Chinese people often state that the wisdom of the ancients is always worthy of repeated speculation. Throughout history, our world has changed rapidly, but many core principles remain the same.
In the Biography of Old Tang Wei Zheng, Li Shimin wrote, “With bronze as a mirror one can correct their appearance; with history as a mirror, one can understand the rise and fall of a state; with good men as a mirror, one can distinguish right from wrong.” The core of the quote is to learn from the successes and failures of history and take them as a warning, to avoid unnecessary detours.
The same is true for the world of blockchain. We need to learn from the wisdom of our predecessors. Even Bitcoin is the result of Mr. Satoshi Nakamoto combining the development of cryptography and computer knowledge in the past few decades.
Therefore, as the first application of the blockchain principle and the most representative cryptocurrency, Bitcoin is naturally something we can refer to and learn from, and why projects like ChainX draw on some of the designs of Bitcoin. It is the origin of cryptocurrencies and a mark of success that so far has withstood the test of time.
Bitcoin’s advantages are unbreakable
When it comes to Bitcoin, we have to mention its exquisite design, which is praised for its decentralization, transparency, traceability, and anonymity. But the most respected part of its design principles has to be its issuance- and reward mechanism.
The total issuance of Bitcoin is a maximum of 21 million. Which makes it the world’s first asset that is analogous to currency but has a constant circulation. For many currencies of this day and age, it is a money-printing madness. Core assets led by the US dollar make it seem like the money printers have been working overtime during the ongoing pandemic this year, driving inflation.
To avoid this, most cryptocurrencies have followed Bitcoin’s design and set the total amount of tokens to a fixed amount. After all, Big Brother has proven it’s correctness with practice.
The reward mechanism’s design was initially met with confusion and intrigue. Some still think that halving the block reward every four years is a bit strange. But four years is not an interval we haven’t seen before. Famous competitions like the Olympic Games and the World Cup are every 4 years too. At some point in time, everyone simply agreed that 4 years was enough time between these events.
The open and transparent mechanisms of Bitcoin present a fair ruleset available to anyone. This means that miners can calmly complete their mission without having to worry about black box operations.
Bitcoin’s halving design is something that newer projects have learned from, but lots of them still use an inflationary system as a way to motivate the community to expand, gravitating back to the design of fiat currencies.
So, are there any exceptions?
ChainX standing on the shoulders of giants
ChainX’s mainnet went live in May 2019 and has been running stable ever since. As the “First Substrate Chain”, ChainX has always been at the forefront of the Polkadot ecology, especially for its technical stability. This includes its tokenomics which is similar to Bitcoin’s.
The total issuance of ChainX’s PCX is also set at 21 million, with the reward halving every two years. Although this might seem like a direct copy of Bitcoin, we chose to look to the past and learn from it, taking the good aspects and implementing them in our tokenomics. ChainX is not the only project that has these but has been able to implement them correctly and operate smoothly. In other areas, ChainX has completely changed Bitcoin’s original design. Most notably its consensus mechanism.
We can understand that some might think ChainX is a “PoS version of Bitcoin”. In the ChainX ecosystem, miners participate by holding PCX tokens instead of buying expensive and specialized equipment. Simply holding PCX equals mining for more PCX. It does not need to be upgraded or require further research and development. In Bitcoin’s design, the increase in the cost of mining machines is eventually transferred to the miners. ChainX’s design avoided such a problem.
It is expected that ChainX’s first halving will be around May 2021. From a data point of view, this will cause the production of PCX to decline, but could also mean a gradual increase in value, just like Bitcoin. After all, through scarcity things become more expensive. It is the best value carrier.
It is because of the design of holding to mine that ChainX has experienced the price it had for more than a year, but the same is true for early Bitcoin. Many early Bitcoin miners were digging at a loss, but after halving again and again, however, those negative income years have become standards for testing truth.
Standing on the shoulders of the giant Bitcoin, we have Ethereum, Polkadot, and countless others, and ChainX is an explorer and practitioner of these early giants and can build upon their accomplishments.
About ChainX
Official website: https://chainx.org
Wiki: https://github.com/chainx-org/ChainX/wiki
Twitter: https://twitter.com/chainx_org
Medium: https://medium.com/@chainx_org
Telegram: https://t.me/chainx_org
White paper: https://chainx-static.oss-cn-hangzhou.aliyuncs.com/chainx_en.pdf
Desktop wallet: https://github.com/chainx-org/chainx-wallet/releases/tag/v1.0.3
Official Wechat: interchain
