Decentralized Autonomous Organizations and Inflation
The concept of Decentralized Autonomous Organizations (DAOs) dates back to the open source software and hardware movement, as these communities attempted to create an economically sustainable project with independent contributors. However, Bitcoin (and smart contracts) allow such a fascinating and elegant implementation of the idea that they have come to dominate the concept. https://web.archive.org/web/20121102025033/http://e-texteditor.com/blog/2009/opencompany http://effluviaofascatteredmind.blogspot.com/2009/03/thoughts-on-gpl-open-company-concept.html
However, in thinking about the current situation with high(er) inflation worldwide, I've realized that sound money is really the original DAO. If you held a "sound" (low and predictable inflation) asset (which could be the currency or actually any limited commodity in demand by that society, for example, land), you were essentially making a long term investment in that societies' ability to grow faster than the inflation rate of that asset. Since the value of the prevelant medium of exchange of a society is somehow derived from all economic activity within that society, a sound medium of exchange would act similarly to a company stock for society as a whole. In a free society, this models the concept of a DAO, where individuals contribute to the whole in whatever way they see fit, and their contributions benefit the whole.
This makes intuitive sense. But to actually prove the idea that sound money behaves like issuing stock in an entire society would require an intense amount of research and analysis to compensate for inflation and other social factors. I'll leave that to economic historians :-).
But this idea is no longer true in many places (for example, the USA) because the inflation of fiat money has exceeded economic growth for the last 100 years, and most notably since the 1970s when the US dollar stopped even pretending to be sound money.
From this perspective -- that of the USD as stock in the DAO we call the United States of America -- it looks as if the beneficiaries of inflationary monetary policy (typically banks) have not only devalued holders of USD (as clearly shown by the loss of purchasing power), but have taken all the past and future growth and innovation dividends due to every citizen by effectively co-opting the mechanism to invest in a societies' growth and innovation.
I want to invest in growth and innovation in humanity worldwide. This is why I choose Bitcoin, Bitcoin Cash and ETH.
Blockchain Energy Use: A Media Package
Recently Bitcoin’s energy use has risen to new heights, causing significant media coverage. This coverage is universally terrible – full of incorrect facts, misinformation, and (dare I say it) lies. It is important to be accurate with information, both for your journalistic integrity and for your employer since incorrect information could have an adverse effect on millions of people’s investments.
I am the founder and lead developer of Bitcoin Unlimited, an organization that has produced Bitcoin mining (“full node”) software and currently produces the same for Bitcoin Cash. I also teach graduate and senior level courses on Bitcoin and blockchains at Umass Amherst.
The following statements are entirely true but may surprise or even shock you. If you don’t understand them, you need to read this entire article before printing misinformation about Bitcoin’s and other cryptocurrencies’ energy use:
If Bitcoin’s transaction rate increased by 10 times, or even 100x, or 100000x, its energy use would not materially increase.
If more efficient Bitcoin mining devices are created, Bitcoin’s energy use will *stay the same*.
If Bitcoin’s price doubled, its energy use would slowly rise until it has doubled.
If Bitcoin’s price halved, its energy use would rapidly halve.
Given a stable price, Bitcoin’s energy use will halve every 4 years.
And here’s a classic piece of misinformation:
Although Bitcoin mining uses a lot of renewables, that doesn’t matter because it means coal and oil is being burnt elsewhere to power other stuff.
Bitcoin Energy Use is Defined by Price, not Production
This is the single most important idea to understand. Whenever Bitcoin commits transactions to the blockchain (by solving a block, which is what the miners do and where all the energy goes), the miner gains transaction fees (negligible) and some free Bitcoins (inflation). Currently the inflation is about 900 BTC per day, or 6.25 BTC per block. At current prices, this is 312,500 USD per block! It costs a few thousand dollars to buy a mining machine. So holy shit right?! Buy mining machines and run them! And that’s what many people did. So now you are competing with everyone else who are running mining machines to be the lucky person to solve a block, which happens about every 10 minutes no matter how many machines are running.
All those machines cost almost nothing for upkeep compared to the energy they use. So based on natural economic laws, people will keep turning on mining machines until the aggregate energy cost (energy used by every mining machine in the network) is about 312,500 USD per 10 minute period or 1.875M USD per hour, at today’s price of about 50000 USD per BTC. But at that point mining for bitcoins will cost more in energy than it produces in BTC, so new machines will not be added. If the price of a bitcoin goes up, more machines are turned on. If the price of a bitcoin goes down, machines are turned off.
