#276 Amaury Séchet: Bitcoin Cash

Transcript

[Music] this episode of epicenter is brought to you by Microsoft Azure do you have an idea for a blockchain app but are worried about the time and costs it will take to develop the new Azure blockchain dev kit is a free download that brings together the tools you need to get your first app running in less than 30 minutes learn more at aka OMS slash epicenter I and welcome to episode my name is Veronica crane and my name is sunny other well and so you know it's just I'm

starting off quickly with some announcements epicenters gonna be holding a meet-up next week in Paris right coinciding with ECC and myself and Sebastian will both be there and it'll be cool meet up you can come meet you know the host some other past guests that we've had as well as you know other listeners and it should be a good time and also at ECC I'll go ahead I'll be going and giving a workshop on the cosmos SDK and so it's a two-hour hands-on workshop so if you're interested in getting started with developing using that come check that out cool yeah unfortunately I won't be able to make it this year but I was here I

think two years ago and it was lots of fun so I am envious of of the Meetup and hopefully the next time I'll be part of it too it's roughly my favorite aetherium conference I've been to so today we're gonna speak with Emery sayshe he's the leaky valve pick on ABC and speaking about big con cash something we haven't covered before now he felt there's so much to talk about here that we've ended up splitting it up into two episodes so that's just a heads up so this is going to be part one that we listen to today we spoke a lot about you know kind of his early getting into Bitcoin the block size debate and the whole scalability debates that happened years ago but they

were really kind of the genesis to pick on cash and a lot that came after us we spoke about Segway to X so it's a little bit of a history tour as well and I think it's and maybe some new listeners they don't remember those times but they were you know there's a lot of heated debates about this topic years ago and we did countless episodes on this topic so if you're interested it's definitely a very very interesting time and that of course Bitcoin cash arose out of and then we also spoke a bit about some of the different technical views around scaling around hard Forks around you know transaction ordering and yeah so it was a great conversation yep

with that let's go to interview a family so we're here with armory sesh a armory is the delete eval or pick on ABC and he's working on Picon cash for a long time of course bacon cash is something that we've never really talked about on this podcast even though it's been around for for quite some time and at some point you know it took up so much mind space in the in the cryptocurrency world but still there's a lot of interesting things going on with in bacon cars really looking forward to diving into both the history as well as you know the technological differentiation that has come up in bacon cash yeah thanks so much for

joining us on Murray thanks for having me so I remember we spoke about a year ago for a while and one of the things I remember that you talked quite a bit about how you got into Bitcoin originally which was like very early on do you mind sharing I have you early exploration of the coin yes well first I was very interested in like digital currency event before it existed this was you know something that was interesting to me and I discovered Bitcoin in late 2010 it was November or December and sonar was kind of like the first instantiation of that idea that

was actually working there was you know produce attempt but they all were flowed in some way so I was very interested and started following what's going on and then after said more like in 2012 or so it started growing very big so I was like okay this is not just me that is seeing something there that is interesting but actually it seems that there are a lot of people in the world that started catching up with that idea so yeah you know in 2012 or on that I was you know this is where I had the realization that it would become very very big at the time did you he's just kind of

watching it afar or did you start maybe working on some little things or exploring different aspects of the code or like what in what way did you engage if Bitcoin back then so I was more interested by the economic aspect of it to begin with so I didn't looked in the cup right away I looked in the cup more recently when you know because in the early days it seems that there was a team of developer that were you know doing just fine so it's not like there was much of a need for me to get involved in the code but say I probably started to look into coding in 2015 maybe you're so I see and so you know

instead of jumping in full time I know when we were discussing you mentioned you were spending you hat you spent a lot of time at Facebook along during that time so I'm like you know twenty ten twenty up till like you know twenty fifteen or so and so you know was like what was Facebook at all like interested in like what was going on or was this EXO to something that was just on your side interest and like also how did your time at Facebook like help you know you know maybe impact the way you look at blockchain development and whatnot okay so so the main problem for a company like Facebook is that right now there are many open question when it comes to scaling block chains and so if a company like Facebook where do you say okay you know like Facebook for instance has a

payment system within their missing G up right if they were to say okay we involve Bitcoin in messenger like next week it would be a giant disaster right because there would be so much people using it at some point and you know today torture couldn't handle it so some some engineer at Facebook were interested by Bitcoin and even some engineer I know at the time wrote some code to support it but it was not scalable enough for it to makes a lot of sense for Facebook you know to adopt that and so that was a bit of the situation that wasn't peaceful though my

experience at Facebook I think was useful in many ways because so first I've worked on I worked on in the cross Department of Facebook so what is gross at Facebook it's people building technology to improve Facebook so that more people use it essentially you know simplify a lot and that gave me a lot of insight about how to make a product that people want to use and how to grow that from you know from a technical standpoint but not only and yeah yeah so that was useful to bring that in Twitter

