Johnny’s Bitcoin Cash Rant

Editorial by Johnny B. Cache

November 12th, 2020 - Three Days Before The Fork

This post has been a long time coming, and I feel it is time to be put out there. The target audience is ultimately not just Bitcoin Cash fans. It’s for a wider community of crypto enthusiasts, hard-core Bitcoin believers, and the billions of people who don’t yet care about crypto at all. Sorry for the BCH lingo in this post. I hope it’s clear enough. This month marks an historic moment in crypto history, a split of two visions for how Bitcoin should be funded and governed. Let’s be real for a second. Bitcoin Cash hasn’t seen the adoption its supporters would have liked to see. Even though the technology works, the user experience is mostly smooth and there are pockets of merchant adoption in a few cities, the Bitcoin Cash project is overshadowed by Bitcoin, Ethereum, and XRP. XRP for Pete’s sake! How did that happen? However, I have the faint hope this will change. And I believe that the foundation for long-term growth will be laid in a few days.

Roger's Stickers

I first met Roger at a Bitcoin Cash Meetup. He showed me how to download the Bitcoin.com wallet and try it out to buy drinks. But I had already been converted to BCH a long time ago. I had watched his videos and was sending bcash left, right and center.  I told him how much I liked it. Roger. Bitcoin Jesus. Maxis hate him, bcashers want to be him. 

Roger's passion is contagious. He wears his heart on his sleeve. His personal experiences are milestones in Bitcoin history. Jail time? Yes, but they singled him out for selling fireworks that everyone was selling. He also saw first hand that cigarettes can be used as currency. His Mt. Gox endorsement video? That video was made in good faith, based on the information he had at the time. The infamous middle finger? A slip of character after false accusations of hiring sock puppets. He has always been up-front about these incidents. His message just made sense. BTC stalled growth, and BCH fixes this. BCH is the underdog, robbed of its Bitcoin title, which one glorious day it will regain. His Twitter trolls were clearly clueless about BCH or Roger’s background. Mr. Fast-Cheap-Reliable Transactions. 

"BCH has the potential to go up a thousand times", he told CNBC viewers. And he walked the walk: His company developed cool services like gift cards, tools for creating tokens, and the popular mobile wallet. He was on ABC's side in the trial against crazy Craig and organized a fundraiser for node development. And yet, the BCH to BTC price ratio kept falling. The BTC bashing didn't win many friends from the mainstream camp. Who cares about cheap transactions when your money loses value faster than you can spend it?  Where did we go wrong?

If you have been following the space, you begin to observe another pattern as well: Roger supporting SegWit2x before flipping to BitcoinCash. Roger posing in Craig's company, until an angry letter before the BSV split wakes him up. Roger making big announcements, like a $200M fund, coin fusion in the wallet, which you don’t hear much about anymore. Are you starting to see the pattern? Roger wants to do the right thing, but he keeps shooting himself in the foot. 

He flip-flopped from being passionate about the original infrastructure funding proposal to claiming that developers who have too much money start fiddling with the protocol, making it hard for businesses to build on. At the same time he's flirting with ‘BSV philosophers’ who have little coding experience. Oh, by the way, BSV just slowed adoption by randomly removing a critical feature (multisig), making it unattractive for payment businesses. Tech matters. It matters big time, especially when big bucks are on the line. “Maybe it's a market signal that infrastructure development shouldn't get funded”, Roger parroted the BSV philosophers. Now he’s openly stating he wants the protocol to be locked down so that businesses can build on it. It’s no wonder since he keeps firing developers, which means no continuity.

If BCH was a company, then Roger would be the marketing department that hates the tech department, simply because the previous tech team (BTC) changed the project specs.

Still, Roger, you are the Bitcoin legend, so thank you for all you've done. Bitcoin Johnny Appleseed. You've created a lot of visibility for BCH on the outside, but also a bit of chaos on the inside. Anyway, I still got that Bitcoin Cash sticker.

