@Jonas

@Jonas 10 May 2021

O CashFusion, where art thou? Today bitcoin.com release an article titled Over 67,000 Fusions: Cashfusion Participants Have Fused Billions of Dollars in Bitcoin Cash that got caught my eye. I think it was partly because I just had read Edward Snowdens tweets regarding bitcoins lack of privacy that got me thinking about the level of fungibility within BCH. 67k fusions is awesome but in the grand scheme of things, and considering that most users surely do multiple fuses for each coin, it is far from a state where Bitcoin Cash could be called a privacy coin. https://www.reddit.com/r/btc/comments/n90tr3/over_67000_fusions_cashfusion_participants_have/ https://twitter.com/Snowden/status/1391034268311293954 Ever since the inception of CashFusion in the Electron Cash desktop wallet and the tremendous work done by Mark Lundeberg, Jonald Fyookball and Calin Culianu it has been seen as *the* solution to get a decent degree of fungibility for our beloved coins. CashFusion itself is built on top of the current BCH protocol and did not require any form of network upgrade to researched, developed and released which helped a lot since no toxic discussions around consensus upgrades needed to take place. https://cashfusion.org/ https://electroncash.org/ One downside is that CashFusion, and similar CoinJoin protocols such as the predecessor CashShuffle, is a optional add-on. This means a user, or at least his or her wallet, has to explicitly take additional actions for a coin to get a more obfuscated history than it otherwise would in a base protocol where it's strictly mandatory to take these actions. This means that the *anonymity set* in Bitcoin Cash can only be as big as the number of users and transactions that participates in these CashFusion rounds. So for CashFusion to be effective it needs to be well used by a big share of the Bitcoin Cash participants. https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/CoinJoin https://cashshuffle.com/ Putting aside the theoretical and mathematical attacks to the protocol as such and whether or not transactions can be de-anonymized by chain analysis, that might be some article from someone else, I feel that the biggest issue is the size of the anonymity set. Too few users are fusing their coins! The crux of the issue is in my opinion the fact that there is virtually no way for a normal user to casually participate in CashFusion. As I stated above, it's implemented in the desktop version of Electron Cash which for all intents and purposes is nerd wallet. It's almost a play ground for new features where User eXperience and ease of has to stand back for flexibility and feature richness. The people we all hope to target with Bitcoin Cash as a medium of exchange, money for the world and bank the unbanked and so on, should in all honesty really not have to boot up the Qt interface on their computers and import seed phrases from their wallets on their smartphones. Normal people don't use desktops these days, so if it's not on a phone it's crap. This brings me to my main question: Why hasn't CashFusion been implemented in any mobile wallet yet? I'm not trying to criticize anyone in particular here since no one *needs* to do it. I sure haven't done it myself so I am in no position to point fingers but I am a little baffled that *someone else* haven't done it. It's getting more and more cringe worthy when random (more or less well known) people boast about the tremendous privacy of BCH because of the wonders of CashFusion and we all know how unavailable the actual user environment is. Last year 1000s of BCH has been pledged and donated for development of various Bitcoin Cash related software and still I haven't seen one person seek funding for doing the obvious work of implementing this flagship feature in a product that most people could actually use. Why is that? I believe that the main reasons are the technical challenge and some that I have heard whispers about are (in no specific order): The protocol is poorly specified. The protocol is very complex. Using a TOR socket (mandated by the protocol) on a mobile phone is hard Keeping a background network connection running for a long time is hard I encourage developers from all around the space to edit this list above. Add bullets, remove bullets, clarify points and find workarounds. The list above is probably inaccurate and I would love for people to fix it. I want a discussion to take place so we all know the feasibility and challenges going forward. What are the commercial actors views on this? Have they reached any conclusions that might be good to share with the broader community? Has any of the open source projects any specific need for funding to implement this? What's the hold up? If CashFusion for some reason is impossible to do with a reasonable UX on a standard Android and/or iOS phone I think we should take a breather and regroup. Is CashFusion really *the solution* to the fungibility problem? Is it really safe to use even though the anonymity set isn't *really* that big? Is there any other options? What does the solution space look like if we are able to take into consideration a consensus upgrade, i.e. a hard fork?

