John Nieri a.k.a. emergent_reasons, President of General Protocols, was pleased with the raise, commenting, “We are delighted that aligned investors are supporting us in our vision to bring DeFi to Bitcoin Cash. We are building a team of dedicated supporters of peer to peer electronic cash here at General Protocols.”When we set out to create decentralized finance on BCH over a year ago, there were very few entities and companies that were willing to back a startup fully focused on BCH. We had a vision to solve the volatility problem that has blocked crypto adoption everywhere - take all the benefits of a low-fee, instant, global payment network like BCH, and add an easy way to stabilize purchasing power without going through trusted 3rd parties. The first form of that is AnyHedge, a non-custodial hedge/long protocol. As speculative liquidity grows, it will become easier and easier for businesses to have all the advantages of Bitcoin Cash together with stability in USD, gold, oil or whatever asset they prefer.
We believe that Bitcoin Cash and all crypto has a volatility problem that holds back adoption. AnyHedge is a trustless (except for a price oracle), synthetic derivative that we created to mitigate the stability problem using the incentives of speculation.GP's first production oracle is a mechanism that fetches price data from a stable price feed, signs that data with GP's private key and then hands the signed price message to users. While these oracle messages were designed to meet the needs of AnyHedge, they can be used in any BCH smart contracts that require a price.General Protocols (GP) is the first DeFi company built on Bitcoin Cash (BCH). GP produces open source protocols and software, and provides paid services for the BCH network. On November 15, 2020, the BCH network will undergo an upgrade and as with any upgrade, there is a risk of a network split at that time. This statement provides clear expectations for users regarding the upgrade.
his latest discussion was recorded on February 1st with attendees:
Andrea Suisani (Bitcoin Unlimited)
Cameron Lee (Online Retailer)
Emergent Reasons (General Protocols)
Freetrader (BCHN)
John Moriarty (Host)
Josh Green (Software Verde)
Paul Wasensteiner (Bitcoin Unlimited)
Tom Zander (Flowee)
Jonathan Silverblood(Jonathan): I started in 2013, mined my own Bitcoin and got some merchants to accept it in my hometown. In 2018 I decided to work full-time with Bitcoin Cash and built CashID, CashAccounts, Cashual Wallet and AnyHedge.03.08.2020 - The Bitcoin Cash (BCH) network will have an upgrade in November 2020. One outstanding issue is the need for improvement of the Difficulty Adjustment Algorithm (DAA). The well tested "aserti3-2d" proposal made by Jonathan Toomim solves the DAA issues in an elegant manner. Jonathan Toomim has provided extensive simulation data and code, and these have been peer reviewed by multiple Bitcoin Cash node implementations as well as outside experts. Jonathan Toomim has also written and submitted the aserti3-2d code to Bitcoin ABC, and had public and private discussions with them regarding it.Imaginary-uname from BCHN: Bitcoin Cash Node is new to many people. It was born as the result of the controversial IFP (Infrastructure Funding Proposal). Required by miners who were against the IFP, former members of Bitcoin ABC and developers from other nodes created BCHN.
We started a campaign with Flipstarter and successfully raised 978 BCH. We are committed to improving the utility of BCH. So far, such mining pools as easy2mine, SBI and bitcoin.com have publicly announced their support to BCHN.
It is written in modern C++17, which gives us all the power and speed of C++ and the usability of a modern language. Knuth is also a development platform that offers a set of libraries as a foundation for building applications.
In addition to providing a full node as an executable program, Knuth is a full-node as a library.
This is designed so that any user can build applications on top of Knuth libraries in their preferred language.Shortly after the proposal by Jonathan Toomim, Amaury Séchet created and committed Bitcoin ABC to a new DAA proposal called Grasberg. Unlike aserti3-2d algorithm, the Grasberg algorithm has not gone through peer review by most of the Bitcoin Cash node implementations nor has Bitcoin ABC provided more than cursory data to support it. Furthermore, the Grasberg algorithm changes the block time from 10 minutes to a variable number more than 11 minutes. The newly introduced slow blocks have never been requested by anyone in the past and they will cause a worse user experience for all users. Confirmations will take longer. Smart contracts depending on the long term standard of 10 minute blocks will be broken. All infrastructure that needs to be aware of DAA will have to validate against a complicated set of rules. Stakeholders in general will have increased doubt that other fundamental aspects of Bitcoin Cash may face arbitrary changes in the future. At the highest level, the slow blocks introduced by Grasberg algorithm reduce the profitability of Bitcoin Cash miners and the security of the Bitcoin Cash blockchain.
John Nieri(John): I first read the Bitcoin whitepaper in 2014. And I understand that the real P2P internet money is possible. But at that time, I was mostly an investor in the space. Later I participated in the blocksize debate and realized Bitcoin Cash is our way to keep the P2P currency alive. So I fully support Bitcoin Cash and decided to run businesses in the BCH ecosystem full time.
Lightning: I am a crypto column writer. I think the concept of decentralization is a good supplementary to the real world. I’m familiar with the scripting engine of Bitcoin. And recently I’ve been paying special attention to BCH as developers are building smart contract on it. Emergent Reasons: Yeah sure so I'll be speaking as a general representative of General Protocols, you know as a business operating on the Bitcoin Cash network and from our perspective there was an announcement, right? that you're talking about where a number of the full-node projects, maybe all of them, I'm not sure all of them, but many of them posted their intention to say that, um, basically that they didn't intend to do any consensus changes on the network and that there was no outstanding plans that were in any kind of condition to be upgraded in May, in any case. And, yeah, so General Protocols supports that. And we published an article as well that said although there are some things that we would really like to see improved in the protocol, right? Not huge changes but um pretty reasonable changes and focused changes. Although we would like those and we really need those, you know, it's not ready, so, you know, we wait and we wanna set up that culture and General Protocols supports that, that kind of shift toward a culture where we get ready, we communicate openly, publicly. All of these ideas get aired out and beat up and reformed and refined. And yeah we support that.
The beta oracle:
Used the public key
0273ee49099f0a09be514cbb45756bf49ad256d0a6de993107e98c89c16b6fa84e.Ran in multiple iterations, totaling about 4 months.
Produced well over 100,000 signed price messages.
Was used to mature and liquidate several hundred AnyHedge contracts on-chain.
The production oracle:
Uses the public key
02bca289e12298914e45f1afdcb6e6fe822b9f9c7cd671fb195c476ac465725e6f.Tracks the price of BCH in US cents, using the same stable Bitpay price data as the beta.
Generates price messages on a secured host separate from the message distribution.
In case of an outage, will recover by interpolating price data from the last published price to the current price.
We support an open, inclusive and professional development environment in Bitcoin Cash. Recently, Bitcoin ABC has proposed to implement a technical change to the difficulty adjustment algorithm. Not only do we object to the unfounded introduction of historical drift correction, which is not widely accepted as a real problem, but we disapprove of the way Bitcoin ABC proposed this change. The proposal was not representative of the core values we and others expect and uphold in the Bitcoin Cash space.
Further, there are specific technical issues that arise from the introduction of historical drift correction. Specifically, blocks can no longer be used to count time within transactions created before the proposed change, should the change be implemented. This breaks several assumptions used by Cryptophyl and partners in the development of new products for Bitcoin Cash and has a catastrophic effect on our product roadmap.