I think it give me a different mindset that most people may have in the space and so recently there's been lots of you know it's news that Facebook is starting to have a serious blocking effort and they're a Cree hiring some team and supposedly it's like you know substantial effort in there what's now that you have some distance you don't work at Facebook anymore you can really share your opinion what do you think what's your expectation where Facebook will end up doing with blockchain um I don't have any particular insight because as you mentioned I'm not working for Facebook anymore what I would expect from that is maybe something that is very ripple like to you settle payment

because Facebook has a lot of international payment system in there and right now they rely on third party to settle like like PayPal and federal and and this kind of people so if they can develop something that is similar to ripple it could help their system quite a bit and I think this is I think this is what they are doing but I don't I don't know any better than anyone else so that's more of an internal enterprise product than than a consumer facing thing I would expect did yeah I would expect because you know Facebook does have very much dis culture of you know let's build an alternative currency to subvert the

system or whatever this is not this is not something that is built in the DNA or the company like Facebook so it would be very surprised if this is what they were doing yeah absolutely so then you mentioned 2015 you started getting seriously involved in in the Bitcoin space and I guess that's also sort of when the blockchain or the debate when the block size was really you know heating up and of course on this podcast we did countless episodes on it so well what triggered this involvement back then and how do you remember the block size two bit okay so yeah it's very interesting because one of the one of the question I

had actually had the small intervention in the community in like 2012 or something like that so okay for people to know I was there very early on but for the most time I was you know keeping a very low profile and the reason is I mean I think most people in the space can understand this is like a very subversive technology and so it's not always the best idea to you know attach your name to it early on and I think this is why people like Satoshi you know choose to stay anonymous and I was kind of in the same mindset but I still had some interaction with the community in 2012 around the block size because there was kind of like my last question at that time I saw the technology is there

is working it has the potential to be big but there is this block size stuff and that it was very clear to me at the time that if the block size stuff say then eventually we kind of run to the limit and and so you know it's gonna prevent the growth of the system so I went in there I asked people but at the time people almost everybody was like yeah no problem you know like when we get anywhere close to the actual limit we're gonna raise it and everything so I was like okay so this seems to be moving in the right direction so I should you know I should consider this to be something very serious and then what happened is that the people that are

more on the side where the block size limits you stay small starting up with more and more influence into the community I think the people that were for raising the block size made a lot of strategic mistake along the way that a lot those people to gain a lot of influence and so it results in the situation where at some point those people we're more influential and more numerous than the one that wanted to increase the block size and this is where this whole thing started to you know journey to war and of sometimes what are some of these you know strategic mistakes that like some of these big blocks proponents made would one of them be backing a Craig rights

claim to being Satoshi perhaps yeah but that was fairly late I think even before that they were they were values mistakes so what do you see in most open source projects so there is another project I participating a lot that is called LLVM it's a compiler or infrastructure project so it's for people who don't know it's software that Texas code that is written by developer in a way that human being can understand and turn it into binary data chip can execute and this project is you know as part is different from many big company in you know the computer science base so you have company like Google and

Facebook and Amazon and these kind of people they are gonna contribute why do they contribute because they have billions of several literally right and if you have 1 million server you improve the performance of application by 1% it's 10,000 server that you don't need anymore that you can use to do something else so it lead when you have like millions of machine it's really quickly add up to very substantial amount of money so they are participating for those reason you have people from Intel or AMD or arm or you know chip manufacturer and why because they want to make sure that the code generated for their chip is you know very high quality they also want to ensure that maybe the engineers that work for Intel they care a lot about the performance of the code

generated for Intel but they don't care that much about the performance on AMD chips right so if you let the Intel engineer to all the work and you are AMD this is probably a strategic mistake because you know your your processor are gonna end up being worse for your customer because the software support around it for compiler is not as good and I think the big blocker made that mistake so the the people that were more for small block invested very even in infrastructure right like company like like block string for instance hired a lot of developer of the core software client and the author company not as much another result you have you have this

