@Cain
more from that month
An Open Letter to Roger Ver Dear Roger, I have put off writing this for a variety of reasons. One being I didn't feel I had the right since I'm a nobody, while you, Roger, are Bitcoin Jesus, the first ever investor in Bitcoin related companies, not to mention likely a billionaire (in USD terms but looking forward to the day a person's net worth is valued in BCH). Let me start by saying I have a lot of respect for you as you are clearly a man of conviction, not afraid to speak your truth, and someone who tirelessly and nobly promotes the idea of economic freedom to anyone who will listen. But I'm not here to stroke your ego. And you don't seem like the type who cares at all about that. What you do seem to care about is creating a peer-to-peer electronic cash system for the world. And as you yourself have said, at the moment Bitcoin Cash appears to have the best chance of achieving that goal. I've heard your story many times over the years, about how when you first heard about Bitcoin you fell deep down the rabbit hole, spent two weeks trying to learn everything you could about it, eventually getting sick and hospitalized in the process. I can relate because ever since I learned about Bitcoin Cash, it has consumed my life in a way I couldn't have ever imagined. I believe both of us, along with the rest of the BCH community, truly want to see Bitcoin Cash fulfill its promise to become p2p electronic cash. Which is why I don't understand some of the things you say or do, the biggest one being your growing frustration with Bitcoin ABC. It appears you are disappointed with the Bitcoin ABC team and their lead developer Amaury Sechet. I have previously written how I once felt the same way. But Amaury has worked hard over the last six months to explain why his team has behaved the way it has. As such, many in the community have now changed their minds about Amaury and see the reasoning behind his actions. https://read.cash/@Cain/the-benevolent-dictator-be82814c But apparently not you. So I just want to understand where you're coming from. I understand I'm not entitled to an explanation. And the last thing I'd want is for you and your company, Bitcoin.com, to choose to support another project. All I'm suggesting is that since you clearly want to see Bitcoin Cash succeed, it might be helpful to hear your thoughts on why you feel that having big players such as yourself fund Bitcoin ABC is such a bad idea. You are free to run your business however you want, to associate with whoever you want, and to act in any manner you see appropriate so long as you aren't hurting other people. But if your goal is to help spread the adoption of Bitcoin Cash and galvanize the community, your actions appear illogical at times. I don't understand why you feel the need to promote known BSV shills, or associate with people like Richard Heart and Brock Pierce, while at the same time disparaging the one team who has proven to be capable of leading the BCH protocol. About a year ago, you offered OpenNode an investment of $1.5M to accept Bitcoin Cash in their project, which I assume is a relatively small sum for you. Today, you want to remove the chained 25 transaction limit on BCH, so I'm wondering why not invest that same $1.5M you had offered OpenNode to Bitcoin ABC to have this done the right way? I don't know exactly how much the Bitcoin ABC team feels is needed for the necessary resources to remove the limit altogether, but I'd venture to guess this would be a reasonable place to start. If they don't achieve what you're asking for, then lesson learned, but considering how badly you seem to want to get this fixed, I'm thinking this would be a small price to pay to find out. And imagine if you fund their efforts and they deliver? You must see potential gains that can be made once the limit is removed, so this will hopefully earn back your investment and then some. In closing, thank you if you've bothered reading this, and I hope that the BCH community can see past all the drama and find a way to work together towards our shared goals. And if you see something I'm missing, I'd love to hear about that as well. The more open communication we have, and the more informed we are as a community, the better. Sincerely, Cain [sponsors]
37 comments
This was a well written piece and polite, but there appears to be a mob outside calling for Roger K Ver to be taken down All it took was 1 "wrong" decision and the rest is becoming history All this drama is driving a wedge (exploited by outsiders) between the most important company in BCH and the most important dev team. As Vin said - color wars! Roger - I will be always be grateful for your stand against tyranny during the hash war, you don't deserve this crap! BTW thanks for paying the legal bills for ABC developers when the said tyrant is suing them p.s - It is ridiculous that people are questioning that you are unable/unwilling to donate/fund ABC directly. That's your choice, not your responsibility
> t is ridiculous that people are questioning that you are unable/unwilling to donate/fund ABC directly. That's your choice, not your responsibility I agree, he can do what he wants. I'm just curious why he doesn't fund them and at the same time accuses them of "dragging their feet".
