Monday, July 6th, 2020
It's no secret that I'm a vocal supporter of Amaury Sechet (aka Deadalnix) and his team at Bitcoin ABC. If you don't know who he is, he was integral in the creation of Bitcoin Cash and has dedicated the last three years of his life to working full time on the BCH project. The four years prior to that, he was a software engineer at Facebook working on product development and infrastructure.
In my mind, he is one of the biggest assets the Bitcoin Cash community has going for it, not just because of his technical ability, but also because of his ability to zoom out and see the bigger picture while also staying ahead of the curve. As someone who consumes a lot of BCH related content, I often find his interviews and presentations contain some of the most valuable information available, so I thought I'd go ahead and ask him a few questions of my own.
Before we get to the interview, let me state for the record that I am not a member of the Bitcoin ABC team, just as I am not a part of the teams behind read.cash, Blockchain.Poker, Stamp, CashFusion, and so on. I am merely an enthusiastic BCH supporter who seeks to promote the projects I believe can help us reach our goal of becoming peer-to-peer electronic cash. No matter what you may think of Amaury or Bitcoin ABC, I hope you find this interview worth checking out, and in doing so gain a little more insight into the mind of the lead developer of Bitcoin ABC, the main implementation of Bitcoin Cash.
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In the last Coinspice podcast you said you would have probably have left this community if you didn't feel a responsibility to BCH and its supporters, but that can't be the only reason you're still here. Why else are you still here?
I’m still here because I believe in the mission. The ability for two parties to transact without a 3rd party being involved - in other words, cash - is extremely important for economic freedom. Due to the economics calculation problem, economic freedom is also paramount for humans to flourish.
Hard money that is also a good medium of exchange is also paramount. The history of civilization is an endless cycle of hard money such as gold being replaced by fiat money, because it is not a good medium of exchange at scale. As a civilization grows, scaling its economy is also paramount, and so moving to fiat is unavoidable. This always ends up several decades later in a hyperinflation episode that takes the civilization with it.
With Bitcoin Cash, we have an opportunity to fix both. But Bitcoin Cash is not unique in this space, it is simply the project that is the lead on that front. Failure to stay focused will cause BCH to be outcompeted.
What would finally cause you to give up on BCH and say it has failed, if anything?
If BCH loses its lead to solve the problems mentioned earlier, then it will be time to join the people who are actually focused on the goal.
What was your reaction when you first found out about Bitcoin? For example, did you get obsessed with it right away and read everything you could about it? Or was it a gradual climb down into the rabbit hole?
My first reaction was skepticism, because there were many previous failed attempts, and the byzantine general problem is provably unsolvable. But Satoshi worked around that limitation by creating a system under which the probability a byzantine failure is not eliminated, but simply becomes exponentially unlikely over time, which is good enough in practice. This was in late 2010.
After this, I kept watching to see if this would pick up. For me, the indication that Bitcoin would become big was the Cyprus crisis in 2012. Many people joined Bitcoin at that time because they realized that banks could not always be relied upon, like in Cyprus. If many people see Bitcoin as an alternative, it means that the meme is catching on.
Is there anyone in crypto, past or present, that you admire or find inspiring?
Yes, many people in fact. Vitalik Butterin for instance, who shows a remarkable capacity to ask the right questions - and really, this is at least half of the work when building such complex systems.
Joseph Poon also comes to mind. He’s one of the authors of the lightning network, but ended up moving on to ethereum and works on scaling solutions there, such as plasma.
Brendan Eich, creator of javascript and now leading the Brave browser project.
And many more.
What % chance would you give BCH becoming a global reserve currency?
It is hard to say as it depends on many factors that cannot be controlled in an easy fashion. Right now, I think we are further away from this goal than we were in 2017. Moving forward again will require a cultural shift. Unfortunately, a lot of the BCH culture is based on lies. Scapegoats are found for every failure. The Core devs lied and cheated! This prevents the self reflection required to do better, and doing better is required to move forward.
What is your biggest regret since forking BCH? What would you do differently?
