Bitcoin Cash Weekly News Special BLISS Conference Edition. May 15 2024 DAY 2

Day 2 started with a special gift for each attendee. Upon entering the conference you were again asked which NFT you bought and all attendees were given a print of their NFT as a keepsake. Some people even went around and got the other attendees to sign their NFT prints. Once everyone was in side the opening by Jeremy once again thanked the sponsors of the event:

General Protocols creators of BCHBULL

Ryan Giffin — Ravish Off Ocean

BCH Podcast

Mike Komaransky

Molecular

Toorik

Mini-Satoshi

As well as thanking some of the infrastructure providers:

Cashonize

Zapit

Paytaca

Electron Cash

Tapswap

Jeremy also briefly talked about some statistics of the attendees:

45 attendees came from 22 countries and 5 continents which is pretty decentralized.

The first presentation of day 2 was by Rosco Kalis on the improvements in CashScript:

“What’s New In CashScript”

Rosco went over his history a bit including the creation of CashScript in 2019, his work at Bitcoin.com, General Protocols as well as his main focus, the ETH based security application Revoke.cash.

Bitcoin Script is difficult to write in as it is more like an assembly language.

CashScript allows for fewer errors, faster development, easier integration.

Rosco said that actually developing a project using CashScript at GP showed where improvements were needed. His presentation went over all the major changes since 2021.

In 2022 BCH upgraded and got “Native Introspection” which allowed CashScript to do things much more simply by no longer needing hacky workarounds.

Last year, in 2023 BCH upgraded again, with CashTokens: Native Fungible tokens, Native NFTs, Local State and contract messaging allowing a lot of new functionality for smart contracting.

NFTs or tokens that represent data that can interact between contracts. It is now possible to have complex systems of smart contracts and to combine multiple contracts in one tx.

Some smaller editions were the ability to do multiplication thanks to native introspection as well as a new address type P2SH32.

Rosco then gave us some hints as to what we can expect for 2024 upgrades.

Better debugging tools with custom error messages and console logging. Fans of Jason Dreyzehner’s Bitauth will be happy to hear that the Bitauth IDE will be integrated into CashScript as well.

Soon better testing will be possible with Local Evaluation (a local testing environment on your local network) to make sure your smart contracts behave as you expect.

Finally CashScript will be adding Libraries. Many smart contracts share a lot of the same code that do the same thing. The addition of libraries will allow you to share code via libraries that can be imported as well as shared. This should speed up development in the BCH space as you will not have to reinvent the wheel every time and there will be fewer errors due to less human error (copy pasting, forgetting to update variables etc.)

Rosco invites everyone to get started with CashScript, there is an online editor called CashScript Playground which lets allows you to test out your code online. There are getting started guides there as well.

The next guest, Jack said:

“General Protocols kidnapped me as slave labor and trapped me in a dungeon to write algorithms for them, so this is my 1 time appearance”.

The topic of his presentation was:

“Chain Reaction: making Local Interactions Global on BCH”.

Jack begins his talk by wondering out loud about the future of BCH. His presentation would go on to be built with many thought provoking questions about possible paths forward.

BCH is no longer just a larger block clone of BTC. It can do MORE complex things and SMARTER things.

So what is next?

Do we try to duplicate ETH and copy what they have?

Do we revive transactional ideas that were proposed on BitcoinTalk years ago?

These are all worthy goals but do we know what were truly capable of?

Do we have something novel?

He went on to compare and contrast EVM contracts to BCH contracts.

One advantage of EVM like systems is that they have shared state and liquidity.

The traditional Bitcoin model, on the other hand, have these completely separated from interaction to interaction.
 
 Are these the only ways to program your money?
 
 What about something more fuzzy and in between? What about something that shares subjectively?

Jack went on to talk about a new kind of topology of a smaller local trust network. 
 This could help with “on ramping” to BCH through a smaller set of known and trusted people.
 It could be automated through UTXOS. The local state would be known through the UTXO set which would avoid the pitfalls of both ETH and LN.

There are several different ways to balance “backing” and “trust” that each have their own trade-offs.

• Fully/overcollateralized: no room for shenanigans but expensive and always works.

• Undercollateralized: room for shenanigans but cheap and can be overwhelmed by usage.

• Localized trust limited interactions local trust and risk trust through repeated interaction like human relationships.

The presentation was quite conceptual but I think it was safe to say everyone that listened felt it was very thought provoking.

Jack ended the presentation by saying he believes we are in a new era in BCH and we can do weird things, blaze new paths. We don’t have to choose between suffocation or poverty, we can choose freedom AND power.

Next up was EmergentReasons aka John Nieri, President of General Protocols.