some additional info: Bitcoin.com currently pays 1% of the blockrewards from their mining operation to Bitcoin ABC but Amaury has voiced that this is not nearly enough for what they expect they can get from that. my take: I think it's ridiculous to complain about blockstream hijacking the protocol but then afterwards not learn from this mistake. Amaury's comparison of protocol funding to insurance is a very good way to think about it. Roger also made very bad mistakes during the hashwar which could have easily been avoided by listening to the right people. I'd love to see bitcoin.com realize the need for infrastructure, and if they don't want to support ABC fine there are alternatives (ie BU and BCHD) but neglecting it (again) would be a major mistake
> Bitcoin.com currently pays 1% of the blockrewards from their mining operation to Bitcoin ABC Interesting. This is the first time I hear this. Is there a source? (I'm just curious, it's not like I don't believe it).
" Bitcoin.com currently pays 1% of the blockrewards from their mining operation to Bitcoin ABC" I am afraid you are incorrect and publicly available information makes this easy to check If you look at the bottom of the bitcoinabc.org website you will find the public donation address. If you look at what is regularly being donated from Bitcoin.com coinbase reward you will see it is not 1%. Not even 0.1%. In fact it is 0,05% of the blockreward that is being donated which equals 1.29 USD per block found. (https://blockchair.com/bitcoin-cash/address/qqeht8vnwag20yv8dvtcrd4ujx09fwxwsqqqw93w88) If all miners would donate this percentage this would be a bit under 68K USD per year Over the past 7 days Bitcoin.com had 6.2% of the hash rate (cash.coin.dance) which extrapolated would lead to their yearly donation being a bit over 4K USD per year.
Great open letter! I feel the same way and also don't understand some of his moves at all. We'll have to wait and see for a possible response but this is a worthwhile effort, so thank you for writing this! BTW you've got me very interested in the time you came obsessed with learning about Bitcoin, hope you'll expand more on that in a personal post :)
Thanks Mr-Zwets. And great idea for that personal post you suggested. I'll try to write that eventually.
It is 0.05%. See my reply above for proof and calculations
I was wondering exactly the same thing. It would be really logical for Roger Ver to sponsor Bitcoin ABC... they don't even require that much.
It would be logical based on what I know, so I'm asking him if there's something I'm missing.
How did you forget so quickly that it was Amaury that has been openly attacking Roger for months? Anyway, ABC has received a LOT of funding, more than 800 BCH of it. And I'm personally guessing that a good percentage of that is from people like Roger. For the record, thats about 2-5 year full-time salaries in France, nothing seems to have changed since that was given. They still ask for more... It makes no sense to me to critique either of these guys. They are both doing what they can for Bitcoin cash. But I'm drawing the line at you and others making it look like the Amaury needs to be treated with velvet gloves and how hard he has it and all that. No, it should be more than Ok to question why ABC is not cooperating on getting an issue fixed that a good percentage of companies think is an issue. Especially since there is source code available. There really isn't much of an excuse.
> No, it should be more than Ok to question why ABC is not cooperating on getting an issue fixed that a good percentage of companies think is an issue. Especially since there is source code available. There really isn't much of an excuse. Your position is understandable. But based on what I know, even 1000 BCH, which is worth $200k today, isn't much when dealing with experienced software developers. Look, I could be wrong here. Maybe Amaury isn't being completely honest. Who knows? But based on what I do know, it seems like they're not getting the support that is needed. And I'm sure this long bear market hasn't helped. All I'm asking for is to hear Roger's side of things. If he says look we gave Bitcoin ABC $10M and they haven't done squat with that money, I think it's in the best interest of the community to hear that too.
The fundraiser was some months ago when the price was substantially higher. The funds gifted were more like 300000 USD. If you have been told that isn't much, you have been lied to. Do your own research. https://insights.stackoverflow.com/survey/2019#work-_-salary-by-developer-type A dev you want on a rather small app like ABC is probably worth around 60K per year. Hence me saying 3-5 people for a year in the previous post. And remember that Amaury is not based in the USA. I somehow expect he wants to find people close to him. Which is clearly beneficial as its much cheaper than the USA. > it seems like they're not getting the support that is needed. This is what they keep on saying. Loudly. And you seem to take their word for it. > If he says look we gave Bitcoin ABC $10M and they haven't done squat with that money The public gave ABC 5 man-years worth of salaries. They demonstratively haven't done squat with that money. In this world people **earn** money, they don't get money and *then* start doing work. Try to convince a company to pay you several years in advance before you do any work. Good luck with that. I think its en open market where BU provided an actual implementation for the feature that the market wants, and ABC is saying they don't want to do it. Typically an open market just switches to another supplier. Fun details; * the SatoshiDice team will pay out 1M to the ABC team if they ship this. And the ABC team is not doing it because of funding. Can you say "huh??". * The ABC team bullying money out of people **before** they do work is a big red flag to most companies and certainly to an experienced person like Ver. Because when you give in to blackmail once, they will always keep doing it.
