This is a transcript of the video essay I posted ~years ago, as the honestcash article is ded.
There has been an attempted hostile takeover of Bitcoin Cash.
On the original Bitcoin Cash fork day of August 1st, 2017, BCH was liberated into larger blocks, free from the artificial 1MB limit that had been imposed since Satoshi originally put it in as spam control in 2010, and kept there by those who didn’t want the blockchain to scale. The Bitcoin Cash split was pushed mainly by Amaury Sechet of Bitcoin ABC, the leader of one of the main Bitcoin software implementations. Bitcoin Cash currently has a hard fork scheduled every 6 months to put in new features. Every time a fork comes around, the minority chain usually dies, as the entire ecosystem upgrades to the new version. This last fork’s upgrade feature list was essentially locked in August 14th 2018. Bitcoin Satoshi’s Vision, a separate bitcoin software implementation was announced the very next day by Craig Wright, and his company nChain. Involved very closely with him is Calvin Ayre, a billionare who made his fortune from online gambling sites, who owns Coingeek, a mining pool and media outlet.
Around the time of the original BCH split from BTC, the future Satoshi’s Vision extremists started popping up on social media, cheering BCH on, creating memes, trolling Core supporters, doing things every great Bitcoin Cash supporter could do on social media. These accounts always had one thing in common, they all believed in the specific vision that Craig Wright laid out, which, of course, includes bringing Bitcoin Cash to 5 billion people. What he says falls in line with what many of us want in bitcoin, but he sprinkles in with what has been called technobabble. He explains things with big words and extremely difficult concepts to wrap your head around. But he does it so fluently, he has to be telling the truth.
Now make no mistake, I am not an overly technically inclined person, I am a Filmmaker who understands intermediate level computing and networking. But, when an entire industry of the smartest people in the world start calling someone out on their bullshit, you listen. This divide within Bitcoin Cash started right after the aptly named Satoshi’s Vision Conference in Tokyo in March 2018. I was at this conference and I interviewed many of the speakers, Craig included. What he said to me was fine, and sounded great, massive tx volume will eventually kill the need for a block reward, among other things, like network topology. Either way, BCH needed to scale. I also interviewed Peter Rizun, Emin Gun Sirer, and others.
At the conclusion of this conference, the first instance of a division was when Craig published a paper, where he cleary plagiarized a large majority of it under his own name. Peter and Emin immediately called him out for it. This created the first community split as well, the main slack channel for bch discussion was forked - one with Craig, and one without. In this slack, if you questioned Craig, you got banned. The startings of his echo chamber. This chatroom, by the way, has turned into a subscription model, where you pay like $10 a month for access.
They like to call it “Proof of Social Media”. Essentially you group anyone who doesn’t agree with your specific thoughts together, and anything they come up with that you don’t like you call it Proof of Social Media to downplay it. Now, I’ve grown up with social media and am well aware of the trolling that goes on. This social media attack vector is the one thing that Bitcoin NEEDS to figure out. It helped with Blockstream and Core’s takeover. It’s easy to sybil and make fake accounts to push an agenda. I’ve been in so many BCH chats where the some anonymous account comes in, shilling “Satoshi’s Vision”, viciously attacking anyone that doesn’t agree with them. Strawmanning others, repeating the same talking points, even instances of doxing certain individuals’ addresses. Of course, there are some real people that support SV, and generally they have been well mannered, but the anon accounts rule the narrative. Accuse others of what you are guilty. Proof Of Social Media.
A couple weeks after Bitcoin Satoshi’s Vision was announced, Craig walked out of a meeting between BCH devs, miners, and business owners. He called it a developer circle-jerk, and didn’t last in the meeting for more than an hour before putting on his grand exit. There was very little discussion between nChain and the rest of the BCH ecosystem after their leader walked out. It seems there was no room for compromise. Craig disliked certain things about the ABC ruleset, and ABC disliked things from SV’s ruleset. Oh, and Coingeek wasn’t there. They held a meeting the night before and immediately published an article saying everyone agreed that Satoshi’s VIsion was the right way forward, a clear and utter lie. Fake news?
When the oh great hashwar was first announced, all of Craig’s supporters cheered for war! Coingeek had amassed a plethora of hashpower that they had been using to mine on BCH pre-fork. At one point they had over 70% of the total bitcoin cash hashpower. But in doing so, the difficulty shot up, making it unprofitabale to mine for anybody. This did not matter to Coingeek, as they kept burning electricity to mine on BCH, even when BTC was more profitable to do so, where they could simply sell their BTC for more BCH. They were essentially throwing away money to posture. They claim since they were ONLY hashing on BCH, that they truly believed in it.
This is Nakamoto Consensus, they said. Miners will vote on which ruleset they want to run, Satoshi’s Vision, or Bitcoin ABC. What they failed to grasp was that BCH is a minority chain, running on the same mining algorithm that BTC does. Nakamoto Consensus works when there is a single chain, miners build upon the most recent block, and as long as all of the rules are met, the block is added to the chain. If the majority of miners don’t agree, then the block is orphaned and thrown out. Nakamoto Consensus was broken when Bitcoin Cash implemented its own difficulty adjustment *and* replay protection at the time of its original fork. BCH knew they were going to be the minority chain, so they did the responsible thing with implementing replay protection to save on user confusion. The difficulty in BCH changes every block, causing the variance in hashpower to even out over time, rather than every 2016 blocks like in BTC.
