The Bitcoin Cash ecosystem needs to recognize and accept some facts. And then we need to establish a constructive and stable path forward that enables us to onboard billions to global-scale, censorship-resistant peer-to-peer electronic cash.
Some Facts
Where We Are
The Bitcoin Cash name, brand, vision, momentum, ecosystem, people, businesses, market capitalization is all worth saving, securing, protecting and growing.
The Bitcoin Cash ecosystem today maintains the mantle of the true continuation of Bitcoin, world-scale P2P electronic cash for everyone.
Some people don’t like other people, for a variety of reasons, many justified.
We are stuck with each other, so we best make the most of it.
Many people and institutions would like to see Bitcoin Cash fail and/or would like to syphon value away from Bitcoin Cash. We must not permit this.
There are multiple, varied and complex threats to the future of Bitcoin Cash.
A successful 51% attack and resulting chain reorganization, while unlikely, rests on the protection of people like Jiang Zhuoer, Jihan Wu and Haipo Yang — not on the fundamentals of Bitcoin Cash. It is time to get ourselves together and build on our own feet.
Bitcoin Cash was 0.16 BTC in early Aug 2017, peaked around 0.4 BTC in Nov 2017, and today it sits around 0.025 BTC. That’s more than 90% down from its peak when compared to BTC, not fiat.
Bitcoin Cash was at 0.08 BTC on 14 Aug 2018. Today it is at 0.025 BTC. BSV is at 0.02 BTC. Put together (0.045 BTC), the two coins are only worth 56% of what Bitcoin Cash was prior to the fork. We are losing ground.
People are lost in “sides”. Are you on side X or side Y? Forget sides. This is about finding a middle way forward, a sane way to achieve stability that keeps Bitcoin Cash together.
Statement of Principles
Personal attacks are destructive and should be avoided/ignored. To avoid engaging in personal attacks, criticize the person’s actions, ideas, attitudes, behavior, etc. Not the person himself.
Bitcoin Cash is the real Bitcoin.
We are better together.
Splits are not the end of the world, sometimes they are inevitable, friendly and fair splits are better than contentious splits / hash wars — but the best split is no split.
A critical mass of grassroots passion is required for mass adoption.
The best technology is required for mass adoption.
Technology serves people, and people’s wants are always changing.
The full node softwares that are used by miners to process transactions, create blocks and issue new coins are in constant evolution and require constant maintenance. There is no such thing as locking or freezing the protocol.
Value only exists if people exist. Value is produced and called into existence by people. Value is borne from people.
Without people, technology is hunks of metal or ones and zeros on integrated circuits of no value whatsoever.
We need more people in Bitcoin Cash, especially builders.
Bitcoin Cash is not about any one individual or company, not you, not me, not any single individual.
Proactivity and professionalism beat passivity and complaining every time.
Bitcoin Cash welcomes everyone who wants to build censorship-resistant peer-to-peer electronic cash that scales to serve billions of daily active users, including people who make less than $2 a day.
Likewise, talk of purging people or organizations from Bitcoin Cash is out of place. Bitcoin is for everybody — especially for people you don’t like, as they bring new perspectives and abilities.
Bitcoin Cash is a big tent. There will always be people you don’t like. Deal with it gracefully.
Focus on the middle, not the extremes. The fact that there are extreme statements being made does not mean those statements represent any considerable amount of influence or power. When one side points to an extreme statement, do not assume it represents anyone in particular of note.
Why NOT Another Fork
Another fork will mean public ridicule and the resulting loss of motivation of our grassroots. It will damage the brand.
Forks are not fun but Bitcoin Cash has to be fun.
Another fork will delay the injection of meaningful outside capital to build apps for mass adoption.
Another fork will reduce transaction count and real block size on all resulting chains.
Another fork will set back protocol development funding.
Another fork will set back DeFi on Bitcoin potentially years.
Another fork will cause holders to net lose value.
Another fork will reduce hashrate, and thus security, on any resulting chains.
Another fork will result in Bitcoin Cash falling below BSV in terms of market capitalization.
Even if there is a successful diversion of part of the block reward to protocol development (IFP, Infrastructure Funding Plan) on one or more of the resulting chains, the loss in coin value could well mean that the value of such an IFP would only provide for chain maintenance, not further development — returning us to square one.
The idea that forks are good because they produce more coins to hold and mine is self-destructive.
The successful coin requires an ecosystem of grassroots builders that are passionate about it.
Miners need builders because builders create apps that generate new transactions, which generate new transaction fees in the coinbase for the miners and ultimately increase the value of the coins miners mine.
Forks diminish the passion of grassroots builders, introduce uncertainty at the moment of attracting new builders and new capital, and generally speaking erode the net value position of holders.
Making Bitcoin Cash into a corporate coin is suicide. Grassroots and business must co-exist, if not actively cooperate.
The Bitcoin ABC plan will turn their coin into a corporate coin.
Amaury Séchet and Bitcoin ABC
Amaury Séchet is not capable of engaging in the leadership required to steward the ecosystem through these times and towards a better future. It pains me deeply to have to say this in public.
Amaury is not an effective leader, period, full stop.
Amaury is a highly capable software developer.