The topic of his presentation was:

“Protect Ya Stack”

John starts out by “giving advice you didn’t ask for”. In recent years the mantra “move fast and break things” has become very popular. John believes that people that are making apps or smart contracts need to prioritize safety when dealing with other peoples money.

John makes a compelling argument as to why anyone would listen to him:

AnyHedge has handled almost 400,000 BCH $100m+ without fail.

John also wanted to make clear that he is not telling us the RIGHT way to do things. Just a good way to do things. He hopes we can do better.

Some things to keep in mind:

• Your contracts will handle the money of 8 billion people.

• You must engage with the endless issues of security, safety and robustness.

• You are not alone. Join the conversation at BitcoinCashResearch.org.

“Move Fast and Break Things” works well with custodial systems because errors can be erased or undone. Bitcoin however is immutable you can not unlock peoples funds if you make a mistake. It very hard to build trust and is exponentially easier to lose trust.

The GOAL is contracts CAN’T fail. John says this can be accomplished with 3 steps.

1. Describe:

• Contract execution (describe what your contract does in a formal way)

• Safety (walk through EVERY STEP of the contract and describe safe boundaries)

• Input Guarantees (look at every input and describe what guarantees you will ake)

2. Confirm that your guarantees ensure safety.

3. Put the results into a specification (You must make it as easy as possible for builders. The easiest way is to create a library).

In closing he advises us to: be ambitious, be humble, assume you are going to be successful and that 8 billion users are depending on you.

The next presentation was by BCH developer Dagur of Cauldron whose presentation was:

“Casting spells: Bringing DEFI to Bitcoin Cash”

Dagur has a long history in Bitcoin including working on BCHN, Flipstarter, BU and going all the way back to OG big block node BitcoinXT.

Now his focus is on enchanting CashTokens in the Cauldron DEX.

The original magic for dexes was created for Ethereum. It doesn’t easily transmute to BCH but boiling it down to it’s core, uniswap ends up as “K=X*Y”.

Dagur found that the secret formula for BCH is a single UTXO can hold both a BCH and a CashToken so its so simple to add many contracts into one TX.

You dont have to pool all the user funds together like on ETH. You can trade with hundreds of contracts at the same time.

This also means that since your funds are not mixed you don’t need a LP token as a receipt for your share of the pool.

Dagur then took us on a journey through the tale of how Cauldron came to be.

1 year ago he added CashToken support to BU and then asked his friend Halvor to help him make the DEX…. In 1 weekend.

Dagur then asked “But Why make a DEX?” 
 Bitcoin Cash is fast. It scales well and it provides a better user experience.

BCH has a different architecture than ETH. In BCH the order of the TXs does not matter. There is no “miner extracted value” like on ETH. We know the exact price in advance, there is no massive slippage. We know if the TX will succeed or not saving fees. No waiting for confirmations.

Dagur went on to talk about about architecture for defi contracts and quoted the Unix Philosophy originally penned by Ken Tompson and summarized by Peter H. Salus:

• Write programs that do one thing and do it well.

• Write programs to work together.

• Write programs to handle text streams, because that is a universal interface.

Also Dagur shared with us some statistics about what Cauldron has done so far:

• 2,043 Liquidity Pools

• 321,883 Contract Interactions

• 109,922 Transactions

• 157.6 BCH TVL

• 2,659 BCH Vol

• 252 LP providers

What about this year? What does Dagur hope to cook up in Cauldron?

• 0% interest rate loans

• Issue a stable coin

• Open Source

Dagur also shared some final wisdom with the community, he said “Do things fast and break stuff try to do fun stuff because people will follow you.”

We had a 90 minute buffet lunch break. The food served at the conference by the hotel was excellent and there was a great variety every meal.

After the Lunch Break was Calin Culianu a prolific dev and maintainer of the many things such as BCHN, Fulcrum Server, and Electron Cash wallet.

Calin’s presentation was very technical but also meme filled so this reporter was quite happy to try to follow along. Calin’s chosen topic was:

“Committing to UTXOs”

In the future, as BCH gains popularity and adoption, UTXO commitments may be needed especially if blocks get very large.

Calin started off by giving a special thanks to Josh Green and Andrew Groot of Bitcoin Verde who did a lot of the research on this topic.

What is a UTXO? It is an “unspent transaction output” meaning sort of simply addresses where coins are sitting now, the current state of the “ledger”.

Calin went on to talk about the UTXO lifecycle and state as well as the basic data fields every UTXO contains. UTXOs get created and destroyed when new transactions appear, using consensus rules. The UTXO set is the current set of addresses that have balances and if you have the UTXO set you know the present state of the chain.

Calin then asks: “if you have the current UTXO set, why do you need blocks?” Why would someone download all the blocks from genesis until today? The IBD (initial block download) takes a long time.

There is no trustless way to get the UTXO set without starting at 0.

