BMAX: pricing “sats now vs sats later” via a mining sharechain (no L1 changes, no custodians, no oracles)

People seem to get caught up on the fact that this is using bitcoin mining under the hood. The following very simplified description might appeal to more people:

BMAX is a decentralized perpetual, fair, and open lottery for a future UTXO, with transferrable tickets:

  • decentralized because it is operated by a p2pool-inspired mining network (which appears to bitcoin as any other source of hashrate)

  • fair because it is ultimately equivalent in expectation to bitcoin solo mining

  • perpetual (repeated) because the current pot is distributed every time a mainchain block is found by the lottery participants (miners adhering to sharechain consensus)

  • open because unlike other lottery schemes on bitcoin, the set of participants need not be enumerated ahead of time