I am sure I sound like a broken record to many when I repeatedly suggest I think developing the code so eCash (and BCH) can handle massive and viral adoption growth should be a top priority. This article is about eCash and I do not think it should be XEC's only top priority. I do think eCash needs to keep doing the structural changes like Avalanche code implementations and some important application development before eCash would be ready to ask the world to bring on the viral growth.

I don't believe we need the technical solution in the code yet. We also do not need to explain the technical solution to me or the competition in advance. So, I am not asking how it will be done. I am asking if the developers have really figured it out in detail. My goal here is to be able to truthfully tell the public eCash is fully ready to scale and there would be no limits on viral adoption growth if it began to happen. Because viral growth could be unexpectedly rapid, the oft-repeated "wisdom" on social media that we can figure it out before it is needed would not satisfy this goal.

In a recent AMA on Telegram Amaury was asked: “What is your best estimate as to when eCash will be able to reach its goal of 5M txs/sec?”. And, he replied: “It depends on the market more than the tech. When usage grows, resources grow too, and we have a solid plan to make it work”.

My Question was: Does that “solid plan” include a technical solution you are sure works at that scale or are you planning to develop and test that solution later when the need gets closer?

Amaury Séchet answered:

"Yes. I used to work at Facebook, so I have a good sense of what tech is needed. Putting them in place requires work, but we’ll also have more resources to get that work done as we grow, so all in all, I don’t think this will be a major problem.

All scaling problems on bitcoin-like systems have social causes rather than technical causes. This is the case for BTC (no hard fork) and the case for BCH (no avalanche).

The tech is known, whether people are willing to implement them or not is another thing, but we are willing to, and for as long as the community is willing to, we will scale."

The off-the-cuff live AMA did not give Amaury much time to compose his responses. I am not sure he answered clearly whether he does have the technical solution I am asking about figured out. I am happy he has "a good sense of what tech is needed". That said, I want to know if they have the actual solution figured out. I feel like much of what he was saying may have been about when massive levels of adoption will happen. What I am trying to ask, however, is whether we have the code ready to handle that level of transactions (not when will we achieve that level of actual adoption growth).

I want to be clear that I am not asking him to let me or the public know the details of the technical solution(s). I would like it to be peer-reviewed, if possible, but I could not help with that. Keeping the solution(s) private until it is almost needed is probably smart even though some advance disclosure could help with testing for bugs or whatever.

He mentioned social limitations and I bet there are potential "social causes" limiting both usage levels (actual adoption growth) and acceptable technical scaling-solutions. I will discuss my ideas about achieving adoption growth below. As for social limitations on the technical solution(s) to scaling:

I know I do not want eCash to use the Amazon Cloud or some other centralized scaling solution like Facebook might use. I believe Amaury is committed to the suficiently-decentralized-money goal for eCash, so I would not expect such short-cuts as his scaling plan. Maybe he thinks we would need to do something radical like get rid of proof-of-work entirely to make scaling work? I hope not, I could see social resistance on that path.

So, I am not sure what social limits on technical solutions he is concerned about, if any. As I said, I do not feel the developers need to tell me or the world what their plan is or what "social causes" concern them. I do hope they do not have significant social barriers to an intended technical solution.

I assume massive work would need to be done on hardware and user-application-installations worldwide but I am assuming that would be done by the merchants and other users organically growing the ecosystem. I believe the important application work being done now is to provide them the tools they would need. I am not worried about there being enough mining effort as growth would increase value and that would increase mining efforts.

Viral growth would not be as easy as most would assume and I am pretty sure many issues would arise along the way. I assume the eCash team would be supporting all those new users as best they can to keep their eCash user-experience as happy as possible under the rapid growth conditions. I am not asking about any of that.

I am just asking about whether the eCash code will be able to handle viral transaction growth.

As for adoption, Why develop the code BEFORE we encourage viral growth to happen?

I used to think and many still do think we do not need to prepare for viral growth until after we grow much more adoption. It would be a lot easier to wait until developers are better funded (which would follow significant adoption growth). I know it seems like we do not need to worry about it yet. So why am I pushing so soon?:

A) Because viral growth can not happen before we can handle it. It could start to happen like it did for BTC in 2017. If we claimed we could scale and we then crash into a ceiling, we lose credibility and momentum and the viral growth dies. I do not think we would need to worry about that scenario because:

B) I believe viral growth will not happen until we convince "The People" and the big players in global adoption that we can handle the load. Some tried to believe in BTC's claims it could scale and got "burnt". Those IT people at Microsoft/Dell/... (that sold their companies on the dream) looked foolish in front of their bosses/shareholders when they fell for the BTC scam. Their peers saw what happened and also learned not to trust crypto's promises. Crypto Kitties on ETH also showed crypto was not mature yet. They will not be so easily fooled this time. I believe we will need a real solution everyone can believe in before viral adoption growth of e-money will begin again.

C) If it can go viral it is much more likely that it will go viral. I believe the ability to go viral will make eCash a target for speculators that see eCash has no top limit on growth. It is not great, but speculative pumping is mostly how coins grow quickly in value. Adoption follows the price growth and together they build off of one another.

D) If eCash could and did go viral it would upset the BTC apple-cart because BTC is held up by lies and price manipulation (it has little real utility for the people of the world). BTC seems too big to fail, but I believe a BCH fork going viral would grow 10 to 100 times larger and more valuable. BTC would just not be able to grow like that.

Powerful speculators that are greed-based would see the writing on the wall and know where the biggest profits were going to be and sell BTC to ride the massive eCash wave. The anti-Bitcoin-dream money behind the takeover and propping up of BTC would try to keep BTC up with massive Tether-style printing, but BTC can not scale. The growth of a real Bitcoin fork would eventually make BTC look tiny and cheap. Mining hash will finally move to the better money and the BTC house of cards will crumble (but never totally collapse).

E) Although it would be preferable in many ways, slower organic growth will not be good enough. IMO, If we do not begin viral organic growth soon we will not become the world's primary e-money worth $1 to $100 USD each. We can always fight for some market-share and be happy enough with XEC at something like $0.01 USD. Scaling would be much easier by then since we would have so few users compared to the original dream.

Conclusion

The idea is out and I believe the people will have e-money not controlled by any government soon. Will we be able to deliver a working product before the people of the world get entrenched in something less perfect but more user-friendly because they can actually use it? The Amazon-cloud (centralized) types of e-money are already out there. People are starting to get used to them.

My most recent concern to world domination by eCash is the idea Visa and WeChat and GooglePay and ApplePay may let people link their crypto wallets to those other payment solutions. Letting us hold any crypto we prefer and letting the 3rd parties do the scaling and merchant-adoption for us would negate the advantages of a scaling solution and make even broken coins like BTC functional competitors. I do not know if we have much time left to become "the one".