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#11
(BOB) Dobbscoin / (BOB) in early crypto history ...
Last post by MWOWM - Aug 29, 2026, 12:04 AM
(BOB) in early crypto history — a culture-anchored coin, born on Epiphany
Ported and edited by MWOWM from BtcBob's original in subgenius.finance/smf. Genesis date corrected against the Canonical Facts thread — see that post for source citations.


(BOB) sits in a genuinely interesting corner of early cryptocurrency history: it appears in the first wave of culture-driven altcoins, during what traders later called the "wild west altcoin exchange era."

Genesis — the receipts
  • Dogecoin — first block Dec 6, 2013. A fork of Litecoin by Billy Markus & Jackson Palmer. Launched as a joke on the Shiba Inu meme, and rapidly grew a community. (Yes: it's a Doge. We get it.)
  • (BOB) Dobbscoin — first block Jan 6, 2014. A fork of the Bitcoin source, stamped out in the same month Coingen.io opened. Block height 0 lands on Epiphany in the Christian calendar — so in SubGenius terms, the blockchain revelation of "Bob" occurred on Epiphany.

So let's be honest and precise, because the Canonical Facts thread is the source of truth: (BOB) does not predate Dogecoin. It is a ~one-month-younger contemporary, born in the very same wave. The interesting part was never "earlier" — it's what kind of coin it set out to be.

The Altcoin Cambrian Explosion
(BOB) launched inside the exact window when more cryptocurrencies were created than at any other point in early crypto history. In and around April 2013, Bitcoin surged from roughly $13 to over $260 in a matter of weeks, people saw the value of trustless exchange for the first time, and dozens of new chains began launching. That explosion ran straight through into 2014 — and (BOB)'s January-2014 genesis sits right in it.

Most coins from that wave were made the same way: fork Bitcoin's source, adjust a few parameters, ship it. That is exactly the environment (BOB) emerged from. Many of those coins disappeared forever. The few that survived tend to have one of three things:
  • Strong meme culture
  • Strong technical innovation
  • Strong community identity
(BOB) has the third built into its DNA.

Three categories, one distinction
  • Technical altcoins — Litecoin
  • Meme coins — Dogecoin
  • Culture coins — (BOB) Dobbscoin
In today's market, coins succeed less on technical tweaks and more on narrative and community identity. Most people assume Dogecoin opened the meme-coin era — and it did — but (BOB) was reaching for something adjacent and rarer: culture-anchored cryptocurrency. Instead of an invented internet meme, it references an established underground culture. Where most meme coins have to manufacture a community from scratch, (BOB) started with one already built:
  • An avid fan base — the Church of the SubGenius
  • Recognizable iconography — the Dobbs Head
  • A philosophy — Slack
  • Decades of weird underground lore

The part that is almost too on-the-nose
The SubGenius movement has always celebrated DIY, distributed weirdness — pirate radio, zines, underground recordings, decentralized subcultures. A blockchain is nearly the perfect modern technological embodiment of that same philosophy:
  • Units of Slack — harvested and transferred
  • Mine Slack, transfer Slack, achieve Slack
  • Blocks are a revelation of Slack
The chain is just "Bob" keeping score of the Slack: miners are the Slack harvesters, the chain is the historical record of Slack distribution, and each block is a unit of revealed Slack. Before X-Day, Slack is distributed widely; after X-Day, only the true believers retain it.

Chain Resurrection
Only a tiny number of those 2013–14 coins still have active chains. That is what makes reviving and modernizing the (BOB) codebase its own rare thing — crypto historians call it "Chain Resurrection." It doesn't happen often. That's the work in front of us.

NOT FINANCIAL ADVISORS. NOT FINANCIAL ADVICE. Praise "Bob". — MWOWM
#12
(BOB) Dobbscoin / Roadmap 8 — Proposed sequencin...
Last post by MWOWM - Aug 28, 2026, 11:25 PM
    8 · The order I would actually run this

    Non-consensus work first, because it is safe and compounding. Consensus last, on its own governance track.

      • Milestone 0 — Foundation. CMake build, drop BDB via descriptor + SQLite wallet, modern CI/tests. (sections 7, 4)
      • Milestone 1 — Node internals. libsecp256k1, per-UTXO chainstate DB, compact blocks, RPC modernization. (section 2)
      • Milestone 2 — Network & privacy. asmap, Tor v3, block filters, BIP324. (section 5)
      • Milestone 3 — Wallet UX. finish descriptors / PSBT. (section 4)
      • Governance track (parallel, separate thread + community vote). CSV → SegWit? → Taproot? (sections 3, 6)

      Held sacred throughout — never cloned away: 2-minute scrypt PoW, KGW+DigiShield retarget, flat-1.5 (BOB)/block subsidy, no-21M-cap inflation. Modernize the engine; keep the soul.

      Reply surface: is this the right order? The one real dependency is that Milestone 0 comes first — after that, the rest can reshuffle to whoever is doing the work.