I compromised a few times on technical matters due to political pressure. This is how the EDA came to be for instance. It turned out to be a mistake every time.
What do you hope BCH (and crypto in general) can eventually achieve? Do you have a vision of what a world where crypto is commonplace would look like?
If/when crypto is commonplace, people will use it without knowing they use crypto. Such a world will, on the surface, resemble the world we have now as far as day to day activities are concerned. But it will shift the balance of power in a way similar the separation of church and state did. Because the state will have a reduced impact on the economy, we can expect the world to become more prosperous, and civilizations more durable. Without fiat money, war becomes much harder to wage. It probably won’t be eliminated, but the endless conflicts like the one we see in the middle east would quickly become economically unsustainable and will have to stop.
When did you first start coding? How did you get into it?
I started coding at the age of 9 or 10 on old Tompson MO5 computers in BASIC. These computers were already old at that time, so I was left free to do random stuff with them.
What do you think of Satoshi Nakamoto? If you had the chance to have dinner with him, would you and what would you want to talk about?
Satoshi is not a very good coder, protocol designer, cryptographer, or anything of the sort. But he still had a profound impact on the world because he was able to solve the right problem. Defining your problem statement is both the most important and the hardest thing you have to do as an engineer. As Bram Cohen states: “The trick is to fix the problem you have, rather than the problem you want.” but actually knowing what this problem is is way harder than you’d think. Satoshi figured out what this problem actually was and was able to provide a good enough solution to it. His solutions were all improved upon since then, and yet this whole space would not exist if he wasn’t able to define what the problem he was trying to solve actually was.
I would absolutely want to have dinner with him. I would like to discuss how he came to think out of the box the way he did. I would also encourage him to use some of his coins to foster the growth and adoption of Bitcoin.
What kind of people are you looking to hire at Bitcoin ABC? Do you often get inquiries from people looking to work with your team?
We are looking for engineers with experience in distributed systems, databases or cryptography, or junior that are willing to learn and do the hard work required to acquire these skills. Smart, gets shit done, and takes ownership.
We had a lot of interest from many parties early on, but lack of funding as well as constant politicking drove most of them away. These people simply have better opportunities than we can offer them, both monetarily, but even probably most importantly, by not having to deal with Dunning Kruger all day long.
Are there any specific BCH projects you find especially interesting? What do you think might be the potential trigger to make crypto mainstream?
Cointext allows to use crypto without internet, which is great.
Bitpay, purse.io and other services allowing you to actually use crypto are also key to success.
The projects I like are mostly boring. They serve some user need and that’s it. This is how we win. The constant hype cycle crypto is stuck in is a self destructive zero sum game.
What does the BCH community need to do more than anything right now to help its cause?
It needs to understand that it is its own worst enemy. Not core developers. Not government agencies. Not Craig Wright. The big block movement has been chewing its own for a long time now, starting with Gavin, then Mike, and is instead stuck in a state of perpetual revolution. This feels great, but does not achieve much in practice. This makes BCH a very risky bet.
Do you see BTC ever raising their block size? If that happened, would you still continue working on BCH?
It probably won’t happen any time soon, but as the make-up of its community evolves, it may. Ultimately, this is up to us to provide an alternative. If this alternative is seen as serious, then people will prefer to switch, but if not, they will prefer to increase the block size on BTC.
Right now BCH is not seen as a serious alternative because it is poorly maintained due to poor funding, is in a state of constant revolution, has been complacent with scams and some of its leaders have alienated a good portion of the crypto space.
What is the origin/meaning of the name deadalnix?
It doesn’t mean anything if that’s the question. It is simply unique and this is what we ask of a name.
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I thank Amaury for taking the time to answer my questions. Here are some additional links to a few related articles I previously posted on this site. If you're interested in contributing to Bitcoin ABC to help them achieve their goal of delivering peer-to-peer electronic cash to the world, visit their fundraising site here: https://fund.bitcoinabc.org/
Related articles:
https://read.cash/@Cain/bitcoin-cash-as-a-protest-movement-615d8a26
https://read.cash/@Cain/the-benevolent-dictator-b531593d
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