Bitcoin Cash as a Protest Movement

What follows is a transcription of part 3 of the Coinspice interview of Amaury Sechet, lead developer of Bitcoin ABC, by C. Edward Kelso that can be heard here. A big thank you to @ElGrido on twitter for stepping up and doing a great job on the transcription and accepting BCH as payment.

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Kelso: Well alright we are back with another episode of the CoinSpice Podcast. This is your host C. Edward Kelso, editor in chief of coinspice.io, and we are finishing our three parter here with with Amaury Séchet, the lead developer on Bitcoin ABC, main implementation for Bitcoin Cash, ahead of the May 15th 2020 scheduled network upgrade and the first two episodes found us kinda delving in to the core parts of that May 15th 2020 upgrade, and with the last one ending on the infrastructure funding plan for Bitcoin Cash, the infamous IFP which has become quite the subject of debate. And in the final part here, Amaury just continues riffing on related subjects, the division in the community, the protocol funding, calls out a few members, and I tried to get him– lure him into deeper waters in regard to what the implications are of all the various responses to the IFP but, in essence, we have Amaury on not to highlight him or to down him or play point-counterpoint, but just because he’s such an influential figure within the Bitcoin Cash community, and he is someone you have to grapple with. So, this does get spicy, and I know you heard me say that over the last two episodes, but this one, I’m serious. Stop right now, after I’m done explaining of course, pause it, go to your fridge, get out your almond milk if you’re vegan if you need that. Sprinkle a little cinnamon to help it go down a little bit or a glass of non-pausterized freedom cow’s milk, whatever you’re into, cause this is gonna get SPICY. Again this is the 3rd part in a 3 part series with Amaury Séchet, do yourself a favor and go back and listen to those first two so you can put it into context. Here he is, Amaury Séchet.

Kelso: Just to restate it, not that you need to, but Tyler Smith moved on to AVA and Emin Gün Sirer’s project at AVA labs, and we actually interviewed him as he bounced over there from Bitcoin Cash. And you’re saying flatly that at least part of his decision, a great part of it, was monetary and that you personally went out to try to find funding to keep him on because he is such a valuable member of the team. That couldn’t be secured for whatever reason. I’m not sure you’re saying it’s the exact same people, but all of a sudden the community is finding funds for these other projects, and that your contention seems to be- I’ll just say it for you- it seems to be: people are more interested in knocking down or contravening ABC than they are in building up Bitcoin Cash, is that right?

Amaury: Yes and no. I think this is a restrictive way to state it. There is an element of that, but this is a very restrictive way to state it. Because I think who stated it the best is Justin Bons, who said that BCH is a protest movement. But, where he is completely wrong is that he seems to think that it’s a good think, but it’s actually a pretty bad thing, because protest movements are not for anything, they are against everything, and as a result they never get to build anything. I remember a few months ago we did a podcast and there was the yellow vest stuff in France going on and talked about that. Where’s the yellow vest now? They’ve achieved exactly jack shit. Why? Because they are against stuff, and Occupy Wallstreet is the same, and you know like almost all the communist revolutions also are based around the same kind of social dynamic that goes on between people and, this stuff never goes anywhere, but it’s tempting, there is always new stuff happening, you get to feel like you are the revolutionary hero that is freeing the people, so it’s very psychologically enticing for people. You and I included, nobody is immune to that, it’s just something that appeals to the human psyche, but it’s not how you get shit done. Not at all. And I can take many other examples, let’s say you are the dude- that dude is not a developer but he worked for a big software company that produces a programming language that is used all over the world by millions of developers, it’s a huge success, you probably use it every day in some way or another, and he helped that effort as a business development kinda guy, you would keep that guy on board right? I mean if the goal is to develop a software to something that is world scale, it’s not just software, it’s a task that includes software but that goes beyond software. You need people to do business development for instance, to extend the use of the software to a world scale, and there are not that many people with experience with that. So if you had someone that has experience with that, you would keep that person on board right? And you know we used to have one person that has this profile and, same thing, that person left recently, that person is Stephan Rust, who worked for Oracle and worked notably in producing the Java programming language. And if people are not familiar, most of Android, for instance, is based on Java, many server applications are based on Java. You use Java in one form or another every day. Yeah, you use software that use Java or collect to servers who use Java probably every day. And so, you see that there are the stated values, and these stated values are build digital cash and have cheap, and reliable transactions right? And cale worldwide and have hard money. This is the stated value. But the onboarded value is we are a protest movement. And this is very important to know that because now if your onboarded value is we are a protest movement, then – and if this is not what we wanna be and we wanna be digital cash, we need to rethink where we spend our time and energy and attention. Because if we spend our time and energy and attention on a protest movement when you want to be p2p digital cash then you are not going to achieve your goal. Or maybe we delude ourselves and those are actually our goal, to be a protest movement. Like people just have this social club, they are pissed off at banks and they want to protest that bank and be Occupy Wallstreet 2.0 and maybe this is what people want to do but then, we need to be honest with ourselves and be like ok, BCH is like a protest movement against banks and whatnot, and BTC and ABC and everybody. Uhm… because if we don’t we are gonna waste a bunch of people’s time, because there are people that are actually for digital cash in the space, that are building on BCH to be that, and those people are the actual victims in that whole process. Not me, not ABC… those are the people who are the victims there, because we as a community are telling them “we are building digital cash, join us” but actually we’re not doing that.