 Amaury In Australia

 Amaury has been ABC's lead developer from the start. He proudly presented the Bitcoin Cash fork at the Arnhem conference in 2017. He became both the savior and villain of Bitcoin Cash. His posts on Telegram and Twitter can be vicious. And yes, he rage-quit the conference call on that infamous last DAA developer meeting. Of course, that’s also just after Jonathan Toomim accused ABC of dishonesty and having ulterior motives by proposing a new DAA. It's true, Amaury's DAA simulation results paled in comparison with Toomim's beautiful graphs that he generated over weeks and months. "You want this angry Frenchman to be in charge of Bitcoin Cash development?", you ask. "Building the best money the world has ever seen? Seriously?!" And you have a point. There are better communicators than him. I mean, he even managed to alienate former allies like Jonald and the Joshes. But, yes, seriously. He's the guy. Why? Because he is right about the big picture. And if you are right about the big picture, it doesn't matter how many typos your rant on Telegram contains. He succeeded where Gavin Andresen and Mike Hearn failed. And he is leading a stellar technical team.

 Amaury has laid it out in clear and structured talks. If you haven't listened to his presentation at the Bitcoin Cash City conference, I recommend it. BCH lacks the resources for development and is effectively free-riding on Bitcoin Core's resources for code maintenance, updates, and bug fixes - just occasionally being able to help out the other side. With this dependency there is little chance of BCH flippening BTC. 

 Amaury's game theory is on point as well. Game theory is at the heart of crypto because it allows you to estimate how other players in the ecosystem will behave. Game theory made it clear that SegWit2x was dead in the water and that a fork was needed to kickstart the big block Bitcoin experiment. Now, let’s see how game theory plays out this time. But again, the big picture counts. He has been harping on about funding for years. He is not alone. Many other developers outside of ABC have agreed with him about the importance of attention to code quality and continuous maintenance in order to keep the network running reliably. And this doesn’t come for free. Projects ignoring this fact will be paying for it sooner or later.

Yet somehow the message doesn't get through. Rather than properly funding the reference implementation, many in BCH are proud of having seven different node teams. Guys. I know Bitcoin Cash is not a company, but when you build a new city, do you hire seven different companies, funded by donations, some of which have just set up shop? You want professionals to take care of it. You don't care if they're not the most polite. Politeness doesn't build that bridge. Steve Jobs wasn't polite. Elon Musk doesn’t sugarcoat. Linus Torvalds dealt with anger management issues. You don't pick your builders based on politeness. You pick those who know what they are doing and have a solid track record.

 Amaury has tried to hammer the message home, but after three years there is still no viable funding plan. Some people claim node developers are greedy for wanting a salary, for not having to beg for donations every six months. Amaury keeps ringing alarm bells. About code quality. About the maintenance work required. About key developers leaving BCH for other projects. About the pointless fights with BTC. About how investors want a predictable roadmap. And about how the funding is not even in the same ballpark as competing projects. Frankly, the budget is ridiculous for a project with a world-changing ambition like BCH. Amaury's predictions have been on point, but many in the 'community' don't want any of it. Finally the time has come where he decided to no longer politely wait for a solution and put the new funding plan on the table. It could have been an invitation to join going down a new path, but the plan was met mostly with disdain from other teams. The 'community' saw it as ABC throwing down the gauntlet.

"No-Tax" Rebels

The upcoming split has been a long time coming. There had been conflicts about things like the bounty for raising the limit of unconfirmed transactions and about the 6-month upgrade schedule. These conflicts were actively fuelled by people in the background who would love nothing more than to see ABC fail. Many were hoodwinked by their narratives.

 The no-tax resistance formed right after the original coinbase funding proposal in January by Jiang Zhuoer from BTC.TOP at the beginning of the year. The proposal was changed several times to address concerns, to please different parties. It turned out that none was good enough to please everyone and eventually the miners killed it. For a while it was buried. Flipstarter was born and funding kept pouring in for different node development teams. ABC's flipstarter was the only one that wasn't completed. "The market has spoken", was the reaction. As expected, ABC's new IFP plan, announced together with the new DAA, was instantly met with hostility. ABC started being called “a team that went rogue”, “corrupt” and "obviously looting the chain to line their own pockets".  The 'no tax' alliance was mobilized by those who benefit from ABC going under, but has also enchanted the kind ones, the ones who want to keep the community together to avoid a split. The loudest voices, unsurprisingly: miners that don't want to pay ABC a dime, other node teams that want a bigger piece of the action, some bitter BSV loyalists nobody cared to kick out, and Bitcoin white paper idealists who want to *decentralize everything*. 