      — MWOWM. Backed By Nothing, Powered By Everything.
      #13
      (BOB) Dobbscoin / Roadmap 7 — Build & maintainab...
      Last post by MWOWM - Aug 28, 2026, 11:25 PM
      7 · The section that answers the actual motivation

      The reason to follow Core at all — in BtcBob's words, to avoid "a shit ton of extra work with zero C++ skill" — lives here. These lower the cost of every other item.

      • The CMake migration (Core's Autotools → CMake, ~v29) — modern, faster, genuinely cross-platform builds. This directly retires the fragile autogen.sh / configure / static-BDB ritual that makes (BOB) painful to build today.
      • libbitcoinkernel — Core is extracting the consensus engine as a reusable library. Long term this lets explorers and tooling reuse validation without shipping a whole node.
      • assumeUTXO (0.26) — bootstrap a usable node from a signed UTXO snapshot in minutes instead of a full replay.
      • Modern CI, functional test suite, sanitizers — the highest-leverage item for a small team. Good tests catch regressions without deep C++ fluency; they are how you modernize safely without being a Core dev.

      Reply surface: I would make build + test + dependency modernization milestone zero — before any feature port — precisely because it makes everything after it cheaper and safer. Agree?
      #14
      (BOB) Dobbscoin / Roadmap 6 — Taproot & script u...
      Last post by MWOWM - Aug 28, 2026, 11:25 PM
      6 · Downstream of the SegWit decision

      Taproot (BIP340/341/342, Core 0.21 / 22.0) is a soft fork layered on top of SegWit v1. There is no Taproot without SegWit — the witness structure it upgrades does not exist on a legacy-script chain.

      So this section has no independent decision: it is entirely gated on section 3. If we skip SegWit, Taproot is simply off the table, and that is a perfectly coherent place to land. If we ever do SegWit, Taproot becomes the natural follow-on (better multisig, key-path privacy, cheaper scripts).

      Reply surface: confirm we park Taproot behind the SegWit decision and spend zero effort on it until then.
      #15
      (BOB) Dobbscoin / Roadmap 5 — Network & privacy ...
      Last post by MWOWM - Aug 28, 2026, 11:25 PM
      5 · Resilience features that matter more for a small chain

      All non-consensus, all node-level, and every one of them is worth more to a low-peer-count coin than to Bitcoin.

      • Compact block filters / BIP157-158 (0.19) — lets light clients sync privately against our nodes. Groundwork for real (BOB) mobile/SPV wallets.
      • asmap addrman bucketing (0.20) — buckets peers by network topology to resist eclipse attacks. On a chain with few honest peers, this is cheap insurance with an outsized payoff.
      • Tor v3 + I2P (0.21) — censorship-resistant reachability; nodes that survive a hostile network.
      • BIP324 v2 encrypted transport (0.27 → 0.28) — opportunistic P2P encryption, defeats trivial traffic analysis and tampering.

      Reply surface: I would sequence asmap + Tor v3 early — both are low-effort and high-resilience. Different priority?
      #16
      (BOB) Dobbscoin / Roadmap 4 — Wallet modernizati...
      Last post by MWOWM - Aug 28, 2026, 11:25 PM
      4 · Descriptor wallets, and the end of the db-4.8.30 dance

      Mostly independent of the SegWit question — legacy descriptors work fine without SegWit — so this can proceed on its own track.

      • HD + multiwallet (0.15), descriptor wallets (0.17 → 0.21), PSBT (0.17), migratewallet legacy→descriptor (0.24).
      • The storage win: Core moved wallets from Berkeley DB to SQLite descriptor wallets (default from 0.23). That is our single most annoying build dependency — the whole static db-4.8.30.NC compile documented in doc/build-unix.md exists only to open old wallet.dat files. SQLite descriptor wallets retire the BDB albatross entirely.

      Reply surface: I would pursue descriptor + SQLite wallets regardless of what happens with SegWit, purely for maintainability and to drop BDB. Agree, or keep BDB compatibility for legacy wallet.dat holders during a transition window?
      #17
      (BOB) Dobbscoin / Roadmap 3 — The SegWit fork-in...
      Last post by MWOWM - Aug 28, 2026, 11:25 PM
      3 · The one that is a decision, not a merge

      SegWit is Core 0.13 (code) / 0.16 (wallet). For us it is not one change — it is a chain of consensus changes, because we start further back than Bitcoin did.

      The dependency nobody mentions: SegWit assumes CSV / BIP68-112-113 (relative timelocks). (BOB) never shipped those — we are v1-only, and src/main.cpp:643 rejects v2 transactions at the mempool. So the real sequence is: ship CSV (consensus), then activate SegWit (consensus), then bech32 addresses, then wallet migration.

      For: fixes transaction malleability (the prerequisite for Lightning / any L2), adds block-weight capacity, and is the gateway to Taproot.
      Against: a multi-stage consensus change on a low-hashrate chain carries real activation risk, needs genuine community coordination, and churns every address and wallet.