Bitcoin SV supporters wanted no split to happen. They wanted the hashpower to battle it out, fighting for the longest chain to decide what was the real Bitcoin… Cash. Follow the longest chain, with the most proof of work, they said. Craig’s famous words “You split, we bankrupt you”
On November 14th the split happened. All it took was one incompatible opcode, a transaction that was valid on one chain that wouldn’t be valid on the other, and a single miner to mine it. There was a split. There was no replay protection at the time, so most wallets sent out both BCH and BSV. The hashwar began and Roger Ver of bitcoin.com moved a boatload of hash from BTC to BCHABC, greatly out competing Coingeek and BSV in Proof of Work. The whole crypto market started crashing, and the two competing Bitcoin Cashes down with it. Both bitcoin.com and Coingeek lost millions fighting in this war, hashing away, even when unprofitable, to prove a point, to fight! But ABC hashed more. - and services began announcing that the BCH ticker would remain with ABC, while Satoshi’s Vision gained the BSV ticker.
Even though hashpower is sybil proof, impossible to fake, - Coingeek claimed that bitcoin.com rented hash to fight the war, and that it was unfair and cheating. Funnily enough, Roger said Coingeek actually came to HIM to rent hashpower. Coingeek goes on to claim bitcoin.com hashpower wasn’t valid because they weren’t mining on BCH until the fork. Coingeek called themselves ‘committed hashpower’, and that since bitcoin.com didn’t have ‘committed hashpower’, that it didn’t count. This sudden change of narrative is a common one with the SV crowd. Bitcoin.com eventually subsided most of its hash back to BTC, and the difficulty dropped back down again, and rational, profit seeking miners started to mine once again on the profitable BCH, while BSV continues to only have one or two main miners, who many suspect are under the same control.
A week and a half later, Calvin Ayre of Coingeek finally claims the hashwar is over, and that Nakamoto Consensus wasn’t truly at play, because of the actions of ABC and bitcoin.com. I thought all was fair in love and hashwars? BSV has announced its replay protection, so transactions aren’t broadcasted to both chains, essentially claiming defeat over the Bitcoin Cash name, but the chain will continue to coexist as Bitcoin Satoshi Vision.
During this time, the BCH ecosystem was essentially shut down. Only a few wallets still worked, and it usually required some advanced knowledge. All exchanges shut down their withdraws and deposits, waiting for the war dust to clear. BCH was suddenly… broken. But! The bitcoin cash blockchain never stopped working. Only the FUD spread about ‘no split’ and potential attacks on the ABC chain basically forced crypto services to be cautious. If you were to try to cause doubt about an uncensorable peer to peer cash system, you would do exactly what SV did. Cause sooo much uncertainty that nobody wants to take it, as they don’t know if they would receive one coin or two… or three? Nobody knew what was going to happen.
BSV has some support already but it is mostly from companies that have or currently do receive funding from nChain. Centbee, Handcash, and Money Button are some of them. They all have great user experience and were previously built on BCH, but now have full BSV support only. It is a shame to watch some great projects go away from the community that helped push them forward. Many of these projects did not receive a one-time lump sum investment from nChain, but rather a monthly one - providing a ever threat of funding being pulled. And where has nChain’s money came from? Sources have followed the money trail, but it gets lost in the Panama Papers, so no one knows for sure. At least Blockstream was honest about it.
Strong Armed by Craig Wright, the man who hired David Bowie’s PR firm for his big Satoshi reveal, the man that helped drive Gavin Andreesen out of bitcoin, this hostile takeover of bitcoin has not been as successful as the one that stemmed from Core and Blockstream. Has Craig fooled Calvin into believing he is Satoshi and the best path forward is by forking into their own shitcoin, and claiming its the real real Bitcoin? Or are there other shady things at play - Both Craig and Calvin have previously been in huge trouble with their respective governments for tax fraud.
It would be a struggle to find one instance of any Bitcoin developer outside of nChain or Coingeek who thinks Craig Wright isn’t full of bullshit. He thrives on those who seek a strong personality to lead them through the mystery of cryptocurrency, he’s a beacon for those who feel marginalized by the crypto community. The Bitcoin Cash fork was the perfect opportunity for him to spread his influence on those who already felt disenfranchised, jumping on the common enemy of Core to build rapport. Criticizing certain things that were included in the ABC ruleset for this November helped radicalize his side. Data Sig Verify and Canaocial Transaction Ordering ended up being the two of the biggest boogeymen that he could attack. I won’t go deep into what these are, but they are currently working fine on BCH. Craig has claimed he has a 0-day exploit for ABC, but will wait to attack it. Have no doubt, Craig Wright is an extremely smart man, and this makes him excellent at what he does, promising promise after promise, and failing to deliver. At least he now has his own coin, and can leave the Bitcoin Cash community in peace - after all, he’s already blocked us all on twitter.
Bitcoin Cash continues the promise of uncensorable Peer to Peer cash that the whole world can use. This promise scares the living shit out of those who are currently in control of our financial systems and world. The powers that be will always want to destroy money they cannot control. Mass adoption of bitcoin cannot come soon enough, until then, we must continue to fight for the world’s economic freedom.