Now I think you understand my statements 3 and 4, with the added observation that it takes time to bring new machines online but they can be turned off pretty much instantly. And a bit of thinking will allow you to understand 2: basically, if machines became twice as efficient, people will run more machines, until again the energy consumed basically equals the money received.
Statement 5 simply follows from one additional fact: Bitcoin’s inflation rate halves every 4 years. So 4 years from now miners will receive 3.125 BTC per block, or only 156K USD if the price of BTC doesn’t change. This means they’ll have to shut off machines to save energy, because you can’t spend 312K USD to produce 156K USD for very long. Eventually, 100+ years from now, this inflation will dwindle to nothing. And somewhere between now and then the transaction fees will start to matter, but that is a topic for another time.
Now Understand What Will Be Known As “The World’s Dumbest Decision”
As I described the situation above, I only talked about blocks, not transactions. That’s because creating blocks with 10, 1000, 1000000, or 10000000 transactions in them is irrelevant with respect to mining. All those transactions get boiled down into a single 80 byte chunk of data before being passed to the miners using an efficient algorithm that can take place on a normal computer (so negligible energy cost), but you’ll have to take my course to understand the details.
So taking the Bitcoin energy use and dividing it by the number of transactions is like taking the entire wind energy in the Atlantic Ocean, dividing it by the number of sailboats on the water, and thereby concluding that sailboats consume lots of energy.
But there’s a catch. In “The World’s Dumbest Decision”, powerful members of the Bitcoin community chose to limit the block size to about 1MB every 10 minutes (note that the average web page is > 2MB today and load in 10ths of a second), and therefore the number of transactions (sailboats) to about 2000 per block. This split the community almost in half (you might realize at this point what side of that split I was on), and created tremendous opportunities for profit-creating sidechains and nascent alternative cryptocurrencies, which some developers and miners had significant financial interest in.
So due to the “law of unintended consequences”, or what we could also call the “law of either being too stupid to think things through or too selfish to do the right thing”, the energy per transaction division actually does makes sense for Bitcoin right now.
But does not make sense for the industry as a whole, and can be remedied in Bitcoin as soon as its politics change. So it ought to be presented as such – a Bitcoin-only and possibly temporary problem.
From this description, I hope you understand #1 now. If Bitcoin ever increases its transaction volume, it will do so without increasing its energy use. And if it does not increase its transaction volume, other cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin Cash, have already done so and so will take a larger and larger slice of Bitcoin’s transaction volume until Bitcoin becomes irrelevant.
Bitcoin’s Interaction With Renewable Energy
Its important to understand that energy supply and therefore price varies dramatically from location to location, and from one moment to another. This is because transporting energy is expensive, and can only occur over existing wires so has inflexible capacity. If you doubt this, you only need to read about the significant power outage in Texas last week (Feb, 2021), and the huge energy prices that resulted, and also about the success of the Hornsdale Power Reserve (https://www.popularmechanics.com/science/a31350880/elon-musk-battery-farm/).
So statement 6 is simply not true, irrespective of Bitcoin. Consumption of renewable energy at some location *absolutely does not imply production of non-renewable energy elsewhere*. You simply can’t get that energy from here to there.
And if you look at the location of Bitcoin mining hardware, you will find that much of it is near renewable sources, typically hydro. This should be your first hint that there is something much more interesting going on than the knee-jerk idea that Bitcoin is evil because it “wastes” power.
What is actually happening is that hydro plants often produce a huge surplus of energy since the energy they produce is proportional to the water flowing through the dam, not the demand for that energy. This energy can’t be transported far because the grid can’t handle the capacity, and no one wants it anyway. So these hydro plants offer this energy very inexpensively so long as consumption is right near the dam. Its pretty hard to move an entire factory with all its workers 100s or 1000s of miles away up into some remote mountainous location. Its pretty easy to move bitcoin miners.
But yes, there’s an ugly truth that if the price of bitcoin increases too much too quickly, then it becomes (at least for a while) profitable to run the miners on more expensive, non-surplus, non-renewable energy. This is what we see during Bitcoin’s short “boom” cycles which ironically is the only time you reporters come running over here to write articles.