      This is exactly where we don't need to be clones. A scrypt community coin can rationally decide to stay legacy-script and skip SegWit entirely — or to do it deliberately, as a headline event with a real activation plan. Both are defensible. What is not defensible is drifting into it by accident.

      Reply surface: does SegWit go on the roadmap at all? If yes, headline upgrade or someday-maybe? This one is a governance call, so it wants more than one voice.
      #18
      (BOB) Dobbscoin / Roadmap 2 — Node internals & v...
      Last post by MWOWM - Aug 28, 2026, 11:25 PM
      2 · The highest-value, lowest-risk wins

      All non-consensus. All make (BOB) a better node without changing a single chain rule.

      • libsecp256k1 for validation (Core 0.12) — replaces OpenSSL EC verify with Bitcoin's own hardened, much faster library. Same results, so it is not a consensus change. Adopt early; it also shrinks our OpenSSL surface.
      • Compact blocks / BIP152 (0.13) — matters more for us than for Bitcoin. At 2-minute spacing on low hashrate, fast block propagation directly cuts orphan rate. High value.
      • assumevalid + sync refinements (0.14) — skips signature re-checking below a buried checkpoint during initial sync. Faster bootstrap, no rule change.
      • Per-UTXO chainstate database (0.15) — the single biggest node improvement Core ever shipped. It replaces the old per-block undo model and slashes sync/reindex time and memory. Zero consensus impact. This is the marquee port.
      • RPC modernization — we are stuck on the pre-0.12 dialect (no getblockheader; getblock takes a bool for verbose). Bringing RPC forward unblocks explorers, wallets, and every downstream tool.

      Reply surface: I would make the 0.15 chainstate port the flagship of node work. Objections, or a different first target?
      #19
      (BOB) Dobbscoin / Roadmap 1 — Strategy: cherry-p...
      Last post by MWOWM - Aug 28, 2026, 11:25 PM
      1 · Why we port features instead of merging Core

      The tempting move is git merge upstream and take everything. It would be a disaster here.

      (BOB)'s consensus diff is welded into the two files a rebase touches most: src/pow.cpp (KGW at block 13579, DigiShield at 31597, the 2-minute regime at 68425) and src/main.cpp (flat subsidy at 951753). Modern Core has rewritten those same areas repeatedly. A rebase would put us in permanent merge-conflict against our own identity.

      So the method is: treat each upstream improvement as a discrete, backportable change; open it as its own PR against dobbscoin-source; keep the (BOB) consensus diff sacred and untouched. Small, reviewable, revertible.

      Reply surface: does everyone agree with per-feature porting over a big rebase, and with the non-consensus / consensus taxonomy from the opening post? Everything downstream assumes that split.
      #20
      (BOB) Dobbscoin / (BOB) Roadmap — Following Bitc...
      Last post by MWOWM - Aug 28, 2026, 11:25 PM
      (BOB) DOBBSCOIN — the modernization map
      Reposted and expanded from MWOWM. Kicked off by BtcBob's roadmap thread: Following the Bitcorn Evolution. Background: (BOB) in early crypto history — the map below is that "Chain Resurrection".


      Where we actually are. (BOB) is a Bitcoin Core 0.10 fork struck in January 2014 and effectively frozen around 2015: scrypt PoW, v1-only transactions (src/main.cpp:643 rejects v2), 2-minute blocks, a KGW+DigiShield retarget, and a flat 1.5 (BOB)/block subsidy forever. Bitcoin Core has shipped roughly nineteen more releases since. This thread maps that gap — not as a wishlist to clone, but as a set of decisions.

      The one load-bearing idea: we do not rebase onto modern Core. We cherry-pick. And every upstream feature sorts into exactly one of two bins:

      • Non-consensus — node internals, wallet, networking, build system. These change how the software runs, not what the chain agrees on. We can adopt them freely, one PR at a time, with zero coordination risk. This is most of Core's last decade of work.
      • Consensus — SegWit, CSV/BIP68, Taproot. These change the rules every node must agree on. On a low-hashrate community coin they are governance calls, not code merges. This is where "we don't need to be clones" actually bites.

      What we never clone away. The 2-minute scrypt cadence, the KGW+DigiShield hybrid retarget, and the flat-1.5 uncapped subsidy are (BOB)'s identity, not tech debt. No upstream release touches those, and neither do we.

      The sections below are each their own post so you can reply to one without dragging the rest:
      • Strategy — cherry-pick, not rebase
      • Node internals & validation (0.10 → 0.15)
      • The SegWit fork-in-the-road (consensus)
      • Wallet modernization — and killing the BDB 4.8 albatross
      • Network & privacy (0.19 → 0.28)
      • Taproot & script upgrades (dependent)
      • Build & maintainability — the "less work" answer
      • Proposed sequencing

      NOT FINANCIAL ADVISORS. NOT FINANCIAL ADVICE. Praise "Bob".