BTC.com Mines First Ever Block With Software Not Based on Satoshi’s Original Code

[jamie.redman1]

On March 13 the Bitcoin network experienced a historic event. During the early morning hours, the first block from an alternative client, not written in Satoshi’s original C++ code, was mined on the mainnet.

Block 457010: The First Block Ever Mined By Client Not Written In Satoshi’s C++ Framework

Just recently the mining pool BTC.com mined the first block ever written in an entirely different codebase. The alternative implementation of the bitcoin protocol named ‘bcoin’ is written in node.js. Bcoin was built by developer Christopher Jeffrey, the Chief Technical Officer at Purse and former employee for Bitpay.

Read More Here: https://news.bitcoin.com/btc-com-mines- ... inal-code/

[arnoudk]

This is great and exciting news.

I like it how the last remaining point of centralization (development of the client) is slowly but surely being decentralized. Bitcoin Unlimited, Classic and XT are steps in the right direction (by having different dev teams), yet still share most of the code. Thus, bugs in Core might very well affect Unlimited too. Having a completely separate implementation (in this case in node.js) is fantastic. It will be much harder to attack and take down bitcoin when bcoin gets more mining support (assuming it passes all the tests for being a reliable and consensus compatible implementation to whatever is the majority hashrate)