defect where if you depend on some infrastructure but you are not really invested in it the the people directly like you know you are at the mercy of the people building it and so I think that was a bit of a strategic mistake sir I probably the first one in the biggest one so the small blocker narrative has been kind of like you know in line with that where they've been saying look all the core developers and main infrastructure people are relatively you know very Pro small blocks and then like you know a lot of these companies and miners are very like throw big blocks but you know you they don't they actually flip the reasoning their claim is that like you know the reason the core developers are overwhelmingly Pro small blocks is

because they have like some technical insight that makes them realize that big blocks are infeasible do you think that's up there like you know how valid that claim is of that I don't think that is the case I think it's more of a difference of opinion on what's important and where the project should go so for people in the Bitcoin cash community peer-to-peer electronic cash is back you know to the most important thing and you want to have the best property for the system you know that fit that bill people that were more on the small block sized is so Bitcoin more as a settlement linear and you would use other system to transact like l2 and lightning Network and maybe liquid and

you know various other stuff like that and so you transact using the system and you use BTC just as a settlement layer for those systems so there is a very important difference of vision and so when you don't want to build the same stuff then they'll just be the the trade off that you are making are not going to be the same and I think this is where the main differences but so why do you think there was a lack of you know big-block support amongst core developers like why did the big blockers never really take a cake step up and take like a big role in a lot of this core infrastructure development well I think

the people on the big block size were more coming from the economic standpoint and I came to be coming from the economic standpoint and maybe that community was a bit weaker on the technical fundamental for quite some time I think I see I see the I think a lot of people in the big block run but he did not realize how important it was to make sure you have a solid infrastructure but the people in the small boxes they realize that very much very early on yeah that's very interesting and then one of the things that is noteworthy is that most or a majority of the co-developers were in favor of small

blocks but at the same time the miners tended to be in favor of bigger blocks why is that I mean why do you think there's any economic reasons why miners would prefer something like electronic cash approach to you know this settlement vision it always seemed a little bit counterintuitive to me because that you'd think that miners would want higher transaction fees so the smaller blocks well no like the revenue of the miner is the transaction fee times the number of transaction right so for miner to generate higher revenue you essentially have to do general direction they can go into they can try to increase the volume

of transaction or they can try to increase the transaction fee I think that the increase the transaction fee are projects or they don't make a lot of sense the reason is that everything else being equal you'd rather use the product that have smaller fee so if there is one product that after high transaction fee and limited capacity and and also one would have a very large capacity but low transaction fee then on the long run you should see most of the volumes you know moving to the one that have high capacity and low fees I think if you are a minor and you are thinking about this long term the second you know the second one makes more sense okay so early on there was a lot of

these you know it's not fair to say that there was no development support behind you know big blocks rather it just was missing from a lot of the you know Bitcoin core development team but you know early on the we are we we already started to see you know many alternative clients start to pop up things like you know Bitcoin classic Bitcoin be you so could you you know tell us a little bit maybe about the history of these alternative dev teams alternative client implementations so I was not involved very closely with all of them so I'm you know I cannot go to every detail because of you know some of it I don't know but essentially there was three big a fourth

on the big box I'd it was a XT that was classy and there was big you so I have a little internal knowledge about what happened with XT so I'm not quite sure I think it got a fair amount of traction early on but it was it was essentially disabled mostly by political move if I understand history correctly so there was this Hong Kong agreement for instance where code developers and minor agreed to not run XC and run car and in exchange car would eventually to be too big a bite increase something like that and so it's essentially like to remove the wind got the the sale of XT but then let around there was classical vu and

the two of them you know when pretty strong I think they they made of humid stay and and one of them is like not presenting a unified front the worst a lot of you know infighting between the two and they were not 100% compatible in terms of the cosmos useful that they implemented it resulted in a fourteen test net so then you know everybody gets cold feet because it's not quite clear which one of the two years support and everything right so I think there was a bit of a strategic mistake on the other side the other campus also willing to play dirty so when the other side is is willing to play dirty we really need two of your you know your act together what do you

mean with playing dirty and you expand on that yeah so I mentioned already they think that they were doing well like investing in infrastructure and stuff like that but there was also so I pronounced like the Hong Kong agreement for instance that you know was more of a political move than anything else because they made some from is there that they are never you know they did not really intend to keep or baby they changed a man later and the internet to keep it at the time is not quite sure but the whole stuff was you know very much political much more than he was for for the benefit of the corner for technical reasons that was also yeah there was also affair like you know that

