Bitcoin Cash: Governance Changes Moving Forward

With the recent conflict in the Bitcoin Cash community, it feels like a split is inevitable and this could potentially be the final nail in the coffin for Bitcoin Cash as a project. For me this is possibly the most frustrating situation to be in because it is obvious which party in this community is refusing to cooperate with everyone else. It seems like those currently involved with Bitcoin ABC do not care what the community wants, and are more interested in their cash-grabs. I hope the best for the future of Bitcoin Cash, but for now, I'm completely out until things finally settle in November this year. After the split, I will consider getting back into Bitcoin Cash if things go smoothly. It is very frustrating to deal with one node implementation choosing to intentionally make things go bad for everyone just because they are not getting exactly what they want, when this is what they signed up for. If one implementation is going to be the only one leading development, it does not make any sense for other implementations to exist.

With this in mind, I think it is important to address what exactly went wrong with the BSV split, and now what is likely to be the ABC split, and try to learn from those past experiences so that we can move this project forward. On top of learning from our mistakes, we need to change how our governance works when it comes to implementing upgrades, and what changes need to be made to the current system. So, here are my thoughts on what exactly needs to change:

1. Instead of seeing the Bitcoin Cash community as polarized factions that the community has to choose between, people should think for themselves, and reject those who are firm on their stances and unwilling to cooperate.

When it came to the BCH and BSV split, I feel like both sides were wrong and unwilling to cooperate, causing this split. The Bitcoin Cash community was forced to deal with either siding with Bitcoin ABC or Satoshi's Vision node implementations, and choosing the "lesser of two evils". Does this sound familiar? It's exactly like our current democracy system in terms of governance, and we already know how that's going... I severely urge people to NOT follow or admire any figure within this community blindly, no matter how much good they have done for Bitcoin Cash. Think on each of their decisions independently and evaluate them for yourselves. Bitcoin Cash is a community, but it is a community made up completely of individuals.

2. Ditch the 6 month scheduled hardforks in place of scheduled hardforks that have deadlines of 9-12 months.

With Bitcoin Cash, hardforks are scheduled every 6 months currently, and this has caused many issues. If Bitcoin Cash is updating every 6 months, that means businesses, nodes, and developers have to change their software relatively frequently in order to keep up with the chain. Not only is this inconvenient, but it also leads to rushed development, and overall slows down the potential rate of development with Bitcoin Cash. What I suggest is that updates happen somewhere within 9-12 months with no exact deadline, and all the node implementations check their progress with development, and agree upon the next hardfork date immediately after the previous hardfork is executed. Not only should hardforks happen somewhat infrequently, but we should not wait till May or November if we need to execute a hardfork for something urgent that fixes the user experience. For example, we should execute the DAA upgrade ASAP instead of waiting for the November deadline.

3. Hardforks should become more infrequent as Bitcoin Cash matures, so that there is more protocol stability.

While it is necessary to upgrade software, I feel like it is also unnecessary to make the update even every year after Bitcoin Cash matures as a project. After the next few hardforks taking place every 9-12 months, I think it makes sense to increase the timeframe to around 18 months afterwards (of course with the emergency hardforks in between). This will give businesses a stable protocol that they can build on top of, and will not have to frequently worry about updating, or have any potential issues with nodes going offline. Apart from increasing the blocksize, there should be slight modifications, optimizations, and improvements that make Bitcoin Cash have a more seamless user experience.

I think that if Bitcoin Cash can nail all of these things down, there will be a lot more respect for it from the outside community, and businesses will feel more encouraged to actually use Bitcoin Cash to its full potential.