Kelso: We’re fracturing, and there’s constant debate about debate and debate… My only push back in that scenario, and I think there is a lot of wisdom there, as you’ve outlined, is that maybe the way they’re thinking, like you say, they could not be honest with themselves, but I’m gonna assume they are. Maybe their thing is they need to rout around the Bitcoin ABC version of the vision of digital cash and that that’s the way to get there, and I’m wondering if maybe you have some sympathy for that, because of the origins of kinda where you’ve come out of, which was for sure a protest movement but also something positive and building on it. If you have some sympathy for that but are also kinda- another sense I get from you is that, I think once the revolutionary glare wears off, and the being out in the street with your yellow vest and running around and getting pictures of yourself on the Champs Elysées by the associated press or the AFP, once that wears off and you gotta get back and do the hard work that no one sees: backporting code and tech debt, and dealing with people’s complaints and three in the morning phone calls like ‘hey, this is taking too long’. Is that part of your worry that maybe this protest aspect of BCH is taking on something that they just don’t understand the full implications of, what they are getting themselves into?

Amaury: Well no. Yes and no. Those stuff are only important if you want to build digital cash for the world right? Because then you need to have a stable infrastructure on which this digital cash can be developed, but if what you want is a protest movement that is not very important. So they probably won’t do it.

Kelso: Okay yeah, my comeback there, was to say they are building it, you know what I mean? But then you are saying it doesn’t match with their rhetoric and their actual vision.

Amaury: Yeah and people are gonna say I want to decide where people put their money or what to do but no, I’m just pointing out like people are completely free to do that. I wanna make that very clear, people are completely free to spend their money on whatever they want, and people are completely free to spend their time and energy developing whatever they want. But we need to be honest about what it is actually, and I think we are not.

Kelso: So my contention would be, or push-back, or however you wanna phrase it, and this is not a show to do point- counterpoint as I explained to you when I lured you on here like a helpless babe that we are here to provide the guest a platform, but this is such a community centric discussion I figured it’s important to at least mildly represent the other side. The community is this amorphous blob, and it seems that a number of those in the west have gone on, or trying to not just protest, which they did, but actively build a parallel universe without the IFP. And any sort of semblance of that. Is there a way to reconcile these things going forward, where we have- I’ve heard it said before- that we want multiple implementations, that’s a good thing. I’m agnostic on that, I tend to favor it because if you say words to me like decentralization and so on, that’s crack cocaine for me, I love that stuff right? Centralization bad, decentralization good. So, in a very rudimentary kind of, very basic sense. But they say they want more implementations. So is there a world by which we maintain or- this is what I kinda see actually. Bitcoin ABC dominance at least in the short term as a reference implementation, but we have I guess now 4 other -at least 4 other, maybe 5- viable, minable alternatives where there’s some sort of, the rhetorid dies down, people kinda see the work that maybe they didn't know existed before. They have some sympathy with your two-year plus struggle to get funding and to get attention and to see this thing get the love it deserves, and also you- kinda harkening back to the podcast I had with Vin, where he obviously, like me as an admirer of yours, he also sort of blamed you- put some of the blame anyway- on how you handled the sort of outward projection of ABC and then the IFP and all this other stuff. So do you see a way by which they can reach across to ABC and ABC can reach across to them, and in this mess of a protest movement and, from their side, this dictatorial centralization. That in the mess of all that, we get a better stronger Bitcoin Cash? Is that possible, or is this my Disneyland America thing coming through?

