Grasberg will weaken the sound money properties of Bitcoin Cash

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4 years ago

Recently Bitcoin ABC announced that they're moving ahead with the Grasberg DAA algorithm for Bitcoin Cash. There are many things I'd like to criticize about the proposal, including that it's not a proposal but a threat in a game of chicken, and many have done so already.

Yet there's one very important thing I feel haven't gotten the attention it deserves, and that's the claim that correcting the historical drift would strengthen the sound money (or hard money) properties of Bitcoin Cash.

As I'll explain, I believe that correcting the historical drift will be detrimental for the sound money value proposition as it makes arbitrary changes to the emission schedule.

What is drift and drift correction?

In Bitcoin Cash we want the time to be around 10 minutes between blocks. We can't have it always be exactly 10 minutes, but on average this is what we'd like.

The problem is that the hashrate of Bitcoin has been rising a lot since it's invention and the algorithm couldn't correct for that, so the average time between blocks is closer to 9 min 30 sec instead of the targeted 10 min. Since new coins are created with each block this means that the predicted emission schedule has been shifted, and more new coins than initially predicted have been created.

This is "drift" and the idea of drift correction is to make the time between blocks be 10 minutes on average.

But there's a subtle, but important, detail here. Do you:

  • Correct the drift going forward, so starting from the upgrade date all future blocks will have an average time of 10 minutes.

  • Correct the historical drift, so starting from the total lifetime of Bitcoin Cash all blocks have an average time of 10 minutes.

We cannot do both so we must choose one. This is the key technical issue that's currently dividing the community.

In the last DAA dev meeting one of the reasons Amauary gave for choosing to correct the historical drift was that the new DAA algorithm had to choose a reference point, and he didn't like it to be an arbitrary block so the only choice would be the genesis block.

This is a completely invalid reason and it's purely an implementation detail that nobody except a developer with OCD might get annoyed over. It's like arguing for black screws over silver screws inside an engine because you find them prettier. It does not matter.

(There are technical reasons to choose the block before the upgrade as the reference point, which is why all other DAA proposals did just that, but I won't get into them here.)

The other claim that it would improve the sound money property demands a longer answer, but first what is sound money?

What is sound money?

If you google "properties of money" you might find this infographic:

http://money.visualcapitalist.com/tag/properties-of-money/

It says that money should be fungible, durable, portable, divisible, acceptable, uniform and limited in supply. The only thing that matters in the DAA context is that money should be limited in supply, which means that a relatively constant supply of money should ensure that values remain relatively constant.

It means that money should avoid the trap that fiat easily falls into, where banks print tons of money to inflate the supply. The money supply should be fairly constant and resistant to change.

This is also something that Amaury said in the dev meeting, that we must under no circumstances alter the emission schedule of Bitcoin Cash. This is absolutely something I agree with and a vital part of sound money is that nobody can change the money supply or the emission rate.

It's why gold has been the prototype of sound money for centuries. Despite a lot of efforts by alchemists nobody managed to create gold. The only way to get new gold is to find it in the earth and dig it up, which is naturally constrained by nature.

The gold supply is literary set in stone.

Historical drift correction is an arbitrary change to the emission schedule

It would be great if we had a time machine so we could go back and replace Satoshi's DAA, which is also the cause for most of the drift, with a better one. This is the only way we could truly fix the historical drift.

But sadly we cannot. So Grasberg does the next best thing, it tries to compensate for the drift by introducing even more drift! It slows down blocks by about 12.5% for five years, meaning we'll have 11 min 25 sec average blocks until 2025 and after that it goes back to 10 minute average again.

If you think that sounds arbitrary you're right. Grasberg includes completely arbitrary parameters, which Amaury cited as a reason to reject the other DAA proposals. The difference is that Grasberg changes the parameters of the all-important emission schedule that will affect all users of Bitcoin Cash, while the alternatives makes a choice with no consequence for any user.

Why couldn't we compensate for the drift during a 100 year period instead of 5 years? Why not 10 years? Hell, why couldn't we do it all in one year, rip the band-aid and get it over with?

No reason.

Make no mistake, while we may call it a "drift correction", a "drift reparation" or a "drift compensation" it's really an arbitrary change to the emission schedule, and this in turn has direct consequence on the supply of Bitcoin Cash.

The only non-arbitrary choice is to simply ignore the historical drift.

(The real purpose of the DAA change is to reduce the gameability of the algorithm, where miners are able to abuse the algorithm for profit and to the detriment of all users.)

How large of a drift are we talking about?

I think it's important to understand how large drift we're talking about here.

According to Jonathan Toomim in Dec 2020 there will be 1.3% more coins in circulation than a perfectly average 10 minute blocks would have produced. If we would activate ASERT (which does not compensate for historical drift) this will be lowered to 0.6% in 2025, but will in 2025 be 0% with Grasberg (and unchanged after that since none of them drift).

So with Grasberg we will have 11 min 25 blocks for 5 years, to correct a 0.6% drift.

What image does changing the emission schedule present?

While Amaury wanted to send a message that Bitcoin Cash is sound money, and that we'll never change the emission schedule, what image would we really be sending?

We would be signaling that we find arbitrary changes to the emission schedule acceptable and that we're fine with changing supposedly untouchable parameters of Bitcoin Cash, for a measly 0.6%.

People will start to wonder, what will they change next? Alter the 21 million coin limit? Move Satoshi's coins? Or perhaps reassign a part of the miner reward to the benevolent dictator himself?

It seems pretty clear to me that messing with the emission schedule like this weakens our image as hard and unchangeable money.

Compensating for the historical drift has never been mentioned before Grasberg, despite months and years of DAA research, simply because nobody cared that the historical average time between blocks isn't exactly 10 minutes. People have realized that we cannot change the past and what's important is the time between blocks going forward.

