Bitcoin Cash: Thoughts Moving Forward

From the recent chain of events in this last month (haha, pun not intended), it looks like ABC is going to intentionally cause a split so they can implement their own 'IFP' into the protocol. It looks like not many in this community are in support of such a move, but in some ways it might unintentionally be good for Bitcoin Cash. In the short term, things may be bad, but in the long term, things are looking bright for Bitcoin Cash. Once we have this split in November, a lot of ideas that were initially suppressed against the community's wishes will finally be able to be implemented into Bitcoin Cash.

I think the future for BCH is looking bright, as it seems that we will finally be able to cooperate with decentralized governance. All of the node implementations seem to be united on their approach to building BCH as peer to peer cash, and building its infrastructure. I have not completely given up hope yet for BCH, but if ABC manages to be the majority fork, or a big minority, I will admit that the Bitcoin experiment has failed. With what has happened in the past, regarding the BSV and BCH split, and now this upcoming split (though we don't know 100% if it is going to happen, but it is pretty likely), I wanted to communicate my thoughts on the future of Bitcoin Cash, and what I think about the upcoming split.

Firstly, I wanted to say that I wasn't expecting a split to occur. I remember that nearly everyone in the community was in agreement with Bitcoin Cash being a good cryptocurrency and having a bright future. To my knowledge, there weren't many issues or infighting within the community and everyone had respect for eachother, including all of the node implementations that work on development. I think one of the most appealing aspects of Bitcoin Cash to me was the fact that multiple teams of developers were collaborating with eachother and gaining consensus in order to move forward. To me, that was a sign that decentralized development makes Bitcoin Cash more like Bitcoin than Bitcoin itself.

Everything seemed to be smooth sailing, but then a sudden controversy came within the community. Though I was part of the community and browsing on an almost daily basis, I wasn't really up to date on current events, and admittedly didn't know much about what was going on in terms of development. I started hearing about people having to pay a "dev tax". I wasn't sure what this was, and if it was actually being implemented as a tax or not, but I thought it was just a temporary controversy that would eventually just fade away. I definitely was wrong about this. Nothing happened on the May hard fork (everything went smoothly), but now it was clear that there was some division within the community.

Though this was a bit concerning, I didn't put much weight to it because it didn't seem to take up much of the discussion in r/btc. There were people who were in favour of the ABC IFP proposal, but they were far and few in between. A few more months go by, and then there is news that BCHN has removed the "poison pill" from their implementation. Most people reasonably don't make a big deal out of it, but ABC proponents took this as a sign that a split was going to occur, despite BCHN specifically being opposed to a split. This theory that BCHN is in favour of a split rightfully upsets a lot of the community because it is mostly a baseless conspiracy based on one small thing that BCHN did to their code.

Either way, things go normally for a while until jtoomim formally proposes his new DAA fix for BCH in the upcoming November upgrade for Bitcoin Cash. The post is met with a lot of support from the community and developers as it is fully researched, backed by evidence, and furthermore, fixes an issue that has been plaguing Bitcoin Cash for ages. Despite this proposal gaining a lot of support by everyone, Bitcoin ABC decides to go their own way, and forcefully implement their Grasberg DAA, that is a modified version of Toomim's proposal, and implements drift correction: a "fix" (if you would call it that) that compensates for the block times dating back to the genesis block.

From here on out, things go downhill. It's obvious that ABC does not want to cooperate, and that they do not care about what the community supports or is against, and just wants to have things their way. This unsurprisingly does not sit well with the community, and many people responsible for the infrastructure behind Bitcoin Cash sign an agreement saying that they will only put their infrastructure behind the ASERT BCH implementation. This causes Bitcoin ABC to make a new announcement where they say that they are going to ALSO implement ASERT, but now they are going to force their IFP again, the previous point of contention within the community. From here on out, it seems obvious that a fork is going to happen.

After this statement about forcing the IFP got released, ASIC Seer makes a post specifically stating that most miners have already switched to BCHN, and that there would be nothing to worry about, come November. This is just a statement, and there is still no proof to back it up. Though this wasn't official, a lot of the community was relieved that there was a lot of support backing BCHN and other node implementations. Though a split is far from ideal, I think that this may be for the better, and I'm excited for what's to come in Bitcoin Cash's future.

Now that ABC is out of the equation, I am excited for many of the new features coming, and that are being worked on by other node implementations. I think what I'm excited about most are doublespend proofs and pre-consensus. I think this has a lot of potential for Bitcoin Cash, because now 0-conf transactions will be MUCH safer, and payment processors won't have to deal with being burnt with double-spends. To my knowledge, Bitcoin Cash Node is going to be implementing Storm, a form of pre-consensus later in the future.

This is a pre-requisite to Avalanche (IIRC), but has the potential for almost guaranteed safe 0-conf transactions, making Bitcoin Cash competitive with other cryptocurrencies that have near-instant and free transactions. I think this can launch new possibilities, such as an exchange built around the pre-consensus protocol, where people can deposit, and start trading instantly (with smaller amounts of money). This will also render second-layer solutions as obsolete and unnecessary, now that the base layer is instant, and almost free in terms of transactions.

Furthermore, I think progress will start going through quickly, now that there isn't any team intentionally stalling progress because of their own personal issues. Smart contracts are already possible on Bitcoin Cash, and AnyHedge is set out to launch fairly soon, which can potentially bring some of the DeFi hype to Bitcoin Cash. I think this will all be really good for user experience, and can potentially attract more users to it.

All-in-all things are looking fairly good AFTER the split, and I think this will have a very positive outcome for Bitcoin Cash, and the future of development. I think one thing we can definitely change about governance is having a different schedule for forking. I think we are better off "relaxing" (please don't take this as meaning doing less work) the schedule to 9-12 months, with consensus being reached on a fork initiation date, and then having emergency hardforks in the middle if necessary (an example would be like the DAA issues we are facing now). But overall, this makes me optimistic because I feel like things will start going through quickly. See you in November. :)