The State of EarthBucks 2.0: Verification Is Back, and the Mines Are Next

Verification is back on EarthBucks. You pay 100 EBX for each year, and each share that a verified account mines counts ten times. It is the newest feature in a busy month, and it comes before the largest change: EarthBucks 2.0, a network of mines that replaces the single mine at earthbucks.com.

This post explains three things: what is new, how EarthBucks got here, and what EarthBucks 2.0 is today.

What is new

Paid verification. Verification is now built into EarthBucks. There is no separate identity website, and you pay in EBX, not US dollars. The price is 100 EBX for each year. You can buy from one to five years at a time. A verified account gets three things:

• A 10x mining advantage. Each valid share counts ten times.
• Permission to put messages in blocks.
• The verified badge on its profile.

Accounts that were verified with the old Identellica service stay verified, free, until November 8, 2026. The details are in Get Verified for 10x Mining Advantage.

Consolidation. A miner’s wallet can hold thousands of small rewards, and one payment can spend at most 100 of them. Before, a large payment could fail with an error. Now the wallet joins small amounts automatically before it pays, so you can send any amount up to your full balance. Read Consolidation Lets You Send Any Amount of EBX.

A Pay page that works like a messenger. Pay is now organized by person, like a text messaging app. Each payment can carry a note of up to 400 characters. Your browser encrypts the note before it leaves your computer, so the server stores only ciphertext. Read EarthBucks Is Becoming a Messenger for a Federated Economy.

Atomic swaps, in a prototype. An offline prototype now swaps EBX for Bitcoin Cash (BCH) and back. It builds and signs transactions for both chains, completes swaps with a shared secret, and refunds swaps that do not finish. It uses simulated chains and test coins, not real funds. Read Progress On Atomic Swaps With Bitcoin Cash.

How we got here

The history is short, and it has some bumps.

• March 2024. I published the first EarthBucks post: a new implementation of the system in the Bitcoin white paper, with parameters for 2024. The supply is fixed at 42 million EBX.
• November 4, 2024. The genesis block was mined. You could mine with a phone, a laptop or a desktop. One week later, a concurrency bug made block 110 invalid, and I rewound the chain to block 109.
• December 2024. Verification started, with Identellica, a separate identity website that charged US dollars.
• January 2025. Mining moved to a new proof-of-work algorithm, Pow5.
• February 13, 2025. EarthBucks 1.0 launched. Four days later, I wrote the first plan for EarthBucks 2.0: a peer-to-peer network, a BCH wallet and a decentralized exchange.
• May 2025. Verified accounts got the 10x mining advantage.
• July 2025. I stopped Identellica verification, because it was complex and unfinished. I also refocused EarthBucks on small internet payments, such as payments between AI applications.
• April 2026. EarthBucks joined Astrohacker, and work on EarthBucks 2.0 began with a Rust consensus library.
• August and September 2026. The EarthBucks code moved into the Astrohacker monorepo, and earthbucks.com moved to AWS. The Rust library reached full parity with the TypeScript library: all 47 modules match, with shared test vectors.

Today, EarthBucks 1.0 is still the live network, and earthbucks.com is still its only mine.

What EarthBucks 2.0 is today

EarthBucks 2.0 separates the mines from the app. In EarthBucks, a mine is not a miner. A mine is a full node that runs as a service at a domain name. It validates transactions, keeps the chain state and builds blocks. Miners do the proof of work.

In EarthBucks 2.0, the mines vote on each transaction before it goes into a block. A strict majority makes a transaction final, and a final transaction never rolls back. There are no reorgs. The vote weight comes from the last 100 blocks, which is about 17 hours of mining.

Here is what works now, on one computer:

• Three mines agree. Three Rust mines validate each transaction, vote on it and agree on the winner when two transactions spend the same coins.
• The mines are fast. With 70 milliseconds of simulated network delay, the three mines finalize about 6,083 transactions each second. The earlier peak was 8,365 each second. I removed some complexity to make the code easier to verify, and I accepted the lower number.
• Membership is signed. One operator key signs each change to the list of mines, and every mine checks the signature.
• The Merkle tree is fast. In a local benchmark, the Rust Merkle tree reached about 1.2 million updates each second.

The design target is one million transactions each second, with a final answer for each transaction in less than one second. That is a target, not a result. We have not tested a network that spans the world.

There is also one known problem. In some tests, two transactions that spend the same coins both became final, in different voting windows. A rule for this case exists, but I do not consider the problem closed. EarthBucks 2.0 will not launch until one spend wins every time.

What comes next

The plan for EarthBucks 2.0 is clear.

1. Audit the mine. Find every fix that the mine needs before migration, including the conflicting-spend problem.
2. Plan the migration. Move from one mine at earthbucks.com to numbered mines with no downtime. All balances, keys and history stay. There is no reset.
3. Launch the mines. The first three mines will be in Virginia, London and Tokyo, at addresses such as mine1.earthbucks.com. Astrohacker will run all mines at launch.
4. Add the BCH wallet. You will hold BCH in your EarthBucks wallet, and send it in the same conversations as EBX.
5. Put swaps in the app. You will trade EBX for BCH without a custodian.
6. Bring KeyPears in. One master key will protect your money, your messages and a vault for your passwords and API keys. You will use the vault to give each of your AI agents only the keys it needs.

The expected launch is late 2026 or early 2027.

Get verified, then watch the mines

EarthBucks started as electronic cash for small payments. It is becoming the money, messaging and key system that people and their agents use to trade. Verification is the part that you can use today.

Go to the Verification page, pay 100 EBX, and mine with a 10x advantage. If you do not have 100 EBX yet, mine it for free.