BTCBAM — Combining Bitcoin And Ethereum
BTCBAM is a business-ready blockchain that combines the UTXO model of Bitcoin with the EVM model of Ethereum to build a hybrid blockchain ecosystem. BTCBAM is backward compatible with Ethereum smart contracts and Bitcoin gateways and will remain so even after updates. This ensures that platform adoption is simple since BTCBAM leans solely upon tried-and-tested technologies.
The Escalating Problem Of Ethereum Congestion
It goes without saying that Ethereum is the most popular platform in the blockchain space due to its thriving developer community and the DeFi ecosystem (which is currently worth $60 billion). However, this increased activity, unfortunately, comes at a price. Each block in Ethereum has a limited capacity, and this high activity level often leads to congestion and more pending transactions.
As per Etherscan, the number of pending transactions in Ethereum more often than not exceeds 150,000 per minute. In fact, due to this congestion issue, users often have to pay astronomical gas fees, which makes Ethereum usage extremely expensive. This is exponentially true for complex smart contracts, which require a lot of gas for proper activation.
The chart above shows the average gas fees over time for Ethereum. As you can see, there are plenty of spikes in the chart which show increased gas fees. As such, if you are a developer looking to run your own DeFi protocol, Ethereum right now may not be the best option for you due to the escalated fees.
What you should look for is a viable alternative to Ethereum, wherein you can safely and efficiently execute your smart contracts.
Looking at Ethereum Alternatives
When you look at the alternatives to Ethereum, the one that’s making the most noise right now is Cardano. However, the fact is that Cardano’s learning curve is extremely steep. Cardano uses functional programming language for both its source code (Haskell) and smart contracts (Plutus).
So, why is this an issue?
Nearly every single developer in the world has a background in imperative programming languages like C/C++/JavaScript, etc. Usually, it is much simpler to pick up other languages, provided they belong in the same family. In fact, this is precisely why Solidity was built to be as similar to JavaScript as possible so that the developers could easily pick it up and cut down the learning curve.
The Learning Curve Of Functional Programming
So, what is going on here? Why is it so difficult to get into functional programming, even for experienced developers?
#1 Unlearning Old Lessons
As mentioned above, it’s challenging to suddenly move on to functional languages after dealing with imperative programming for so long. They are used to the coding style, object-oriented programming logic, etc. They have probably written thousands of codes and are used to the syntax being a certain way. It is often infeasible for them to unlearn past lessons and move on to a new language.
#2 The Confluence Of Mathematics And Programming
Functional programming combines mathematics with coding logic. The problem here is that our education system still teaches us outdated mathematics that doesn’t really have any application in the modern world. Also, there is always a disconnect between mathematicians and programmers, who believe that they are working in two different fields without looking for any synergistic opportunities.
#3 A Lack Of A Strong Online Community
This could be a blasphemous thing to hear for the functional-maxis, but it is what it is. Here are just some of the posts that we saw while going through the Cardano Developers subreddit,
“From experience I know how incredibly important it is for any new platform to make it as easy as possible to develop for the platform and to leverage existing knowledge in the community by offering well-known programming interfaces. Plutus does not do that.”
While the community is small and the language is very young, the fact is that without proper communication and knowledge transfer, it will be extremely difficult for a newbie to get even their feet wet.
#4 People Need Time That They Don’t Have
While people may have learned imperative languages over years and even decades, they can’t afford to give the same time to learn functional languages. People often try to hack their learning process, however, that leaves gaping holes in their understanding and knowledge.
Why Fix Something That Isn’t Broken?
Now, let’s make one thing perfectly clear.
This article isn’t a functional programming hit piece. We understand that it has many qualities, and maybe in time, the overall community and knowledge base will be more formidable than ever before.
However, all that will take time. Time that many projects don’t have.
We are currently living in an ecosystem of exponential growth. Since the beginning of 2020, the DeFi market has exploded from $700 million to a staggering $60 billion! As such, if a project were to keep pace, they can’t afford to have their dev team spending months trying to figure our a whole new language.
In situations like these, it’s much simpler to follow the principle of Occam’s Razor. The simplest solution, is more often than not, the correct one.
Why would you fix something that isn’t broken? Instead of constantly looking for a new, untested platform/technology, isn’t it much more prudent to stick with a proven system that has given birth to — and is sustaining — a trillion-dollar economy?
BTCBAM — Combining Bitcoin And Ethereum
BTCBAM is a rarity in the blockchain world since it utilizes Bitcoin’s UTXO model and is compatible with SegWit. This ensures that BTCBAM can take advantage of all the developmental activity in the main Bitcoin blockchain. Plus, BTCBAM is compatible with the EVM (Ethereum virtual Machine), any Ethereum smart contract can run on BTCBAM and vice versa. What this means is:
- Any existing Ethereum dApp could be easily ported to BTCBAM. This includes all the DeFi protocols.
- BTCBAM can use Ethereum’s token standards like ERC20, ERC223, ERC721, ERC827, etc.
- All the exciting solutions that Ethereum is working on, like plasma, state channels, sharding, and rollups, can be translated onto the BTCBAM blockchain.
So, what does this mean?
Developers who have been working on Ethereum can now port their dApps to BTCBAM and continue their work. There is no steep learning curve whatsoever since the underlying protocol is the same! BTCBAM has no interest in butting heads with Ethereum. However, we are interested in providing an alternative EVM-compatible platform for developers who want to deploy their dApps without having to suffer from congestion and astronomical gas fees.
