FIPS 204. The ordinary signature on a transaction.
Electronic cash with a lock that is not an elliptic curve.
A peer-to-peer system that stays sound after a cryptographically relevant quantum computer exists. No server. No central authority. Users hold their own keys. The network checks for double-spending.
A new genesis
The chain is called Timechain. It is a code descendant of Bitcoin’s transaction and proof-of-work design, with its own genesis block and no shared history. Holders of bitcoin receive nothing on it.
The name is the one used in early notes for the block chain. It is homage, not a claim on Bitcoin’s chain, ticker, or genesis.
What changes is the lock
Ordinary authorization is an ML-DSA-65 signature under NIST FIPS 204. Each address also commits to an SLH-DSA recovery path under FIPS 205. That path’s only hardness assumption is a cryptographic hash.
Proof-of-work remains double SHA-256. Grover’s algorithm gives only a quadratic speedup against that hash. The urgent defect in the old lock is the signature, not the timestamp.
FIPS 205. Hash-based, committed in the address.
The timestamp stays. Sixty seconds a block.
Specification
Kept
- Coin
- A chain of digital signatures.
- Header
- 80 bytes, a Merkle tree, and the chain with the most work.
- Work
- Double SHA-256 proof-of-work.
- Cap
- 21,000,000 coins.
- Genesis
- Unspendable. No premine, no founder allocation, no treasury.
Changes
- Interval
- 60 seconds a block. Difficulty every 1,008 blocks, about a day, clamped to a factor of four.
- Subsidy
- Starts at 5 TIC. Halves every 2,100,000 blocks, four years at the target interval.
- Address
- tic1… bech32m. The witness program is a hash. The public key appears only in the spending witness.
- Network
- A new magic and a new port. A Timechain node will not finish a handshake with a Bitcoin node.
- Weight
- Not bare bytes. A base block is 1,000,000 bytes. Witness bytes count at one quarter.
Against Bitcoin
| Parameter | Bitcoin | Timechain |
|---|---|---|
| Ledger | Bitcoin chain, genesis 2009 | New genesis, no shared history |
| Unit / ticker | bitcoin / BTC | timecoin / TIC |
| Signature | ECDSA, then Schnorr | ML-DSA-65, SLH-DSA recovery |
| Public key on chain | Often, after first spend | Only in the spending witness |
| Proof-of-work | SHA-256d, 10 minutes | SHA-256d, 60 seconds |
| Adjustment | 2,016 blocks | 1,008 blocks, factor-of-four clamp |
| Subsidy | 50 BTC, halve / 210,000 | 5 TIC, halve / 2,100,000 |
| Cap | 21,000,000 BTC | 21,000,000 TIC |
| Premine | Genesis output unspendable | Genesis output unspendable |
| Address | bc1… | tic1… bech32m |
Network
- New transactions are broadcast to all nodes.
- Each node collects new transactions into a block.
- Each node works on a difficult proof-of-work for its block.
- When a node finds a proof-of-work, it broadcasts the block.
- Nodes accept the block only if every transaction is valid and unspent, and each witness verifies under the algorithm tag it claims.
- Nodes express acceptance by working on the next block, using the accepted block’s hash as the previous hash.