Partnered With:

What is Dmint? POW attempt of BTC asset protocol

Read this article in 8 Minutes

The renaissance movement of BTC culture is overwhelming all consensus in the crypto world.

Author: blockpunk ∞ (,⍲) (@blockpunk2077)

Note: As per your instructions, I will not translate the content within the HTML tags and the English words and phrases will not be translated. Therefore, the content will be returned as it is.

This article will introduce the Dmint update of Atomicals and show you a new way to use POW for BTC asset issuance.

Atomicals protocol has updated its NFT minting method, Dmint, and has heavily incorporated Bitwork, a POW mining system similar to Bitcoin, into its design. This aligns well with Bitcoin culture and has excited the community, as evidenced by the high number of downloads and installations, which even propelled Atomicals' Github code repository to the 11th spot on the overall rankings.

So, what is Dmint? Why should you pay attention to Dmint?

Atomicals can not only issue tokens like BRC20, but also be used to create NFTs with all data stored on BTC, of course, in a different way from Ordinals.

Atomicals' NFT minting method is called Dmint, which is a more fair and decentralized way of launching NFTs.

NFT deployers need to number each NFT image in the series (such as 0000 to 9999). The Atomicals protocol will calculate the hash value of each image file and generate a separate json file for each image.

Later, the protocol will calculate a proof of the above image hash values through a Merkle tree, which can be used to verify any NFT in the series.

The deployer of the NFT series writes this proof along with the name, description, logo, mining difficulty, and other data of the NFT into the transaction, and sends it to the Bitcoin network to complete the registration of the series.

Therefore, during the deployment registration process, the deployer only needs to send the proof of the NFT image, instead of the NFT image itself. Even if a series of 10 million NFT images are deployed at once, it won't cost much in sats.

Later, the NFT project party publicly releases the pictures and json files of each NFT. Users can choose and send Bitcoin transactions on their own to engrave the image data and json into the BTC block, completing the casting (claiming) of a single NFT.

These NFT image hash values can be mutually verified with the Merkle tree proof in the registered transaction.

This completes the series issuance and minting of NFTs.

Of course, the highlight is still the fair launch of NFT. Dmint introduces two innovations here:

Bitwork can only mint after mining, and multiple difficulties can be customized within a series;

Accept specific UTXOs to send minting transactions, which can be used to receive ARC20 tokens or paid to the project party as required.

First is Bitwork mining, which is a unique fair launch method of the Atomicals protocol. Deployers can set a specific length prefix for forging, and forgers must use a computer to exhaustively search for a matching hash value with the specific prefix before they can forge.

First of all, the Bitwork that is set up reasonably effectively extends the window time of minting, giving ordinary players more opportunities. The minting of Dmint NFT cannot be operated in batches, nor can it obtain a large number of chips simply by raising gas. It is a fair distribution with one CPU opportunity at a time.

Furthermore, within the same NFT series, different Bitwork difficulties can be set for different NFTs (down to each individual one), for example:

Whiteboard: Set the difficulty of the next 8000 NFTs in the series to 4 digits (calculated in 1 minute).

Green outfit: NFTs with serial numbers between 1000 and 1999 have a difficulty setting of 5 digits (calculated in 16 minutes).

Purple equipment: NFTs with serial numbers ranging from 100 to 999 have a difficulty setting of 6 digits (equivalent to 256 minutes or 4 hours of calculation).

Legendary: The difficulty setting for NFTs with serial numbers 0-99 is 7 digits (calculated over 3 days).

If you agree with the value of Bitcoin's proof of work, then the value has also been extracted through Bitwork calculation, which authentically records the rarity of NFT.

Obviously, the most obvious design for this variable difficulty is the issuance of domain names: a small number of short domain names have high value, corresponding to high Bitwork difficulty, and large mine owners can try mining to earn a lot of income; a large number of long domain names have relatively low value, corresponding to low Bitwork difficulty, and anyone can spend a few minutes to forge one for themselves.

How can domain names belonging to all of humanity be fairly allocated in a network without a central or public authority?

Bitwork, this kind of pure computation is the most able to obtain consensus.

This design seems to echo Satoshi Nakamoto's idea 13 years ago. Here are his original words: "Miners should be rewarded, and you can consider using a certain amount of work to generate a domain name."