Forward Looking Ideas About Energy
Dismissing Bitcoin as a dirty technology may be throwing out amazing techniques to actually aid renewable use, so I’d like to look into my crystal ball a bit and propose some “crazy” ideas.
First, Bitcoin mining could allow greater use of nuclear power, where new designs are generally agreed to be cleaner than coal/gas and seem to be much safer (but I’m not here to advocate for nuclear, I’m just here to point out a possible interaction with Bitcoin mining). The problem with nuclear is that it provides a steady “base load” but can’t ramp up and down quickly. And you know, you can’t over produce energy without bringing down the grid. You have to meet demand exactly (sometimes bulk energy prices actually go negative – providers literally will PAY YOU to consume energy). So you have to run quick-to-power-up but dirty non-renewables to handle any load variation. But what if there was a “magic black box” that could soak up extra supply and turn it directly into money? In that case, nuclear baseline load could be higher.
Second, Bitcoin mining could do the same thing for renewables. The problem with renewables is their erratic production. But what if you could profitably over-build renewable sites, so you are producing (say) 150% of power demand on a sunny or windy day? And then on a cloudy or light wind day you drop down to 100% demand. Why is this good? Well, if you built out to produce 100% only on the brightest or windiest days, then on cloudy or just breezy days you have to fire up the coal or gas generator to meet demand.
We cannot overbuild and use that energy for much else. For example, could we build a factory that uses that extra-but-variable 50% to make aluminum? No, because it and its workers would sit idle too often, need to be fired up at strange times of the night, and work continuous multi-day and night shifts. Worse, sometimes we need to start 1% of that factory’s production, other times 100%. But Bitcoin miners have none of these problems. So we may be able to deploy Bitcoin miners to convert extra renewable electricity production into money that essentially pays for that deployment of extra renewable capacity, averting the need to fire up dirty non-renewable production.
Finally, a Bitcoin miner is a great device for “load shedding” (this is when the power company automatically turns off power to stop the entire grid from failing).
You could even imagine it behaving as a lossless energy “teleporter”. Imagine a future where miners are more or less evenly distributed across a geographic region, producing money from solar power. Does one region need more energy and one region have too much? Rather than pass the power through lossy, expensive-to-maintain, and “nimby” (Not In My Backyard) high voltage power lines, turn off miners in the region that needs energy, and turn them on in the region that has too much.
Co-locating bitcoin mines near surplus hydro is the first step in the future I’ve outlined here. And its already happened. But there are a few reasons these more advanced ideas haven’t been fully realized. The first is simply time. The second is that the boom cycles of Bitcoin make it profitable to mine (during the boom) with expensive energy. But as Bitcoin grows, the boom cycles will stabilize (look at prior boom cycles, they were bigger on a percentage basis).
The third is that mining hardware used to be getting iteratively but significantly more efficient on a yearly basis, obsoleting old hardware. So miners had to run their hardware 24x7 so that it would pay back its investment before becoming obsolete. However, just like how computer CPU performance increases are much smaller now than they were in the 1980’s and 1990’s, the mining hardware’s chips are now approaching state-of-the-art in terms of transistor density. This happened because its a lot cheaper to produce chips using older technology, so the first mining chips were produced using old and relatively cheap technology. The next chips used less old and more expensive technology, and so on. Mining chips literally passed through much the same technologies and therefore transistor density increases as CPUs, but did so in 7 years rather than 40.
So we can expect that the usable life of a bitcoin miner today or in the near future will be long enough to allow them to be powered on intermittently rather than continuously.
Fourth, in some areas Bitcoin mining has gotten a bad reputation for encouraging the building out of power connectivity to a site during the boom and then cancelling the contract during the bust . Well, honestly that should be on whoever signed that contract on the power side, although I can't really blame them for not understanding this emerging market. Make the miner pay for that build out, and you have a free data center built and ready to rent if the miner moves out.
Of course, you are thinking that we could just push surplus power into batteries. For sure, but how much battery capacity is ultimately deployed depends on the continued development of battery technology, their usable life, and the ability to transport that power. It seems unlikely that a battery will ever be developed that can store a rainy season’s worth of excess hydro power into the rest of the year’s worth of demand. Certainly, such a device would look nothing like today’s batteries. It is more likely to efficiently convert electricity into some relatively stable chemical, like gasoline.
