A New Hope

Friday, November 13th, 2020, 2 days before the fork

One of the many beautiful things about Bitcoin is its resiliency. How all it takes is a handful of people (maybe even one single person) to keep a chain alive.

In my last post I wrote how disappointed I was by the recent direction of BCH, but I'm happy to report I don't feel that way anymore. What I see now is the potential for a huge opportunity and a chance for a fresh start.

To me the bottom line is the mission hasn't changed. The mission is still to create a global digital cash system that can be used to facilitate peer to peer transactions without the need for a third party. And despite most people having no idea what a potentially civilization changing technology this can be, I want to echo what Bitcoin ABC's lead developer Amaury Sechet said in a recent interview:

"There are new economic times that are coming, and people need to be paying attention to that because the people paying attention to that are going to be far ahead of the pack effectively. Many people are just not looking at it, and they are going to find themselves in a dire position. And this is true even in crypto. Because if I look at Bitcoin or Ethereum, they are always running at capacity now, which means if you want to use Bitcoin at a larger scale it's going to be through custodial services. But if there's a huge economic crisis those services can run out of liquidity and not be able to transfer money anymore. So you may have Bitcoin and not be able to transact with it. Ethereum is not in as dire a position but it's still running at capacity. And all of that is more about people than technology, I'd say, and the people in the Ethereum community are focused on defi and this kind of stuff, which is interesting, but it's not solving the economic problem that it's profiling. And then I'm looking at BCH and I see people that are having effectively philosophical arguments about what is the essence of Bitcoin and disagreeing with that and forking to oblivion because of it, which is also not solving that. So what I want to do right now is get rid of that baggage and focus on solving that problem, because I think this is the most important problem you can be working on right now." - Amaury Sechet, Lead Developer of Bitcoin ABC

When I discovered Bitcoin Cash and made my first transaction, I was truly amazed by this technology. Without fully understanding how it worked, I thought it had the potential to be a real game changer. Only when I took a deeper look did I realize how much was still needed to be done, and how few resources were available to get us to the finish line.

For the past couple of years those of us in BCH have been arguing over how to deal with the funding problem. It's what ultimately led to the current situation. While I admit that it appears that the ABC chain will have much less support in terms of price and hash, I remain hopeful that the new coinbase rule will usher in a new era for Bitcoin because this funding mechanism is something that has never been tried before, at least not on a branch of Bitcoin that stems from the original genesis block.

People are familiar with the old joke that socialism hasn't worked because it has yet to be done correctly (aka that wasn't real socialism), but what we have here is the complete opposite situation. Through Satoshi Nakamoto's creation, we are getting the opportunity to try something truly novel, to truly test the resiliency of the system he created.

I have nothing against those who want to run their experiment however they want, but I for one am looking forward to seeing how the new coinbase rule will be enforced by Nakamoto consensus.

I'm not saying this is going to be an easy road, or promising this road will lead us to the promised land, but I feel that for the first time in a long time, I can be optimistic about the future of peer to peer digital cash. One where there's less debating and more building.

I'm also excited to see how the Global Network Council evolves. I look forward to participating in this new community by having skin in the game and associating with like-minded people to make our voices heard.

Nobody knows the future, but neither did anyone who was buying up BTC for $15 a coin back in 2012. Who knows, maybe one day we'll look back and see this was a rare opportunity at a second chance for those of us who discovered Bitcoin late.

With that said, please don't take any of this as financial advice. There are way too many unknowns to accurately predict how this will play out. The only thing I do know is that I can finally see a version of the future I want, and I look forward to watching it all unfold beginning on November 15th.