A few BCH whales have started to make some noise in their support. Some believe the low BCH price is Amaury's fault (note, the BCH network keeps humming away). Some didn't like the way Amaury said 'thank you' for their donation to ABC. And some keep polishing their own proposal for how governance should work, solving all the problems, once everyone agrees to it. These ‘big block boys’ have become community darlings, and some BCH media channels have been more than happy to give them a platform.  The loudspeakers are on blast: "Paying a single address is bad. Central control of funds is communist central planning. It will lead to political games and corruption. Amaury just wants to cash out and buy his lambo." This narrative is being sold to the world. “The BCH community just fired Amaury". They insist that ABC is the rebel chain forking away from BCH. "We're not splitting, you're splitting". The rebels actively lobbied miners and exchanges. They fight for the ‘freedom of Bitcoin Cash’, but really they claim the mindshare and ticker. Whales reward the messengers with generous support. Already dancing on ABC's grave, some BCHN supporters are looking forward to the ‘ABC airdrop’ after the split. The messaging worked. Most of the applications on top of the network, wallets, exchanges, user facing apps, are siding with BCHN.

 Their narrative is seductive, but they forget one thing. They don't speak for the whole community. Vin Armani, who was the first to predict the coming split back in June, coined the term 'Bitshevik' in response. While many took this as an insult, Vin has clarified that the original word 'bolshevik' literally means 'majority': "It is meant as a commentary on those who valid moral righteousness simply because they hold a majority opinion." 

Coinbase funding for Bitcoin Cash is a big change, pragmatic and bold. ABC was offered the VC funding route in the past. They didn't take it. With the IFP the incentives are aligned to create value in a sustainable fashion, while avoiding takeover by outside interests. It provides regular income to developers carrying out critical work to keep the network running, and frees them of the need to compete for attention for fundraisers. It is also aligned with the white paper, whose last sentence reads: "Any needed rules and incentives can be enforced with this consensus mechanism." 

 The plan had been in the making for years, revised multiple times, and never pleased everyone. 

Let’s be clear about what’s happening. Others have been reaching out to take over the steering wheel. Getting rid of Amaury is like Ethereum firing Vitalik and proclaiming Ethereum Classic is the real Ethereum. In contrast to Ethereum, in Upside Down BCH World the revolutionaries are cheered on with sponsored megaphones.

 Like a married couple that’s been fighting for years, it's better to split now so that each can thrive as an individual. The kids are grown up and can decide for themselves which parent they join. Many projects have signaled they will stay with BCHN. Sure, it’s sensible to have a rudimentary ecosystem with an existing user base in place. And yes, there are competent people and supporters and people I like on both sides. 

What The Future Holds For BCHN

BCHN was forked from ABC and removed the IFP code. Since then the code bases have already started to diverge, so BCHN is effectively ousting ABC as lead implementation. In other words, BCHN is happy to shoulder the responsibility for running a multi-billion dollar network with volunteers funded by donations. Going forward, this means backporting from Core, maintaining code, and scaling the network. We're back to square one.  Except this time it's not ABC that is funded, but the BCHN team. Instead of a 'benevolent dictator' we will switch to a polite ‘non-leader’, the anonymous Freetrader. A few more key players are pulling the strings behind the scene. BCHN will use an 'evidence-driven process', where, according to the website, development is 'responsive to ecosystem needs, resulting in software that is performant, reliable and predictable'. Sounds great, right?

 But responsiveness to the ecosystem also means that the commitment to the roadmap is lost. So what about the roadmap? It seems that some still want to follow ABC's roadmap. Others seize the opportunity to pull out the roadmap they’ve been keeping in their back pocket. Yet others view the very existence of a roadmap as an attack on Bitcoin Cash's decentralized purity. Note that 80% of the funding for ABC competitors came from just two sources. Decentralized much? Just like in the early days, a few wealthy whales fund a few projects, hoping to build an ecosystem. Ultimately parties lost interest or had money troubles themselves, making continuous funding difficult.