the core developer that were morn the big block side they were if you like Mike urine and gabbing undressing but they found themself is elated very quickly and the controlling removed from the project there was there was a fair bit of stop going on already it and and Bitcoin talk and if she places like that so yeah I know I just wanted to because you know we're speaking about these things years ago and probably many of our listeners are not not not very up-to-date of that so just I wanted to spend like three minutes kind of recapping what happened okay yeah sure so basically what you had you had under one hand people who wanted to have bigger blog so and we spoke a little bit about that into enough division around

that and then a lot of the core developers they wanted to have this other thing called segments which would give a lot of you know extra technical capabilities and we can speak about that later to exactly what said it was and then you had these different factions and there was a division and lots of drama around it and we did many episodes back then you know we have Mike Hearn on several times throughout and back on and Greg Maxwell and like so with lots of discussions on this but basically had these differing visions and then there was this sort of agreement to do kind of both right so the core developer says okay we'll do is to have megabyte block size increase at least we'll double it and then the other one says - said okay with lower

we'll go ahead with say great and activate that and but to megabyte thing came first no the segue thing came first right so the second thing got activated I thought I was tagged with two eggs yeah I I think there were strategic mistake made we stuck with two eggs as well like you mentioned the fact that the too-tall activate at the same time was a bit of a mistake I think there is also probably a bigger beast egg and this was the mistake that led me to believe that segue to eggs will fail with very high probability at the time and so that that this eh was very important it was that at some point the activation of secrete 2x was modified in a way so that it's

compatible with the way usf deviates the grid so for people who don't know us USF is essentially a group of people that decided on August 1st work on a in the poached egg with no matter what and where can I run modified version of the become core software that does that you know even if there is no majority support for the minor or whatever we just are gonna activate sick wit and essentially for the network with the stick with branch on August 1 and that made a lot of people very scared because a lot of people at the time were very scared of force and so they choose to activate Segway to X in aware I was

compatible with USF and I think that was a mistake because clearly the USF people they were not right there to find a compromise or have any kind of negotiation they wanted to you know it was it was a movement that was very much you know my way out the highway and if you refused so rather if you don't modify the activation to be compatible with them on August 1 they would for themself of the network and they would find themselves from the minority chain and then you know like maybe the wallet maybe they don't want it maybe they come back or whatever but essentially to remove a lot of wind without the sale on the other end if you activates acquit in

the way that is compatible with what they wanted then they stay on the chain they can claim that Sigrid activated because of their effort and so you give them much more leverage in the negotiation so than me and you do that in between the time where they get what they want and when the other side is supposed to get what they want right so it's pretty much a guarantee that you're gonna have a bait-and-switch if you do it that way but if you empower the people in the negotiation you give them more leverage that don't want the second part to happen by the way you do the first part you're pretty much guaranteed that the second part is not gonna happen so that was what I saw at the time I know I've seen this like debate happen

countless endless times on Twitter already about like you know was that August 1st said with activation a caused by you ASF or by the segue to X agreement and it's like it's kind of impossible for anyone to really disciple like the way the West agreed to X was made essentially made it impossible to know this episode of epicenter is brought to you by Microsoft and the azure blockchain workbench getting your block team from the white board to production can be a big undertaking and something as simple as connecting your blockchain to IOT devices or existing ERP systems is a project in itself well the folks at Microsoft have you covered you already know about the Azure blockchain workbench and how easy it

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than 30 minutes visit AKA OMS slash epicenter and be sure to follow them on twitter at m safety blockchain we'd like to thank Microsoft and Azure for their support of epicenter before we continue talking about Segway 2x and like you know kind of the origins a Bitcoin cache then one thing I wanted to bring it back for one second and is discussed really quickly you know we often like see that you know there's this like you know block size increase versus egg weight and you know these are usually the two like main popular proposals that are well known if there's like other proposals right as well like you know extension blocks which is like you know how I want to go back to something that you guys stayed a few time while it was very much big

block versus egg weed and I think it's it's a bit of a strange representation it may be what it looks like no but it was not like it was then if you go back in the past there was this proposal to do stack weight as a hot fork instead of doing it as a support and a lot of the people that would be now in the big block camp we're actually in support of that and I was in support of that I know people like Gavin Andresen we're in support of that so it's not per said that everything is bad about sig weed but the West agreed was made as a soft fork creates another failure case of four megabyte photo so when you