Amaury: No, well… So, yes, but… (both laugh). I’d say yes, and in fact it’s been happening partially already, right? Because the BCHD fork for instance, have been cooperating with the ABC fork like since the beginning, it’s worked very well, and this is also why they’ve been defunded recently. There is a huge pledge that has been removed from BCHD because they were in agreement with some of the stuff that ABC says or does so, this is not kosher right? So you gotta get rid of that. Maybe this is another example of what I was stating. Imagine you have a dude, that has written 80 to 90% of an alternative implementation, and in addition he pushed this technology called neutrino, that allows SPV wallets to work much better than the bloom filter tech that we use right now. And this is specially important if we want to have very large blocks. We expect everybody to use SPV and not run their full node on their Raspberry Pi, so someone that does that would have produced tremendous value toward realizing the roadmap, and yet because that person was accused of wrong things, that person needs to be defunded- I’m obviously talking about Chris right? And Chris wrote most of BCHD.

Kelso: Chris Pacia of BCHD, OpenBazaar.

Amaury: Yeah so, he built a good chunk of OpenBazaar as well, which is obviously a huge declaration of alignment with the stated value right? OpenBazaar goes hand in hand with something like BCH. At least with the stated value of BCH. This is a marketplace to use BCH as digital cash. And so, this is one of our examples where the stated value and where the resources are going really don’t match. But back to the point of multiple implementations, we have been working with BCHD, actually many points which exist on the roadmap come from the BCHD guys but, there are two kinds of decentralization. You have several groups of people and there is no objective boss between them, but they cooperate towards the common goal. But there is also like everything is atomized to pieces and pulverized everywhere, and this is like the ultimate decentralization right? Every atom is anywhere, but this second form of decentralization provides zero value whatsoever. So if you want to have some kind of decentralization that makes any sense, you need to get along with the plan. Like you need to want to go to- actually if we go back to the Bible story with Moses, they have effectively decentralization there because there are 12 tribes of Jews that are going there right? It’s not like one unified blob, it’s like those 12 tribes, that kind of have the same common goal, but effectively not. And because they don’t, they are spending all this time wandering in the desert. So this is the decentralization that don’t work. For that to work you need a shared goal because, what’s happening right now is that you have some people that have the shared goal, and it works very well to work with them. But you have those people that never really shared any of the goals, but that got along with the plan because they have no alternative, they kinda fucked up their alternatives, and so they went there. It was not their choice, and now they’re there and they wanna change the plan, but really this is a huge negative for BCH. Because the only thing that it does is add uncertainty because now nobody knows what the plan is, because even if there is a stated plan then those people have influence, so maybe they’re going to change the plan at any time. So you don’t know anymore where this project is going, which is bad for everybody that wants to get into it, because they effectively don’t know what they are getting into. Plus it prevents everybody from executing the plan, so that’s the wandering in the desert element of it, right? There is just, like, if you were a bystander, and you have those 12 tribes, and they’re like ‘ok we’re going together’ and one of the guys say ‘ok we’re going to the promise land’ and the other one is like ‘oh no, we’re going to the Mount Sinai’ and the third one is like ‘we’re going somewhere else’. Then I’m not sure I wanna go to the desert with you guys. It would make zero sense for me to do that, I don’t even know where I’m going, and this is the freaking desert, there is no water, no food, this is bad. I don’t wanna go there with you when you don’t have your shit together. And so this is what is happening, and if we are honest with ourselves- there is this seen and unseen idea in economics, but this is happening right now right? A lot of people see that, and we’re selecting in the community for the people that don’t see that. Because the people that see that they just don’t join. And now if we’re honest with ourselves, there were many people involved in BCH early on, that are valuable people in crypto, that are not anymore. And those are the people that see that, but they didn’t leave making a huge noise or whatever, they just contributed less, and then disappeared, and we don’t think about them anymore. I don’t know if you were there like three years ago or two years ago when things were just starting, but we had Vitalik that was hugely supportive of BCH. Now he’s hardly talking about it anymore, and actually I had a few discussions with Vitalik even recently. He pointed to me this whole protest movement thing, as the main reason- I don’t wanna put words in his mouth, because I don’t remember the exact statement he used but basically it was like “BCH is not going anywhere because of that, so I’m not very interested anymore”. You had people like Emin Gün Sirer was very involved in BCH, is not anymore. It’s not just technical people, you had people like Vinnie Lingham for instance, that was very supportive of BCH, he’s not talking about it anymore. All those people, they have no interest in picking a fight, those are people who have interest in building, right? And honestly, your reverse the role- I kind of feel like I’m one of the initiators of this, so I have a sort of duty to the people that went along with what I was proposing to bring them there right? But those people, they did not, so they just left. And if I was in in their shoes, I would've probably done the same, because of this whole protest movement thing. And one way or another we’re gonna realize it, and there are two ways, either we realize it, or we suffer so much that we have no other choice than to realize it. Those are the two options that the community has at its disposal right now. BSV was one example of that, everybody suffered, and we’re gonna have more of that going forward up to the point where people realize what dynamic is taking place that leads to this kind of events. Right now I don’t see that happening very much, if you go on r/btc for instance, half of the posts in there are about how bad the Bitcoin people are. Like imagine the level of crazy ex-girlfriend this is reaching? It’s almost 3 years later now, yeah? It’s like two and a half years later, and people are like, everyday, half of the things they talk about is how bad their ex was. It’s psycho you know, it’s not healthy, it’s reaching almost pathological levels at this point.