Or perhaps that “storage technology” will be a little black box that converts electricity directly into a new form of money in exchange for the valuable service of helping to secure the world's financial network. This new money is stored easily, cheaply, does not age, and can be used to purchase power during the dry season from someone’s solar surplus. Conversely that solar producer purchases your power during the rainy season.
The future of renewable energy production and storage is by no means figured out. But sitting here today, I think that cryptocurrency mining may play a very interesting role in it.
Raspberry PI 4 BCH Full Node
For people who want to run a dedicated BCH full node, a Raspberry PI is a good, inexpensive option. It is a 32 bit ARM machine so is less powerful compared to an Intel NUC (small form factor Intel PC), but a full node can be had for less than $200, compared to $500 - $800 for a NUC.
Hardware
I chose a configuration that came in a bit above $200 but was convenient.
I started with the CanaKit Raspberry PI 4, 8GB . You can find cheaper options, or something more beautiful such as a single PI+SSD enclosure or one with a touchscreen. https://www.canakit.com/raspberry-pi-4-starter-kit.html
I chose this because it was simple one-stop shopping, since it contained a full PI 4 setup with case, heat sinks, fans, power supply, on/off switch, and boot flash.
Next, we need a SSD to store the blockchain. Getting a high performance SSD and enclosure is important since the PI's 8GB of RAM does not leave much room for caching. Make sure it is advertised as 500+ MB/sec transfer. I chose the 1TB Samsung 870 QVO since it was competitively priced and fast. However, the BCH blockchain currently consumes only about 250 GB so you can save money by purchasing a lower capacity drive. https://www.amazon.com/SAMSUNG-Internal-Version-MZ-77Q1T0B-AM/dp/B089C73T72
For the SSD enclosure, I purchased this one from Inatek. There are a lot of choices here; just make sure that you get one compatible with USB 3.0! https://www.amazon.com/Inateck-Inch-Drive-Enclosure-External/dp/B00FCLG65U/ref=sr_1_8?crid=OXC37F97W5YH&dchild=1&keywords=inatek+hard+drive+enclosure&qid=1602551003&s=electronics&sprefix=inatek+hard+driv%2Celectronics%2C156&sr=1-8
Install the SSD in the enclosure, connect it to the RPI via a USB 3.0 cable, and flip the SSD enclosure's power switch to "on".
I had an old monitor and extra keyboard/mouse for use during setup. After the set up its easy enough to go headless (or maybe dual-purpose the machine as a full node and cryptocurrency ticker/news feed).
The final hardware is very compact, and sits near my router. You can attach the PI and SSD with a bit of double sided tape to keep them together and get a very short usb3 cord to connect them.
Software Setup
At this point, you should boot up your Raspberry PI and go through its basic install and setup. I used the Raspbian (Raspberry PI) OS, which is the first choice in the CanaKit installer.
Once you've completed this install, it will have installed Linux and auto-boot you to a graphical desktop as the "pi" user.
Get the Bitcoin Unlimited Software
Go to https://www.bitcoinunlimited.info/download and download the 32 bit ARM version of BCH Unlimited.
Setup the SSD Volume and Copy the Software
sudo fdisk /dev/sda
Answer the prompts: n, p, <defaults for the rest>. Then "w" to write the changes
sudo mkfs -t ext4 /dev/sda1
Set up the sdd directory and auto-mount it:
sudo mkdir /ssd
sudo nano /etc/fstab
And add this line to the end of the file:
/dev/sda1 /ssd ext4 defaults 0 0
Now mount /ssd, detar BCH Unlimited, and create a bitcoin data directory:
sudo mount /ssd
cd /ssd
sudo tar xvfz ~/bch-unlimited*
sudo chmod -R a+r bch-unlimited*
sudo mkdir .bitcoin
sudo chown pi .bitcoin
cd ~
ln -s /ssd/.bitcoin .
