upgrades are based on a timestamp. When the median timestamp of the most recent 11 blocks (MTP-11) is greater than or equal to UNIX timestamp of November 15th (or May 15th) 12:00:00 UTC, the new protocol rules take effect. This better enables your business to prepare for the upgrade at a particular estimated time, plus or minus a few hours.
Although this semi-annual upgrade schedule is not expected to continue forever, it is in place for the forseeable near-term future. Regular protocol upgrades provide a predictable cadence for the ecosystem, and are necessary to achieve the vision set forth in the roadmap.
To become a solid base for application development and innovation, Bitcoin Cash must continuously improve and compete. Working together, we can build a technical foundation to empower Bitcoin Cash to be the best money the world has ever seen.