I get all your points but based on my research, I see things differently. Not saying my mind can't be changed, but from where I stand today, I support Bitcoin ABC and hope that Roger will come to the same conclusion at some point.
we know that ABC funds are secret no one knows who it's managed. Could you please say openly and honestly if you got funded to support ABC view or write for them?
No all my views are my own and I've never been paid by anyone to promote anything. I'm flattered you think that's even a possibility.
I know you have been in BCHgang channel and you know that Amuary has grudge against BU. He stated he will not accept them what ever they do. did you notice that? I wonder why you always write to defend him despite the fact that there are thousands of developers that can replace him and had much better character
Where are these thousands of developers that will step up and develop the BCH protocol? They are free to develop their own implementation and compete. There’s reason no one mines with BU. There’s a reason amaury has a grudge against BU. They have done nothing to demonstrate to me what value they bring to BCH. Amaury and ABC have earned my respect. That’s the only reason i support them. I own BCH. I have skin in the game and so I’m doing what i believe is best for my holdings.
You can support ABC and still avoid pissing on BU. And you can support BCH while having trust in the multiple implementations we have. Also without putting full trust in one team or one person. Having skin in the game means you do what is best for you, and supporting Amaury as you are doing is not in the best interest of him. Supporting people's wrong decisions doesn't cause them to learn and improve. Your blind support is doing the coin and the man a disservice.
I don't think it's blind support. Before the BCH City conference, I was in opposition to him. And if I see him acting in a way that I don't agree with, I'll change my position. Same with BU. If they start behaving in a manner that I think is good for BCH, I will back them as well. Their handling of the 25 tx limit among other things has been disappointing.
You don't respond to any of the points brought to your attention and you are very black/white in your decision process. As I explained above. You can call it what you want, but your support is most definitely not well researched and balanced.
I am an outsider looking in so there's only so much research I can do. Why don't you write an article explaining why I'm wrong?
> I support Bitcoin ABC The world is not black and white. Roger doesn't NOT support Bitcoin ABC. We all support ABC. You are asking Roger to defend himself when he is critical of some decisions. There is a huge difference between not supporting a team and having to silently accept all their decisions. Bitcoin Cash should be open and should allow constructive feedback. If you disagree with that, please consider using the old banking system. Relevant video; https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qDQeMFwnOCE
"A small app like ABC" LMAO Good luck reaching p2p cash for the world with funding for a year of 3-5 developers getting 60k .
Please, don't read into this as if I'm somehow telling you that ABC are saints, it's just a note about the invisible work that could've happened. > They demonstratively haven't done squat with that money. I don't think that's true. As a developer I can tell you that the fact that you don't have any gimmicky features to show off during some time doesn't mean you haven't done anything. Maintenance, refactoring, backporting security fixes, doing architecture, writing technical documentation, doing manual QA, writing tests for automatic QA, installing workstations, setting up development environments, having to do meetings, having to go to the conferences, having to explain your actions to the stakeholders (to the public in this case) - these are some of the important things to do and it would look like "nothing has changed", while in reality: 1) you have avoided collapse of development in future due to unbearable technical debt; 2) you have avoided catastrophic security failure in the future; 3) you just allowed yourself to continue working. These can't be seen, but these are important. Amaury worked in Facebook, that should tell us that he's a good developer who knows this well. Again, I'm not saying they are definitely saints and not slacking off, but invisible work is important too. > The ABC team bullying money out of people before they do work They delivered the working client for close to 2 years. I wouldn't consider that "before they do work". > the SatoshiDice team will pay out 1M to the ABC team if they ship this. And the ABC team is not doing it because of funding. Can you say "huh??". Yep, that is surprising.