Kelso: Yeah I think that’s fair, and I think CoinSpice is slightly guilty of that on my end as well. I hear about it from time to time…

Amaury: I mean there is no problem mentioning it from time to time right? This is not- the problem is when half of what you discuss is your ex, three years later, you’re a psycho ex-girlfriend, or boyfriend, you know?

Kelso: We just can’t get over it, and I think your point is that, if you look at the battle, our ex-girlfriend did a whole bunch of squats and she’s dieted down, and she’s muscular, and she started-

Amaury: Our ex-girlfriend doesn’t give a shit about us, she kinda dumped on us at the beginning you know, like when there is a breakup happens sometimes, but she moved on like two years ago.

Kelso: She’s happy, she’s rich, she’s got her own cosmetic line, she’s dating Antonio Banderas. Things are going well, and we’re in our one studio bedroom apartment stalking her Facebook.

Amaury: Yeah, it’s time to hit the gym, delete Facebook and lawyer up, you know, like as Reddit would state it. Every time you have like a dating problem on Reddit it’s like- delete Facebook, hit the gym, lawyer up. It’s always the answer, so you know, I don’t know if it’s the best answer, but this is the answer according to Reddit, so we gotta do that.

Kelso: Is there a way, and you’ve already answered this in a roundabout way, you’re becoming more Vin Armani like every day-

Amaury: I don’t think so, we have a very different style obviously, but we’ve been talking about those stuff for a very long time, and the reason we both have been able to make quite reliable predictions on what would happen going forward, is because we share a lot of those ideas and they work.

Kelso: Right. I wanna take it all and put it together for sort of a kinda your final take here, and I think I’m actually repeating myself but for some reason I have to get it out. Is there a way going forward where we’re not acting within the BCH community like a scorned ex-girlfriend, where we cannot get over that this person said this about us, and that person did this, and then they funded this but not that. Is there a way to reach across the nodes, reach across the- to do something that doesn’t normally happen, in other words, instead of playing out the game theory and maybe in a weird way self-prophesy, I think it’s gonna go this way and I’m gonna steer it in this direction, intentionally or not. Is there a way of counteracting that and going ‘you know what, these guys say they want digital cash, maybe I made some mistakes along the way’, and you laughed at me, prior to our recording, and you said ‘well turns out I’m not perfect’

Amaury: Yeah that’s very unfortunate.