To remain within the Raspi's 8GB, set your bitcoin configuration as follows by creating a new bitcoin.conf file:
nano ~/.bitcoin/bitcoin.conf
server=1
dbcache=100
par=2
maxorphantx=50
maxmempool=100
persistmempool=false
maxconnections=50
maxoutconnections=5
maxreceivebuffer=5000
maxsendbuffer=5000
net.blockDownloadWindow=50
Running BCH Unlimited
Running from the command line
To start it all going to make sure it works, you can run bitcoin-qt or bitcoind from the command line:
/ssd/bch-unlimited*/bin/bitcoin-qt
Automatically Start On Login
mkdir ~/.config/autostart
nano ~/.config/autostart/BCHunlimited.desktop
[Desktop Entry]
Type=Application
Name=Clock
Exec=/ssd/bch-unlimited1.9.0.1/bin/bitcoin-qt
Synchronizing
The Raspberry PI will begin by synchronizing with the blockchain. Since the machine is not high performance, this will likely take a few days (the highest performance desktops with gigabit ethernet connections can do it in hours). In particular, the synchronization may appear to stall around 2016-2017. Progress is still happening, but at this time, the pre-BTC-fork blockchain was filling 1MB blocks. And after we forked, there were a few "stress tests" to prove large blocks in BCH.
These can take awhile, so be patient. Once synchronized, the machine will easily keep up with the block and transaction load.
BCH Unlimited Statistics
As your node is synchronizing, you can pop up the "debug" window to see its connections to other nodes and its upload/download bandwidth.
Exposing Your Node to the Network
It has been argued that an end user running their own full node is worthless. I disagree, although there is a kernel of truth that doing so it not as valuable as mining. But I believe that it is worthwhile for the following reasons.
They serve data to SPV (phone) wallets and other full nodes.
They help hide mining and other economically significant full nodes from eclipse, denial-of-service, and other attacks.
They enforce the consensus rules for your own use, and "carry" the SPV wallets they serve onto whatever fork follows those rules. This makes it harder for a group of miners or other full nodes to choose to change these rules.
From a cryptocurrency community perspective, full nodes (and especially full nodes whose IP address does not resolve to a data center) express an individual who has a persistent interest in the cryptocurrency. While its easy to rent virtual servers in a data center, its pretty hard to get residential IPs.
They choose forks. For example, looking at cashnodes.io and searching for "ABC:0.22" I can see that at the time of this writing only 65 out of 1201 full nodes care enough about the IFP to upgrade! This includes 455 ABC nodes that haven't upgraded. I believe that this clearly indicates negative sentiment around the plan to loot the currency by compromising security commonly called the "IFP". And it indicates that this negative sentiment exists even among people who were previously enough of a proponent of ABC to run a full node. This is a powerful message that ABC should heed if it wants to remain relevant. https://cashnodes.io/nodes
But to be helpful in these ways, your node must be visible on the internet. To do so, you very likely need to configure your router/firewall to forward port 8333 to port 8333 on your Raspberry PI. How to accomplish this exactly depends on your router/firewall so is beyond the scope of this article. However, please take the time to do this so that your node helps out the network!
You can determine whether your node is visible from the outside by first Googling
"what's my ip". Then enter that IP address into the query box at coin.dance about halfway down the page here to search for your node. https://cash.coin.dance/nodes
BCH: Looking back and Moving forward
In the years following our fork from BTC, negative events have confronted us affecting the stewardship of a successful cryptocurrency. Loosely, such a stewardship comprises making technical decisions, growing engineering relationships, building the user community, and protecting the essential qualities of BCH. Most of these negative events have not alone been serious enough to risk or cause a fork, except for the Infrastructure Funding Plan (IFP) and the issues leading up to the BSV fork.
But on the technical front, we have failed to deliver many meaningful end-user innovations, instead mostly focusing on internal, janitorial work and introducing purposeless complexity and unnecessary change that consumes engineering time. Three years after the fork, it is incredible we are wrangling over a fix to a fix of a hack. Specifically, ASERT is fixing problems in the DAA algorithm that I identified in simulation and documented before the DAA was merged[1]. And the DAA itself was a fix to the EDA which was pushed into BCH as an unreviewed pre-fork change.
Arbitrary deployment of substandard code and willful disregard of evidence-based analysis is not our only technical problem. We cannot deliver end-user features: zero conf reliability has disappeared for years into an opaque piece of vaporware named “Avalanche” which has discouraged alternatives and at its best will make us a poor copy of the AVA cryptocurrency which, being entirely focused on delivering the best qualities of the Avalanche consensus mechanism, will likely outperform BCH in that regard. And we waste engineering time: we struggle for months to convince ABC to deploy something as simple as increasing the unconfirmed transaction chain depth. This reluctance is more for political issues than any engineering justification.
