These are some ideas for a minable fungible CashToken.
’ not sure if the transaction hash gimmick is actually possible.
Using both functions and bitshift upgrades, mainnet deployment would come after May '26.
Total Introspection (?)
As the name implies, and like bitcoin blocks themselves, a novel trick of this token might be that the transactions calculate their own hash via introspection. Miners will grind for an nft commitment nonce resulting in a transaction hash below a certain number. Once ordered correctly in a block, these mined transactions should always be emitted in the second (third, etc) transaction slot in a block.
The internal hash calculated in the contract and the actual hash in a block may eventually diverge in the future if new capabilities are added to outputs that alter the transaction hash.
HASH256
Part of the larger goal of this project is to develop the technical capacity within the Bitcoin Cash community to mine directly on low-cost SHA256 ASIC hardware. Since transaction hashes are also hash256, CTOR will advertise these transactions at the near the top of every block they are mined in.
Since there is no ready-made software to mine sha256 CashTokens with ASCIs, someone will have to sort that out. There is now a burgeoning ecosystem of single chip benchtop development hardware. Some enterprising individual may figure out how to under volt cheap ASIC boards on the cheapest DC power.
Difficulty Adjustment Algorithm
As a minority hash project, and to facilitate a stable hash rate, an effective DAA has to be selected.
ASERT seems feasible to implement in CashAssembly with bit shifts:
And it seems to preform quite well in practice:
Emission Schedule
Each tokenbase payout will be a fraction of the running balance of a UTXO. Since a constant fraction paid using a recursive function is a simple half-life or exponential decay, we can easily achieve the outcome of Satoshi’s emission schedule without the boom-and-bust of the stepped 210000 block halving cycle.
The same half-life of around 210k blocks will likely the design parameter, unless there is a strong case to go faster or slower.
Free Gas for Miners
Ideally, the covenant would finance the minimum dust sats for miners in advance, so any sha256 miner with minimal hardware may begin mining for tokens without the pesky need to find 800 sats for their output.
Energy Price Oracle
As previously articulated by @bitcoincashautist , a difficulty target is effectively a price oracle for energy, which is a correlate for capital in the wider world.
The “get” for the community, besides another hard commodity token, would be an on-chain energy price oracle. The challenge here is to aggregate the current difficulty into a single NFT that can be used by anyone in the community without interfering with mining activities.
Each use of the oracle NFT, by another contract, would require for all miners to restart with the new oracle utxo as input to their transaction.
Paired with the need to give each successful miner 800 sats with their tokenbase reward, and the disruption that using the oracle price NFT output would cause to miners, perhaps one solution would be to have users of the price oracle pay a substantial fee (4000-8000 sats) to compensate miners for their troubles.
The main price could be copied to a cheaper contract for use by other dapps.
Threading
There can be many token emitting fungible token outputs miners can select to mine from. There can also be many difficulty tracking NFT threads that get aggregated periodically.
For simplicity, it may be best to put everything on one thread, given that everyone setting or using the oracle is paying the cost.
Game Theory
There can still be shenanigans with miners replacing the mempool mined transactions with their own. If miners with substantial hashpower wanted to commit hashpower to that, I’m not sure the community would complain.
A griefer (that just wanted BTOPs to fail) could attempt to race successful miner’s transactions with an oracle spend, or a competing Block Top tokenbase tx. A minimum utxo age (BIP68) could prevent the difficulty NFT from being spend excessively, as a supplement to the cash requirement.
