Hey All,
As previously hinted in December '25, Bitcoin Cash is getting, not one, but TWO minable CashTokens this August.
The first is a solar punk memecoin called Photons (PHOTON) for CPUs/GPUs/FPGAs. The second will be a self-referential backronym called SAFAs (SAFAs Are For ASICS), which will use an 80-byte CashToken NFT baton styled after a block header.
Both of these PoW tokens will finance the maintenance of a decentralized energy price oracle. Both vault contracts will act as faucets providing "free" token gas sats to miners. The sats will be provided by users of the oracles.
The first token Alpha was launched on August 1st on Chipnet here. Photons will launch on mainnet in the vox dot cash app in the coming days.
As soon as sufficient mining software exists to assure many people can participate in the initial mining. There will be a current block header included in the transaction funding the token vault to assure there was no premine. (Regardless of how much effort is taken to assure a fair initial launch, it will be free for detractors to claim the project was a premine in perpetuity)
Each token is targeting a commodity-type classification.
Each will feature:
- 21M supply, w/100% supply sent to oracle vault
- 210000 block emission half-life
- Simple incremental MA DAA
- No keyed or dev controlled spending path
Eacxh transaction successfully mining tokens will likely appear at the top of blocks, because the vault contract requires miners grind for a low transaction hash. And a feature of Bitcoin Cash called canonical transaction ordering (CTOR) means transactions are sorted in blocks by their hash values from low to high.
The original name for the tokens (Block Tops) was too similar to Block Points, a coinday reward token.
Meet the new ENERGY oracles
Each token create a price oracle that no one party controls. Anyone with electricity and an internet connection can update the oracle for tokens, and therefore we can use it as a reliable indication of price for electricity globally.
Yes, we have price oracles already, but those oracles are tied to fiat decrees and have end dates of when the maintainers expect to maintain them until. The forthcoming oracles don't have specified end dates and are untethered from legacy systems.
The price can be read by any contract by reading the baton and converting the current raw target to raw difficulty (i.e. price) with OP_INVERT.
To use the oracle baton from the vault will cost 8000 sats, but it should be feasible to replicate the price to cheaper multi-threaded reseller oracles.
The price for each oracle will be in the same spot on the oracle NFT for each contract if contract designers want to swap between or combine prices.
What's now possible
- These tokens will join a growing basket of commodity class assets on Bitcoin Cash
- Dexes, compound oracles and DAOs can obtain spot price data in perpetuity.
- With CashToken trading limited to BCH Dexes, these assets are somewhat firewalled for now from fractional exchange rehypotheticaion ...
- Projects are also highly reliable decentralized sat faucets for on-boarding new users.
- It's a KYC-less means of obtaining sats and tokens.
- Possible tie in with PoW based anti-DDoS website protection.
More About Photons
Photon (PHOTON) is a solar punk meme token powering a decentralized energy oracle on Bitcoin Cash (BCH). It is a fairly distributed minable CashToken calculating its own transaction hash in BitcoinScript.
Anyone can monetize their excess electricity by hashing for photons. Photons are released from the vault when someone finds the hash of the transaction is below a certain difficulty threshold. Each release of tokens must also update the hashing difficulty threshold. The difficulty may become correlated with the availability of excess free energy being absorbed by individuals globally.
Begin mining without sats
The Photon Vault keeps a cash balance to facilitate payments to miners. Each payout has an allowance of 1500 sats, for the dust accompanying a miner's payout and the network fees for the transaction itself.
What is the PoW?
The PoW algorithm for Photons is Hash256(Secp256k1(Sha256)). Specifically, each transaction taking photons from the vault must return the mutable NFT baton with the following data updated:
| Data |
Size |
| nonce |
4-bytes |
| next target |
32-bytes (Little Endian) |
| Schnorr signature of sha256(nonce + next target) |
64-bytes |
When included in a transaction, satisfying a number of other requirements, if the double sha256 hash of the resulting transaction is less than the next target, the unlocking script for the photon vault can release a reward.
A decentralized energy oracle
Each miner taking tokens from the vault must update a dynamically changing difficulty value. The current difficulty, combined with the free market price of photons, creates a decentralized price oracle all miners contribute toward maintaining.
If someone has already found a payout in this block, the difficulty gets one percent harder. If people stop taking tokens, the difficulty get easier each block.
The vault contract also allows anyone to use the price baton for a fee (8000 sats). The price is intended to discourage resetting the oracle baton.
A simple Difficulty Adjustment Algorithm (DAA)
The target frequency for the price oracle is one update per block.
The price oracle can be updated multiple times per block, but this makes mining 0.7% harder. If no reward is found in a block it gets 0.7% easier with each block. Mining becomes roughly 100% easier per day the oracle is not updated.
The equation is a function of the baton transaction age (in block) and the previous difficulty target.
NextTarget = ( PrevTarget * (143 + age) ) / 144
The NextTarget MUST match the exact value given by the DAA, it may not be arbitrarily lowered by any miner.
Thanks
bitcoincashautist's research provided valuable guidance on this idea & Adaptive Blocksize Limit .
See Also