> Amaury worked in Facebook, that should tell us that he's a good developer who knows this well. That also could mean Cambridge Analytica
> Again, I'm not saying they are definitely saints and not slacking off, but invisible work is important too. It must be really hard work that takes a really expensive developer in order to backport all the work that the 2MB chain does. I'm sure that they are working hard, but you have to ask if the winning strategy is running after your competitor (BTC) doing exactly what they are doing while pretending to be better.
Backporting is only one thing. I mean ask any good developer - sometimes to non-technical bosses it seems like you're doing nothing at all, yet for some reason you're still at the office until the wee hours.
Sure, there is lots of stuff that those devs could be doing. In the end those efforts should translate into a visible results, no? If you state "the client doesn't crash" or some silly other metric, well, that's putting the bar very low. Which results are you seeing? And please pick things that demonstratively are not being observed in the other 4 or 5 different clients. The "doesn't crash" or "doesn't have an infinite inflation bug" isn't really an accomplishment if all clients have that feature.
Your claim was: > They demonstratively haven't done squat with that money. All I'm telling is that you can't say that, because a lot of work can be invisible. I'm not saying they're the best team or that they're saints or something. They are what they are - leading implementation. What have they done - well, the forks went on without a hitch, which is good. Other than that - I don't know, because I don't follow their development. But claiming "they demonstratively haven't done squat with that money" I think is a bit too big of a claim.
> As a developer I can tell you that the fact that you don't have any gimmicky features to show off during some time doesn't mean you haven't done anything. Maintenance, refactoring, backporting security fixes, doing architecture, writing technical documentation, doing manual QA, writing tests for automatic QA, installing workstations, setting up development environments, having to do meetings, having to go to the conferences, having to explain your actions to the stakeholders (to the public in this case) - these are some of the important things to do and it would look like "nothing has changed", while in reality: 1) you have avoided collapse of development in future due to unbearable technical debt; 2) you have avoided catastrophic security failure in the future; 3) you just allowed yourself to continue working. These can't be seen, but these are important. OMF'nG! i need to save this forever-and-ever .. and ever (actually, i think I'm just gonna start writing about it .. just created a new community "Dev Tales"). this kind of shit REALLY needs to be told. like we ALL studied computer science @ hogwarts and all it takes is a simple spell and a flick of our wand
I donated a lot to Bitcoin ABC team as I was big fan of Amaury, but was very dissapointed with his lack of gratefulness and excuses for it so I can certainly relate with Roger Ver being very hesitant to donate more to Bitcoin ABC as it's very demotivating and unrewarding to do so. I explain more here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bsTwjihHB-E We all like to be praised for our efforts, Amaury gets praised plenty for what he contributes, but does he praise back people who donate to him? Nope. Just ignores, neglects and makes up excuses for it. Same for David Allan by the way, donated lots to his development fund too, send messages via all possible channels, also on youtube dev meetings, as I was surprised there was not even a mention of the big donations received, let alone a thank you, never got a response.
Amaury clearly has excellent programming chops and Bitcoin Cash would not exist if it weren't for him, but the way he communicates online - like in the BCH GANG Telegram group - is pretty toxic. I get how the Linus Torvalds take-no-prisoners style of discourse might be needed to shoot down people who spout BS, but even Linus has eventually outgrown that and I bet Amaury would be far more effective if he can inject more civility in the way he discusses stuff. I mean, there really shouldn't be any difference in our tone of discourse whether we are online or not.
RE; Amaury "attacking" Roger, I believe Amaury explains the situation well in this podcast w Coinspice. From the horse's mouth 👍 https://coinspice.io/news/podcast-bch-dev-amaury-sechet-gets-spicy-roger-ver-being-french-funding-rejection/
That is one side of the story. The side of the aggressor. Take all he says with a spoonful of salt. Amaury is pissing on a lot of people, as the article states."He’s taking-on everyone in the Bitcoin Cash (BCH) community, from fellow developers to well-established business leaders." Maybe, just maybe, if you try to work together with people instead of positioning them as your enemies, then you can get much more stuff done. Amaury has severely toned it down in the last months, and suddenly stuff works better. Anyone arguing that the common factor in all the disagreements and problems in BCH isn't the one that is actually the center of it, well, they should ask why they are deluding themselves.
You think your recipient heard you? (I’m just curious)
https://www.reddit.com/r/btc/comments/ebk1j5/an_open_letter_to_roger_ver/fb6zawv?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web2x