With UTXO Commitments in place it would allow people to start, decentralized without trust with the current state of the chain. Allowing users/programs to start working very quickly with BCH with only minimal downloads vs the entire chain history.

There are of course trade offs if you are skipping evaluation of old transactions and blocks.

Calin then discussed some of the possible ways to deal with this problem. 
 “UTREEXO” as well as “FLAT UTXO TABLE” and “Bucketing” which is a Bitcoin Verde proposal .

No matter the path forward UTXO commitments would require new consensus rules.

Most likely it would require P2P protocol changes to get the commitments from your peers as well.

Calin then discussed the advantages and risks involved in going forward with UTXO commitments. 
 
 Advantages include:

• Spinning up pruned nodes quickly.

• Practical solution for fully validating nodes wishing to run on modest hardware.

• UTXO combined with better SPV wallet compatible pruning would help decentralization even with massive blocks.

Risks include:

• May incentivize fewer full historical nodes.

• May normalize unexpected or different patterns of behavior.

• Unknown unknowns (bugs/exploits).

The final speaker was Elliot Price aka “Fiendish Crypto” with his talk:

“Making The Impossible A Reality”

Fiendish started by once again acknowledging Jonathan Silverblood for organizing the conference to much applause. He went on to share his “Fiendish Dream”:

• A world where all beings can trade freely with each other.

• No middle men no restrictions.

• Money can be instantly sent to anyone on the planet in exchange for goods & services.

• Essentially Free.

• With money that is rare, precious, and hold it’s value.

BCH makes all of that possible. Fiendish went on to talk about all the reasons why we love BCH, it is:

• Permissionless.

• Decentralised.

• Trustless.

• Seperates money from the state.

• Low free and low friction.

• BCH offers privacy.

• Fixed supply.

BCH works for everyone.

Fiendish gave a bit of a history lesson while talking about how decentralization of society leads to wealth also decentralizing. Looking at inventions like the printing press as an example of how the decentralization of information led to the renaissance. Anything that impedes the flow of information hinders the growth and health of a society — offering CBDCs as an example of this.

Fiendish asked us how we get to this amazing future with BCH?

What are the steps required in making this future a reality?

• The power and utility of money is exponentially linked to the size of the network.

• Need to expand the network or promote activities that assist that expansion.

• We need people that accept BCH.

• We need people that use BCH.

• We need to invite more people to grow the community through awareness.

“/SOMEONE”

The world needs someone.

That someone is you.

Everyone can do 1% more. Onboard a merchant or a service and use the places that accept BCH.

Fiendish implores us to think globally, act locally. Co-ordinate and network with other people in the community to share tips on onboarding. The 1% more can be as simple as interacting online. Twitter, Telegram, reddit. Like, share, subscribe and comment on BCH content. Go to Meetups and conferences. BCH has a lot of great products but we need MORE. Build products that serve a need.

Create your market with your product. Build business and models around your products that generate revenue.

Fiendish dove into the topic of marketing, something that BCH certainly is lagging in. He talked about how when you onboard a merchant you should ask if you can put a BCH sticker on their door or register (which you can get for free at https://bitcoincashfoundation.org/store/)

At this point the host Jeremy interrupted Fiendish to let us all know that the BCH upgrade had completed and that the ABLA upgrade was now live. The audience erupted into cheers of joy knowing that the blocksize debate was now essentially dead on BCH.

Back to the presentation Fiendish suggests that everyone get on social media and start posting about BCH. Make a new account if need be. With ai tools that are now available it never been easier to make content. If you still think creating is too difficult, by all means like, share, subscribe and support the people who are making content. Join us in the MEME wars! In the last few years BCH culture has become overwhelmingly positive and constructive.

Finally Fiendish asked that if you only take one thing away from his presentation take this:

“Be Awesome!”

There was once again a short break and then a panel discussion between Jeremy, Mathieu, John and Elliot.

The panel covered a wide range of topics both inside and outside the BCH ecosystem to the wider crypto world. It is an interesting discussion that you should really take the time to listen to and can be seen here.

Jeremy closed out the event with thanks all around.

After there was dinner and then finally a special gaming event for builders only which included a Street Fighter II tournament (which organizer Jonathan Silverblood won which was devastating) as well as a BCH trivia contest and a chance to play the table top game Jonathan created himself.

With the conference over many gathered at the hotel bar until the wee hours of the morning paying for their drinks with BCH. Many people decided to stay a bit longer and see the sites of Ljubljana including the shopping and the castles and the other historic sites around the beautiful city.

All in all the conference was a great success that no doubt inspired man people to build and create and promote new money for the world. BCH — Money For Everyone.

If you want to learn more about BCH and what we have been up to check out discover.cash.

You can watch the whole day 2 of the conference yourself here.