Amaury thinks he has sound money figured out, but his proposal would hurt the sound money quality, not improve it. Nobody should be able to manipulate the supply or creation rate of sound money, yet Grasberg would do exactly this.

If you really want Bitcoin Cash to be sound money, you should reject Grasberg.

I apologize for not adding timestamps to some of the things Amaury said in the DAA meeting, I don't have time to listen to it again just to add them to my references.

I also must thank the ABC team for so conclusively prove that they do suffer from the Not Invented Here Syndrome with their Grasberg proposal. I did kind-of predict it in an earlier article of mine, but I didn't expect it to be so egregious.

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4 years ago

Comments

At first I thought it was just an argument trolls used on social media, but hearing Amaury and Mengerian say it themselves just cements it.

$ 0.00
4 years ago

It’s very important article. I am completely agree with their decision. So, thanks for give information.

$ 0.00
4 years ago

I think it's not really technical for them. From my recent interactions with Amaury and ABC proponents I realize that there are different expectations on their side about how things should be decided. TLDR version would be that ABC expects to be considered as the standard, they want to have the only say about the protocol decisions and they find it annoying that there are other teams raising their voice.

Also as mentioned by people who are a fan of this authoritarian mentality, it is ABC's personal project and everyone who is not happy can have their separate fork. They are the leaders and the rest are supposed to be the followers!

The truth is somewhere in the gray area. This was never communicated from the beginning to people who invested their time, money and reputation on a fork that was supposed to be the representative of freedom, free market principles and real decentralization. Not decentralization in the form of money, because from BTC experiment we found out that's not enough, but also decentralization in the way decisions are made, in protocol and in respecting free market principles (miners decide how many transactions they are willing to process as long as technical limitations allow).

So ABC continues with their expectation of owning the decisions regarding the protocol and an unhappy team because their "incentives are not aligned". This relationship between businesses and actual users of BCH and ABC is turning into a toxic relationship that starts to manifest with more passive aggressiveness on the side that believes they lost more (ABC).

This is a bad relationship that either needs to be resolved or broken up. The relative truth here is that, ABC had options for making money but they didn't like those. They could have had a business or put out their funding campaign before IFP! However, they wanted an option to make money without explaining to the community, responding to the priorities and working towards the goals of the people who funded them. They wanted to work on things that they like to work on, same as any other developer likes to do (but we usually don't get to!)

However, there are issues to be discussed here. Many people in BCH community never signed up for this deal. It's clearly obvious that people like Roger Ver would never put their reputation, money and time on the line if they wanted to create the same mechanisms as Blockstream .

Also ethically speaking, making any changes to a decentralized protocol without community buy-in is wrong. Immutability is one of the main characteristics of a blockchain. It is written in most of the academic or white papers related to the blockchains in general. Immutability can be removed with changes to the protocol. So allowing one central body to make all the decisions regarding the protocol, can remove the immutability characteristic of a blockchain.

My other response is to people who call it freedom of participation. "If you don't like it, fork off". You should understand that according to the whitepaper and roadmap, BCH sold investors and community a product. The warranty of this product is the promises given in the beginning. ABC being the sole leader of the protocol was none of those promises. However whitepaper and roadmap were. Making changes without community buy-in is very similar to selling a product with warranty and cancelling a warranty arbitrarily, because the new CEO doesn't agree with it.

Sorry for long essay, however this is my understanding of the situation given the last few conversations that we had in Twitter. The way I see it is that, ABC wants to gain the standard level leadership they want using their decisions. This level of ownership can potentially empower them to enable IFP without miner consensus. The less developers working on the protocol, the better for them which explains the current situation regarding DAA unnecessary drama which is not actually a technical matter, but political, power move 4D chess played only to build the foundation for the next steps.

$ 0.28
4 years ago

As an example of exactly this mentality look no further than one of ABC's explanations of why they didn't copy jtoomim's asert code.

"Because he didn't submit a pull request to the ABC repository". (Look it up in the second DAA livestream.)

At first I thought it was just an argument trolls used on social media, but hearing Amaury and Mengerian say it themselves just cements it.

$ 0.11
4 years ago

Completely agree. It does the exact opposite of what it claims. Also undoing 1.3% faster inflation by punishing everyone with 12.5% slower blocks for 5.5 years is just not a huge benefit to be gained for paying a very severe mid-term cost.

$ 0.00
4 years ago

Wow

$ 0.00
4 years ago

In short, we will decide on the algorithm capable of giving us the best possible results in the exchange that we are trying to make, and that is why they are the complications of many investors.

$ 0.00
4 years ago

Keep sharing

$ 0.00
4 years ago

thank you for sharing informative article.

$ 0.00
4 years ago

Thank you for this article very informative

$ 0.00
4 years ago

Thanks

$ 0.00
4 years ago

Informative

$ 0.00
4 years ago

Great article, and it makes sense. Thank you for making it clear to us.

$ 0.00
4 years ago

The update is a wonderful one but my own is that let their not lost of funds.

$ 0.00
4 years ago

I think you will be successful

$ 0.00
4 years ago

the grasberg algorithm is one of the solutions that comes to modify the world of cryptocurrencies, greetings

$ 0.00
4 years ago

Giid article

$ 0.00
4 years ago

❤️🤗

$ 0.00
4 years ago

Thanks

$ 0.00
4 years ago

Very informative. Thank you for the write up

$ 0.00
4 years ago

Thank you =)

$ 0.00
4 years ago

Thanks

$ 0.00
4 years ago

Great article!

$ 0.00
4 years ago

good article. i like it bro. write more.

$ 0.00
4 years ago