@Jonas 4 September 2020

On the IFP: How will the artists get paid? During 2020 the Infrastructure Funding Plan has been a hot topic, to say the least, surrounding the Bitcoin Cash network. My initial reaction to the the first IFP announcement was actually quite positive and it just did make some sense to pay for infra structure development and maintenance via the coinbase reward. https://medium.com/@jiangzhuoer/infrastructure-funding-plan-for-bitcoin-cash-131fdcd2412e I get that ABC wants to run their own show and leave the other full node implementations on another chain but until there is certainty about which of the two forks that remains "Bitcoin Cash (BCH)" throughout the cryptocurrency markets this split is not amicable and will cause a lot of problems. If one of the two sides of the fork gives up the name and implements replay protection the drama would immediately settle, but I don't think that'll happen because the name evidently carries a lot of value. From my point of view the IFP was discarded by the (loud part of the) majority of the infra structure developers and seeing flipstarter come to life and bootstrap projects such as BCHN and the BCHD SLP integration is quite amazing. I do not think that flipstarter or similar community driven donation models is sustainable beyond these initial rounds of funding so within a year we will probably be back to square one in terms of funding. https://flipstarter.cash/ https://bchn.flipstarter.cash/ https://bchd.flipstarter.cash/ So why do I consider the IFP to be a bad idea? Firstly I think that the drama surrounding Bitcoin Cash will intensify beyond the boiling point if there is a multi million dollar per year stream of money to fight around for everyone that consider themselves infra structure developers. Instead of every project trying to find their own way of putting food on their tables the default direction will be to get a part of the 8% coinbase and the way to do it is either convince the Global Network Council (GNC) of your excellence or trash talk the incumbents and claim that they are ineffective and therefor should direct the funding elsewhere. Oh the drama that will emerge! The details of the GNC has yet to to be announced but I have severe doubts that this organization will not be corrupted and eventually overthrown, resulting in yet another split. Why should miners and holders pay 8% to one team when another team claim to do the same for 7%, 5% or 0.1%? The we-can-do-it-cheaper-and-better-team will of course launch massive campaigns on social media to fire up a split because they are incentivized to do so. https://www.bitcoinabc.org/2020-08-27-global-network-council/ Secondly, and this occurred to me recently, is the premise of centrally secured funding and the ~15 year old echo when I hear proponents of IFP say things along the line of: "Who will pay for the infra". In Sweden circa 2006 a political party was formed and got into the eye of national media. The party was of course the Pirate Party led by the unknown IT guy Rick Falkvinge and although he didn't have any political background or media training some of the arguments brought forward resonated a lot with myself as a student in my young 20s. One question that he was asked on prime time TV often regarding his stance on allowing free copying of, for instance, music was: "How will the artists get paid?". Since a couple of days ago I see a very strong connection to the "Who will pay for the infra structure?" raised by the IFP proponents. https://falkvinge.net/2011/01/31/how-shall-the-artists-get-paid/ The answer is that this is a problem for the person working on the infra structure, not *everyone else*. If something needs to be done it'll get done if enough people and or capital depends on it. If the infra is written and maintained by a bunch of amateurs then we need to realize that the project doesn't carry enough value to be professional. Bitcoin Cash did fork off over three years ago and there are people working full time on it still and to my knowledge no-one has starved to death yet. I am fully aware that some of these people have unsustainable funding situations and have lost a significant amount of money, both in personal savings and opportunity costs. I am truly in awe of the sacrifices done by a lot of people to bring this technology where it is today and I hope that you will be rewarded in one way or the other, but *forcing* a funding model into the protocol is not the way to go. I'm sorry. If the situation is unsustainable then please step aside and if no one fills the gap then the gap is not meant to be filled. Is Bitcoin Cash doomed to fall into irrelevance with or without the IFP? Perhaps. But I consider the previous and upcoming split and dilutions of the Bitcoin Cash network effect and reputation far more damaging. *Clarification: I am not a miner, significant holder of coins or infra structure developer beyond a few sporadic code contributions to Electron Cash. I do not consider myself to have a strong voice within 'the community' and mostly lurks around BCH related channels to get my information. I am not a stake holder, just some random dude.*