Bitcoin Diamond’s history started in November 2017 withBitcoin miners named “Team Evey” and “Team 007” who were dissatisfied with the manner of operation of the Bitcoin Core protocol. Although Bitcoin was the first cryptocurrency to gain mainstream recognition, they felt that it still failed to deliver what was promised as the original vision of Satoshi Nakamoto, i.e. fast and affordable transactions of all amounts, waterproof privacy protection and accessibility to new users. These were the areas which those who pushed for the hard fork from the Bitcoin blockchain saw as an opportunity to attempt to build on Bitcoin’s alleged shortcomings. While sharing the core goal of its “parent” cryptocurrency in the sense that it has the ambition to become a decentralized global network for the exchange of assets, Bitcoin Diamond also wants to do things a bit more differently in several technical and operational segments.

What Bitcoin Diamond wanted to improve initially were the transaction times on the Bitcoin platform. As the BTC blocks have been limited to 1 MB in size, this originally allowed the platform to carry out between 2 and 7 transactions per second which has dragged down the number of transactions per second.

Bitcoin Diamond developers saw the requirement of having the 1 MB block size a leftover from the early days of Bitcoin history which limited its capability to scale with the rise in the number of users. With larger block size, they hoped to prevent having the blocks become congested with the amount of pending transactions, just like its mempool. Instead of this, larger block size was supposed to increase the number of processed transactions and deliver a faster average transaction times.

To achieve this, Bitcoin Diamond offered support for larger block sizes, raising the related limit to 8 MB. While both of the platforms have the same block time of ten minutes, Bitcoin Diamond hoped to provide support for eight times higher amount of information based on this increase. Also, the transaction capacity of the blocks was supposed to be provided with a five-fold boost. Combined with the implemented Segregated Witness process, the BCD is advertised as capable of performing 100 transactions per second.

Bitcoin Diamond also went for increasing the unit block to allow for more storage trading with the goal to optimize storage on its network and keep the generation of isolated blocks at minimum.

At the same time, the BCD team had to shake off the initial fears of the community which believed that increased block size will ultimately hurt Bitcoin Diamond’s decentralization efforts because of more demanding maintenance of the full nodes. This led Bitcoin Diamond to put additional efforts in implementing other solutions to improve its performance.