His steadfastness, commitment, raw skills, ability to marshal minimal resources in order to keep the lights on for Bitcoin Cash for years are all unparalleled. These qualities are to be appreciated, honored and respected.
But Amaury needs to recognize his limits and learn how to operate as part of a team.
Amaury Séchet still has much value to offer to Bitcoin Cash and this fact should be recognized.
Bitcoin Cash aims to be a decentralized peer-to-peer value transfer system that will flippen BTC and be universally recognized as the real Bitcoin. The fact that so much here revolves around Amaury and simultaneously Amaury is unwilling to work as part of a team is a problem.
That problem must be solved, otherwise the breakup of Bitcoin Cash is inevitable. This would set back the Bitcoin Cash vision at least 5 years, if not extinguish it.
Change the world and profit enormously, or support Amaury Séchet as he operates clumsily outside his areas of expertise, leading us all down the wrong path. This is the decision that Amaury himself has designed for us.
Funding
Everyone is waiting for the next bull market. It may never come. We have to build with what we have now. Stop waiting for someone else to fix the problems for you.
Protocol development funding will have a knock-on effect of attracting more capital, both human and financial, to Bitcoin Cash. Protocol development funding must happen.
Of particular interest are the DeFi funds popping up. We can do DeFi on Bitcoin Cash, and do it better. But only if we have our ducks in a row.
We’re not going to build world-scale money eating ramen in our parents’ respective basements. We need resources, including talent, both business and software talent.
Bitcoin Cash need not go the Ethereum DeFi path of corporate, Wall-Street-ization. Therefore, we can have a greater impact with fewer resources. But we still need the resources.
We need to adopt the free-and-open-source-software (FOSS) attitude of welcoming and leveraging volunteers, part-timers and business contributions. This has the advantage of requiring less funding.
Jiang Zhuoer, CEO of BTC.TOP, has put forth an idea called The Satoshi Awards that can serve as bounties for major forward progress in Bitcoin Cash protocol and application development.
Organization
Committees and bureaucracy are not an answer, but we do need to establish processes around certain things to ensure a predictable playing field, consistent growth, transparency, dis-incentivize drama and to make new people feel welcome.
Haipo Yang’s proposal for a Bitcoin Cash Standard Organization is interesting and worthy of consideration.
We need a technical lead who is a reasonable and competent person with a minimal ability to communicate and work with others, who understands the need for a team approach — not a go-it-alone approach.
We need a technical ambassador, who can shepherd new volunteer and part-time protocol developers through the protocol development process, and can identify candidates to work full time on protocol development. This person has to be technically competent, a decent communicator, have a welcoming presence but also be willing to tell egotistical grandstanders to shut up, sit down and stop stirring the pot.
We need a receiving area for business developers — people who are interested in building businesses on Bitcoin Cash, to give them encouragement, point them at tools and mentor them towards success. I recommend the BCH Ignite workspace on discord.
We must cooperate on protocol development with complete transparency, integrity, as leaders and with a minimum of guile.
There indeed and without a doubt are entities on reddit that are exacerbating our internal divisions. They will drive us to the destruction of our dreams if we are not careful. Remember our Seven Social Principles from Rick Falkvinge, among them: “We reward the positive.”
Reddit is broken as a method of communication and governance for those of us building Bitcoin Cash.
We can form a standards organization / foundation which serves to harmonize competing interests around protocol development, ensuring an open, transparent and collaborative development process.
We can structure this organization in the way most suitable for ecosystem growth, identifying the suitable stakeholders in an open process.
We can structure an IFP, if there is support for it, that pays to a foundation which would have an open and consistent process for usage of the funds.
We can separate an IFP, if there is support one, from the protocol development teams, to remove conflict of interest and reduce power concentration.
Going Forward
To increase the value of Bitcoin Cash, we need to stop airing our dirty laundry in public and promote our value instead.
We need to produce excitement, flame passion, produce good PR and make some genuine progress both on funding protocol development and on attracting more application-builders to Bitcoin Cash.
Bitcoin Cash today is a conspiracy of ego and foolishness. We need to move away from bad habits ASAP, cold-turkey-style.
We need to build apps, and we need to support app builders.
We need to build on top of each others’ apps.
We need to onboard 5 billion daily active users by 2030. Read my thoughts on mass adoption here: A Manifesto for Bitcoin Cash Adoption in the Developing World.
Next Steps
Therefore, I put forward the following as next steps that need to be taken by those of us who are serious about building Bitcoin Cash.
Behavior
No more governance on reddit.
No more personal attacks on reddit.
No more protocol development on reddit.
No more personal rants on reddit. Just because you are involved in Bitcoin Cash does not mean you get to do a feeling dump on r/btc and provide entertainment to the do-nothing spectators there. Be smarter than that. Make constructive proposals instead.
No more public campaigns to gain “popular support” on reddit, a place full of sockpuppets, voting bots, BTC and BSV trolls, and otherwise open to those who would psyop us into ripping each others’ throats out.
Protocol development must move outside the range of public forums and must embrace a calm, reasoned approach, such as that of the new bitcoincashresearch.org.
Accept that you will never like or approve of everyone, maybe not even of most people, working on Bitcoin Cash. Deal with it. Think about how you are getting their work essentially for free. They work for you. We are all contributing value to each other’s pots.