Let’s take an honest look at Schnorr signatures which is arguably the most exciting feature associated with ABC (note it was Mark Lundeberg who polished and ported code originally written by Core, so ABC’s role was perhaps managing the process?). What features does it provide the end users that they didn’t have already? Signatures? No. Sure, Schnorr does them better but not in a way that’s immediately meaningful to end users. Coin mixing? No, we had that already. But again Schnorr does it better. Do you see our lack of end-user focus?
Our engineering ecosystem is shrinking and suffering a turnover rate unhealthy for a complex mission-critical product. Entrepreneurship is low, with few to no companies using technologies such as CTOR, CDS, Schnorr, and the marginally higher unconfirmed transaction chain depth. Few engineers bother to contribute based on prior experience with a severe not-invented-here syndrome and the theft of their ideas (examples include DSV/CDS, the BCH specification effort, and now ASERT/Grasberg, and efficient, merkle-path-to-coinbase-only block candidate node to miner communication). I am unaware of a single technology merged into ABC from a non-Bitcoin Core client. Regular merges from the Core project that will never scale has put a de-facto soft limit on BCH scalability since ABC cannot deviate significantly from Core and still merge cleanly.
Our user community is qualitatively smaller, shown by the probable departure of SatoshiDice and others, shown by the lack of meaningful token-based efforts, and little adoption of new technologies such as coin shuffle. Notwithstanding a possible “hot spot” in Australia, BCH acceptance piggy-backs on BTC acceptance, essentially depending on BitPay’s continued support of altcoins. Quantitatively, these problems are reflected in a coin price that is highly correlated with BTC, but has fallen significantly against BTC and is likely still trending down when one accounts for the general “rising tide” of all crypto right now and the higher beta (volatility) of a lower market cap coin.
We are also not protecting the essential qualities that distinguishes BCH in the cryptocurrency ecosystem. We gave away the “onchain scalability” narrative to BSV during the BCH/BSV fork and lost 30-50% of our community (based on 2 independent metrics: what the prices settled at and how BU members split). The IFP proposal and resurrected IFP2 proposal attempt to add a per-block tax that in the IFP a small set of individuals with the right political “pull” would receive. But now, in the IFP2, it is an undisguised looting of BCH as the money goes to a single address. These IFPs introduce all the moral and practical problems that would come with governing the distribution of unearned money. Although this proposal was defeated once, ABC has refused to give it up, which is continuing to erode the community's confidence in BCH’s moral grounding as a fair currency.
Looking at the IFP more abstractly, it becomes clear that it would have introduced a central banking cartel to BCH. Notably, Grasberg introduces the same central banking, but this time less overtly, by adding code whose sole purpose is to adjust the inflation schedule. It is true that prior code has changed the inflation schedule, but the primary purpose of that code (or at least the stated primary purpose) was to solve other problems. This is a key philosophical difference from prior algorithms and ASERT, and it changes BCH’s social contract.
By now, it should be evident to most people that these problems stem from ABC and specifically poor leadership in ABC on all four of these key stewardship responsibilities.
In order to effect change we must be willing to risk a fork, because we cannot control the actions of other parties. So we must be so certain that our path is better that a split will be irrelevant long term. I am certain that the path we have taken in the last few years has been disastrous, and I am certain that we can do a better job because among the bad decisions have been voices arguing against them. Bitcoin Unlimited and I have been a leading voice in the argument against every bad decision and we have paid a political price for this. But our arguments have been well researched and carefully reasoned, and grounded in good business, end-user responsiveness, good engineering, and good science.
There are loosely three fork outcomes that will be evidenced by price and hash power. First, the existing BCH but with ASERT fixing the DAA (let's call it BCHfork) may dominate (1), or both forks may end up more or less the same (say within 50%) (2), or ABCfork (ASERT and IFP2) may dominate (3). These possibilities are comprehensive, any decision to “not fork” by one party implies either 1 or 3.
While one solution would be to simply choose a more qualified individual to lead BCHfork, let me propose a different plan. My plan will minimize surprises and allow those who do not share the plan to exit early. My plan is simply to actually HAVE a plan. We must create a clearly defined vision and execute on it. This should streamline development and minimize politics because if people do not agree with the plan, they should not join the community.
