Bitcoin [BTC]: A piggybacking Proof-of-Proof blockchain has almost 20% of Bitcoin’s daily transactions

VeriBlock has a Proof-of-Proof concept which is used to secure other blockchains via a supplemental consensus mechanism by piggybacking a mainstream blockchain like Bitcoin’s.

Bitcoin developers recently noticed some strange activity on the Bitcoin Blockchain as there were a large number of unknown transactions called “OP_RETURN” transactions. These transactions had data written into the Bitcoin blockchain and this could be used for proving the existence of data at a specific point in time and also for issuing assets.

The main aim of VeriBlock is to help secure other blockchains which usually have lower hash rates and are prone to be 51% attacked by miners or bad actors who can easily rent hash rate. VeriBlock improves the security of such alt-coins by putting checkpoints of other coins/tokens/blockchains on the Bitcoin blockchain.

This could be helpful for forks like Ethereum Classic [ETC], which forked from Ethereum [ETH] and uses the same mining algorithm as Ethereum, which is EThash. Ethereum Classic underwent a brutal 51% attack which caused loss of 219,500 ETC worth a whopping $1.1 million.

Although VeriBlock is still running on the testnet, the data obtained from its blockchain explorer shows that the number of Proof-of-Proof transactions is almost 20% of the total Bitcoin’s daily transactions. Specifically, there are a total of 57745 PoP transactions out of the 309847 Bitcoin transactions. Furthermore, the average block time for VeriBlock is 30 seconds.

A Redditor, u/castorfromtheva commented:

“Interesting. Wasn’t aware of this yet. So bitcoin to literally be security backbone of altcoins? Those were anyway pegged to bitcoin ‘magically’ but now they are gonna be pegged for real. That makes bitcoin even more valuable.”

One of the members on VeriBlock project is Jeff Garzik, who was a Bitcoin Core developer involved in the SegWit2X hard fork attempt on Bitcoin, which failed.

Another Redditor, u/legendsneednotags commented:

“How many projects is Jeff Garzik involved with?”

To which u/SkunkHunt2016 replied:

“The more important question is: why Jeff is trying to attack Bitcoin so many times?”