BCHN may have enthusiastic developers. But again, it's the big picture that counts. Without commitment to a roadmap and with Roger’s BSV-esque demands to “lock down the protocol” BCHN has a worse value proposition than Litecoin. LTC is a technological dead end, but at least it doesn't do anything crazy. It’s still got the 'digital silver' meme going for it. BCHN is planning to develop new features led by individual champion volunteers. In other words, we won't know where this road will take us. But hey, maybe adoption will thrive. Maybe the token ecosystem will be the giant growth driver. Maybe read.cash or lazyfox will go hockeystick. However, if usage picks up meaningfully, that implies that the demands on the network will grow. Less continuity and attention to code quality always lead to more maintenance work or serious issues down the road. So far we have seen that markets are forgiving towards such blunders, but once trust is lost, it is difficult to regain. 

 The BCHN approach to decentralized development of infrastructure is certainly unique in the tech world. It may be even bolder than the IFP. If BCHN can demonstrate to the world that its development work can sustainably be funded by donations without an outside takeover, then I will consider the Bitcoin experiment successful. Also, Big Tech will take note and adopt decentralized development as a new paradigm. Based on the observations of the space, allow me to be skeptical. This is not how the real world works. This is not how anyone builds mission-critical network software. On top of that BCHN will inherit most of the problems of BCH, including the ‘bifurcation gene’ mentioned in a Chinese article a few days ago. You know what that means. Yes, another split is in the cards, somewhere down the road. I pray for thee, sweet BCH. I pray for the ecosystem built on top not to fly apart. And I pray for my sweet SLP tokens of all those teams that preemptively sided with you. Be fruitful and multiply.

 Don’t get me wrong. I believe it is worthwhile trying to continue going down the non-IFP route. It’s cool that BCHN is saving the current BCH experimental settings to explore what comes next. The positive scenario is that there will be a whole wave of creativity, innovations, and collaborations that lead to a thriving ecosystem.  All I say to the KOLs and supporters: Be honest. Make clear where you are and where you want to go. Don’t waste time bashing ABC once you have your own chain. See both chains as worthwhile experiments, and compete in the free market. Nice green, by the way.

BCHA - The Ugly Duckling

The new coin may start with a smaller core. It may be a rough start. But with BCHA the value proposition is clear: we get "hard monnaie", where predictability is paramount. We get the assurance that the roadmap for p2p cash will be executed according to plan. The foundation for world-scale cash will be built with state-of-the-art software engineering. The new coin will be confidently positioned in the multi-coin universe. It will have to assume a new identity. Just move on and let the BCHN & Co do their thing. The 'Bitcoin-Cash-is-the-real-Bitcoin' shackles will be broken and left behind. Like Jihan wrote back in 2017, “be friends with other coins, learn from them, and make BCH better”. 

BCHA will provide a solid base to build on and will welcome current and future enthusiasts. It will build the community and ecosystem it deserves and needs. It will attract those who believe that being a store of value and a means of exchange are not mutually exclusive. It presents a viable option for all those who collect Bitcoin BTC as a store of value, but are willing to experiment. It will welcome fans of other coins with solid teams and supporters that value steady progress towards a goal. And the goal of BCHA is still the same as described in the white paper: build peer-to-peer electronic cash for the world.

 Coinbase funding might just be the missing ingredient needed to create the flywheel for success. The new funding scheme will encourage investments that can spark the growth in the years to come, while preventing an outside takeover by whales or corporations. No more need to listen to shrill voices speaking for the 'community' that thrive on attention. Engineers and businesses that see value in the network will gravitate towards BCHA and evangelize it. Ultimately, profit is the driver that will bring adoption of p2p cash at internet scale. BCHA is aligned with this mission, and will be ready to grow. 

Bitcoin is just 11 years old. Bitcoin Cash just turned 3 this August. BCHA is laying the foundation for the next 100 years. I feel comfortable being in a minority during this split. Let the events unfold. Miners will decide the next step on November 15. Exchanges will decide the ticker. A new chapter begins. Let’s hope we will see the ugly duckling grow up and turn into a beautiful swan. I like the odds of long-term success. I like them a lot.