Kelso: Yeah, I was extremely disappointed that you were not perfect. You know, is there a way for you- This is a totally unfair question now that I’m forming it, but I’m gonna ask it anyway. Is there a way for you- you’re sort of a shelling point of the protest movement ironically enough is around you, you are almost Trumpian at this point. If you were to say you know what-

Amaury: That’s good then!

(Both laugh)

Kelso: Depends on who’s listening.

Amaury: I mean he got elected, he was president at the end.

Kelso:  (Laughs) There it is, and he might be again. So you go over to BCH Node you get into the chatroom ‘You know fellas, F ABC I’m with it’. There is a sense they would all move over to ABC. And so it’s sort of ridiculous and you’re kind of in this impossible position, but is there a way for you to go against type, as your public persona is- and I don’t really see you as the contentious figure they do, I’m just gonna grant them that you are this ogre whatever guy. Is there a way for you to go against type and just go ‘You know what, I’ve made some mistakes, and the Rogers of the world, I haven’t liked what they’ve done, they haven’t liked what I’ve done in parts. But let’s acknowledge their contributions, let’s move forward. The BCHN node guys, the imaginarys, the emergents… these guys you know what, I like the moxy, I like what you’re doing here, the hutzpah, this is a great idea. I’m glad to see you- you’ve kind of moved a little plank from my eye, let’s do this’, or do you think immediately it would be ‘ahh he’s capitulating’, and they’d flip the game theory on you, and now his weaknesses have been exposed. So have we just kind of set this up to fail? Sort of the Mexican standoff? There is about 25 questions in that, this is totally unfair for me to pause right here but, just to get your reaction for my word-salad.

Amaury: Yeah, so, well obviously I did make mistakes along the way. I would be stupid to say that is not the case. It is impossible to make decisions every day for two years and every single one of them is right. That would be me being Donald Trump actually (laughs) because according to himself he’s not making any mistakes. But you know, I think this is not the crux of the dynamic here. When people get angry, the reason people get angry is because they have an expectation and reality doesn’t match that expectation. This is the source of anger, right? So you expected your friend to come with food, but they decided to not come anyway, and they did not tell you, and now you are fucking alone at home and you have no food. You’d be angry at your friend. Because you had an expectation that even they set up right? But it doesn’t really matter if they set it up or not actually, you had an expectation and this expectation did not happen. The problem we have here is that there is a huge gap between the BCH community’s expectation and the reality of the situation. The expectation is that we’re gonna be the #1 currency that everyone uses in the world. The reality is that we are way smaller than Bitcoin that is itself way smaller than world currency. So we are nothing. And the anger comes from that expectation not being met. And this is why you see anger at anyone that’s gonna remind you what the reality is. And so you see anger against the BTC folk, why? Because they remind us what the reality is, and the reality is that we did not execute very well on increasing the size of the block, and as a result they are #1 and we are #4 or something. And this is what happened. We didn’t play the game very well, and they played the game better, and they won. That is the reality. And our expectation doesn’t match that reality. And the same with ABC where the resources that we have right now are not in that equation with everything that you guys want us to do, and we want to do as well. And as a result a lot of this stuff are not gonna be done, or we need to find alternative ways to find resources like the IFP. This is the reality, because no other implementation is gonna be able to do any better with the kind of resources that they have. We estimate that it’s very hard to get a large amount of energy with less than two million a year. There are many ways to compute that number but this is also what is like- parity Bitcoin for instance, had the exact same number. Like recently they made- because they stopped supporting a Bitcoin client- they’ve stopped supporting one of their node clients. And they put up the number, and the numbers were very close to the one we put up there, and right now there is the expectation that it is possible to do that with an order of magnitude less money. It’s probably possible to do that with less money, you know, like if we optimize our stuff, but an order of magnitude is a lot. And so here you also have like a reality and an expectation that don’t match and so when reality and expectation don’t match, anger is like the intuitive reaction that we have. And so it’s gonna happen. It’s gonna happen and there’s gonna be anger. And the only way we go beside that is willing to look at the reality as it is, not as we want it to be.