With fork outcome 1 (BCHfork has most of the value), we execute this plan at a fast-but-careful pace, cognizant of the trust given to us as stewards of significant value, but realizing that BCH is leaking value and we need strong moves to reverse the trend. In the case of fork outcome 2 and 3 (even split or ABCfork has the most value) we recognize that success in competition to BCH and BTC (and BSV and ETH) is of paramount importance and deliver features at a rapid pace.
Fundamentally, I am not interested in being a leader in the zombie-coin BCH has become, or in a BCHfork that continues in the non-productive manner of the last few years. I am interested in disrupting the entire world’s financial infrastructure. This vision responds to end user use cases or even a good story (because the only way to prove a use case is to create a competitive crypto). This will require that leaders respond to community/user needs and deliver best-in-class functionality matching or anticipating market trends rather than trailing trends. This requires leaders to say YES (pending a security review) before saying no, and for you the community members to say YES and most importantly *refrain from saying no to ideas that you have little or no involvement in*.
We will require a massive effort to catch up, since the industry and world have moved forward while BCH wasted time with janitorial work. We need to simulate permissionless innovation in an intrinsically permissioned blockchain until the blockchain is itself sophisticated enough to not require such. This will require delegation of tasks, trusting each other’s general competence, and tolerance of imperfect details, rather than having every engineer in this community analyze and become an expert in every proposed technology. This will require that we deliver what we technically see as best now (and iterating as problems become apparent), rather than waiting for an indefinite time for the best solution.
**A BCHfork Vision and Roadmap, Loosely In Order of Importance**
(HF) Groups: Miner enforced, script-aware fungible and nonfungible tokens, with covenants (contracts that are applied by the token originator to any token transaction). A quantity of BCH can also be placed within a group and therefore be controlled by a covenant.
(HF) Smart contract features: OP_PUSH_TX_STATE (transaction introspection), OP_BUFFER (allows large P2SH scripts), OP_PLACE, OP_EXEC (interfaces the covenant with the redeem script), and others as they become apparent. Groups and these smart contract features combine to provide efficient DeFi capabilities, competing with Ethereum and drawing developers to BCHfork.
Groups, covenants and smart contracts together allow any rule expressible in BCH script to apply to an “opt-in” subset of BCH or to a token. These technologies taken together allow any new BCH script expressible consensus rule to be imported into the blockchain. This functionality will massively reduce the pressure to hard fork to add extra features. It is even possible to constrain the use of new opcodes to specific groups, so that only BCH and tokens in such a group can use the new opcode. If groups are used in this fashion, the risk of deploying new opcodes is reduced since only the value within these groups are exposed to the new opcodes.
(no fork) Doublespend notifications and deep DS notifications
(no fork) Deep unconfirmed transaction chains
(HF) Large Integer opcodes. This is fundamental smart contract infrastructure, but specifically allows efficient implementation of contracts and many other signature or decryption algorithms. Going bigger than 256 bits makes our cryptographic primitive faster and more efficient than ETH which must build big nums out of 256 bit numbers.
(no fork) Counterparty and protocol discovery (CAPD). Allows wallets to discover and interact with peers anonymously.
(simple, bump-a-number fork, but a lot of underlying work for some full nodes) Transaction scalability to 512MB blocks per 10 minutes
(HF) Rapid, efficient UTXO access and UTXO commitments (UTREEXO or Peter Rizun proposal). This helps deliver scalability, and UTXO commitments are very useful in an SPV wallet context.
(HF) Block time reliability and unconfirmed transaction reliability through Storm/Bobtail
Once these features are deployed, we will have a scalable, efficient, smart-contract capable, reliable, light-wallet friendly, DeFi capable blockchain. At that point we need to slow the changes dramatically to focus on application level development. But we will be able to still respond to the community because most desirable extensions will be expressible in BCHscript, and enforceable within group constrained BCH or tokens.
We must then focus on building the end-user applications that this infrastructure will enable. I am not worried about a low value coin. All “alt-coins” today are so low value today compared to the potential market as to be essentially equivalent. And any and every cryptocurrency today is equivalently one “killer app” away from domination. I am worried about the lack of technical progress that will block a killer app from ever being created, and a coin’s value trend showing falling interest by the people who will build those apps. We need to deploy the infrastructure needed for diverse applications and then grow and deliver an ecosystem and community that finds that killer app.
@AndrewStone
