What many BCH supporters don't understand

Friday, October 2nd, 2020

I‘m afraid too many in the Bitcoin Cash community believe in something that is simply not true. I don't blame them, because I used to believe this as well, this notion that BCH is already positioned to become world money and replace state backed fiat when needed.

If someone as knowledgeable about this space as @ColinTalksCrypto thinks the above, then it's likely that many others feel the same way. Well, let me tell you right now that it's just not the reality of the situation.

If you don't use BCH as often as I do, I can see how you might think it works great already, and that we can wait on further technical developments. You might think all we need now is more adoption and network effects to take over the world, and that Amaury and ABC are just a bunch of whiners who only want more money to line their own pockets. (The fact that they just used some money to hire away one of Roger's best developers speaks otherwise.)

Like many of you, I used to believe all we needed was more users. As a user myself, I thought BCH was fantastic. As a regular player on blockchain.poker, I am always amazed by the speed of my deposits and withdrawals and the amount of control I have versus using a credit or debit card. As a result, what I felt was most important was to get others to experience it and see what I saw. But now I realize I only felt this way because I wasn't looking at the full picture.

The above chart represents what's known as the Dunning-Kruger effect. Simply put, it shows how people overestimate their knowledge in a specific area because of a lack of self-awareness.

Unfortunately, BCH seems to be full of people who all think they know best. Whether it's the color of the logo, or the length of the block times or upgrade cycles, or the proper way to fund infrastructure. But in reality, BCH only has a handful of real experts, and if we're going to achieve our mission to make BCH into world money, we must rely on and support our best people to help get us there.

Don't get me wrong, by no means am I saying I'm one of those experts. But as someone who has used BCH extensively for the past three years, I'm confident that I have a much better understanding of its current limitations than most.

For example, I've now run into the 50 chained transaction limit many times. As a result I've been unable to use my BCH on several occasions until the next block confirmation because I was sent a transaction that had too many parent transactions.

I've also had my wallet reject transactions saying they're too large and the only way I got around it was by using my desktop wallet to select specific UTXOs to send until I got the transaction size small enough. I've also had issues where my 12 word seed phrase didn't pull up your addresses because the wallet was using the wrong derivation path! If you don't believe me, try taking your read.cash seed and importing it with the bitcoin.com wallet and see what happens.

Imagine standing in line at a coffee shop and trying to pay and getting a message that says you have to wait for a confirmation due to the chained transaction limit. Or losing your wallet one day and pulling out your 12 word seed phrase and having it not work because of an error you weren't even aware of? People will have heart attacks thinking their life savings vanished into thin air.

These kinds of issues can all lead to bad user experiences that turn new users away in the same manner that new BTC users could be turned off when faced with high fees and slow confirmations.

BCH supporters need to wake up and realize that as great as BCH might seem today, it's far from being ready to act as a credible alternative to state backed fiat money.

We don't want Bitcoin Cash to be a technology that's merely adequate. If we want people to make the switch from state backed fiat to Bitcoin Cash, we need to impress them with something that's far superior to what they use now.

This is why it's so important we fund infrastructure today to get these things sorted out in time for the coming economic collapse. A year ago I wasn't as concerned about how much time we had left, but seeing the astronomical amounts of money that have been printed by governments around the world in 2020, who knows how much time we have before we're forced to seek out a better money solution.

This is also why it's important we spread adoption as quickly as possible. We need to seed local economies with BCH merchants who can become future experts that can teach newcomers and answer their questions. I would have been at a loss if not for the help of such an expert that walked me through how to select specific UTXOs and how to force set the derivation path on my electron cash desktop wallet.

Infrastructure isn't sexy. It's not the stuff that makes headlines and rewards the person doing the work with status in the community, but it's absolutely vital. Without the proper infrastructure, the killer app of BCH as money is dead on arrival. Smart-contracts and tokens are interesting, but they must take a back seat to the primary objective to make BCH useful as cash.

This is why we need to have a united front and support the team with the most expertise. While BCHN and crew want to slow down the 6-month upgrade cycle, ABC is looking to speed up development. While the anti-ABC people are busy debating what should be worked on next, ABC is focused on completing their roadmap to fulfill the BCH mission of becoming peer to peer electronic cash.