Kelso: Yeah I guess that’s where we leave it. Regardless of what happens I think a lot of people, even with BCHD being I guess summarily defunded in parts, and during the Flipstarter campaign I noticed the Flipstarter guys like imaginary and Emergent and so on, stepped up and they donated to BCHD, they said it’s a valuable project and they like it, and so on. And they-

Amaury: Yeah that made me think that, especially imaginary_username has not been very honest lately. Very disappointed because up to recently he was a very stand-up guy. EmergentReasons is the definition of a stand-up guy, so there is no doubt in my mind that EmergentReasons has all the best intentions in the world. But the reality doesn’t care about intentions. This is not how it works. Reality really doesn’t care about our intentions, and if we want to actually make things better, like you’ve got to adopt like a scientific method, effectively. You need to make hypothesis, ok? A hypothesis might be ‘if we do X things will be better’, then you try to do X, and you measure whatever things, whatever metric you decide that better matched, and then you see does that work, does that not work? Right now we are not doing that. And so we are not improving. And it doesn’t matter if we have good intentions or bad intentions, like reality doesn’t care about that, at all. This is probably where I would depart with Vin because he would tell you like ‘Oh reality is subjective or something like that. I don’t think that is the case.

Kelso: And last question here on the IFP and then I’ll let you go. I’ve kept you for far too long here. It seems the BTC.TOP pool has effectively pulled out of the IFP. Do you see other miners kinda waiting in the wings to kinda activate it eventually or is this DOA?

Amaury: I think it’s probably not gonna activate.

Kelso: And do you think ever?

Amaury: I don’t know. I think a lot of things that can happen in the next six months. And depending on the choice that everybody makes- like the choice that we make as an aggregate, as a community, it means that either we move on from where we are, or we are good for a bit more wandering in the desert. This is really up to everybody right? Because this is the aggregate choice of the decisions made by everybody that is currently inside that. And this is gonna be decided by where we put our time, attention and resources, including money but not just money right? Like everybody has different time, attention, work, whatever. It really depends on where we put those. If we put those in places that are very much aligned with the goal that we have, or our stated goal, then we are gonna get closer to those, and we are gonna start moving faster, and everything is gonna be much better. If we don’t, then it’s gonna get worse by the end of the year, which is probably very bad, actually. Because it seems like there is a bull market that is profiling itself, so probably things are gonna go up by the end of the year or something like that. We are going to be in a bull market, or this is what it looks like. So if we don’t get our shit together we are gonna be left behind. And then climbing back is going to be even harder.

Kelso: That’s as good as a place to end to stop. The great Amaury Séchet, lead developer at Bitcoin ABC, the stalwart, the battle-tested, implementation for Bitcoin Cash. And this is his take on where we are now as a community. I expect to get a lot of debate, ironically enough, and push-back, but also I think he’s a respected enough member of the community for people to take him seriously, so I really do appreciate all the time and the effort over the years, and during the podcast here. And before I let you go, how can people follow your work and keep up with things ABC, keep up with Amaury Séchet?

Amaury: Well we’ve been publishing articles on a regular basis now, so we have a Bitcoin ABC Medium account where we put articles. Probably gonna move to BitcoinABC.org website at some point. We’ve been having a lot of problems with read.cash because there is this new OC mechanism to try to discover plagiarized content, and we’ve been getting a lot of false flags on there, so it’s not working great for us, which is very unfortunate because everything being the same we’d rather use services that are built upon BCH like read.cash, but right now it’s not serving us as well as it could. And so we publish on there, but you’re probably better off by going to Medium.

Kelso: We’ll have links to all of it in the show notes here. Again man, I really appreciate all the time, the ability to reflect the philosophy, the time, the work, the effort. You’ve always been very supportive of CoinSpice, and we appreciate it. Thanks again man, and we’re rooting for you.

Amaury: Thank you, ciao.