Unwriter announced Overpool, an offchain ledger for Bitcoin

When Unwriter, the anonymous yet prolific Bitcoin developer, doesn’t release something new for quite a while, you can bet that he’s working on something big. That was proven true on September 24, as the Bitcoin SV (BSV) community is coming to grips with the countless new possibilities created by the talented programmer when he announced Overpool.

Today I'm releasing Overpool — A decentralized Turing-complete ledger of offchain bitcoin transactions.https://t.co/uEo6IeTCbn

— _unwriter (@_unwriter) September 24, 2019

Described as an offchain Bitcoin transaction ledger, Overpool allows off-chain Bitcoin transactions, and effectively allows applications to work with Neon Planaria and DAT to become a Turing Complete system, looping transactions until they are ready to be committed to the blockchain.

The full documentation of the Overpool network is well described on the website Unwriter has created for it, so developers interested in using it should head over and check it out.

One follower noted that Overpool sounds a lot like Lightning Network, the second layer solution intended to make BTC transactions a bit faster and cheaper. Problem is, that technology is still barely used, still under development, and not really ready for the average consumer. As Unwriter noted to the follower, Overpool is ready now.

Unwriter, as is his routine with these big announcements, posted several working examples of how the new service can be used, including individual user pools which can be published and subscribed to.

Watch as I post to the Overpool HTTP endpoint, and it gets replicated to all subscribed peers over DAT P2P network, in realtime.

Now imagine each peer plugging this into Neon Planaria and looping back in.https://t.co/BFVRFb4vCe pic.twitter.com/PeAo8A5jIN

— _unwriter (@_unwriter) September 24, 2019

He also took the time to specifically note that the service was licensed with the MIT license, allowing it to be used with any blockchain. In theory then, this can allow the BTC and BSV blockchains to work in harmony, allowing the BTC chain to be a pool with its own consensus rules and block size, committing to the BSV chain when necessary.

While everything described by Unwriter is impressive and bound to be handy for other developers in the space, for the average user it might as well be Greek, so one kind and respected community member helped translate what he’s accomplished for the rest of us:

Think of it like a second mempool that allows transactions to hang before they’re broadcast to the chain. In that interim, you can have a betting pool, and escrow, a livestream or a podcast…

— Kurt Wuckert Jr | GorillaPool.com (@kurtwuckertjr) September 24, 2019

Only a day out from this big announcement, that’s just some of the possibilities that can now happen with Overpool. As the weeks stretch on, there’s bound to be plenty more.