implement stick with essentially you can create a block that is up to four megabyte but effectively in terms of capacity you get one point for it 1.7 X the capacity depending on the assumption you make will probably gonna see in in a few months you know what is the real number but in that ball part so less less than say less than 2 X but you get 4 X adversarial case which means your software needs to be able to support up to 4x you know the base base block size that is not really a problem if you plan to keep the block small right but that's a very big problem if you want to increase the size of the block because suddenly you had eternal case that yet

credibly big and someone can craft a special block that exploit the diverse abilities and bring the or to its knees right like yeah I know like a lot of my issues with like the segwayed software proposal mostly just around technical debt where it just seemed to be a very complex change a touch like the all parts of every pieces of yeah that's sent that's another that's that's another thing the way so the way it was done as a soft or was significantly more complex than the way as a hard fork because obviously did it to retrofit everything into the existing rules but the existing rules has never been made with the configuration that you would retrofit all of that in them so it was a

bit more complicated but that's the road that used to go into so yeah to get back to your question there was also proposal AG extension block this was actually what I was working on initially and so extension blood was essentially a way where you don't do anything special in the base block the base block stay similarity what it always was before Segway tour before a blog or anything but you create this extension block in which he can put segwayed like transaction in them and this exchange network would be 8 megabytes as part of proposal and so you would create a situation where you get most of the benefit of the grid

and you also don't get the main drawback of segwayed that is the four megabytes adversities and you get a bigger capacity as well and this is a support so that seemed to fit the requirement that you know many different party wanted or at least a state they wanted so I started working on that but then Sigma 2 X started becoming big so it kind of removed the windows of the state of the extension block ID and at the same time they were doing it in a way that I thought was likely to fail so I had to change plan one of the things that is also interesting around the genesis of Bitcoin cash is because the people in

cash started that was before you know this was so August first was this key date by the UAE SF the threat was there's gonna be a Bitcoin fork in USF and people still thought Segway to X was going to happen at least most people thought that and bacon cash was actually launched beforehand and people were not really paying attention to it there's like what's this weird thing back on cash and then you know when when segwayed 2x started failing that's really when Bitcoin cash picked up so can you can you speak a little bit because when did you start working on Picon cash I mean you you initiated this

initial fork as well and yeah I wrote most of the software and most of the spec for it there was also this all the guy that goes by the name of free trader that brought maybe the you know second biggest part of it for you it was very clear even at a time okay segue to X is going to fail big gun cash is the right thing to do now maybe people don't see it this way but soon they'll realize segue to X fails and then you know there's gonna start a momentum around take on cash yeah so maybe I would put it as strongly because you get too real at the time this is in the future you never know 100% what's going to happen in the future but I told it was more likely than not that's agree

to X was questioned about the timeline here so you know III don't know if these dates are exactly right this is just what I was able to pull from like some articles and stuff but it seems that you know the Bitcoin cache of our train was announced on May 15th of 2017 but the Segway to X like New York agreement didn't come out until May 23rd of 2017 so was the Bitcoin cash like planned like happening with did it these are initial seeds are they like the result of the segue to X or is it a like did you already have this idea going in even before the New York agreement so there was an ID to effectively for that chain

and create a big blockchain but I was I was working on the extension book at the time as I mentioned it was more of an effort that was supported by a class he continued next year as well but when I'm when I jumped in is that so there was this agreed to work stuff I was convinced it it was unlikely to work and at the same time there was like a lot of discussion between classic and XT and be new but they since you'd not be able to agree on what the spec canal look like so roughly two months before yeah two months two months and a half before the actual court date this is when I jumped in I see and so you know so it was sort of just like just like frustration I guess that

like you know you saw that this like segue to X thing wasn't gonna work and it's just like you know you decided what won't convert straight on by side yeah yeah what I was seeing a at the time is that on one side to people that build something I'm not very interested in but they are executing very well boss on like the business side and the infrastructure side that development and everything they are you know they are doing what it takes to make their scene work except this was not the thing that I was interested in and on the other side there was a group of people that tried to do something that was more in line with what I wanted

but they seem to make mistake again and again and so that was yeah that was that was very super straight and so how did this uh you know coalition come together so like you so you mentioned like you know the XT classic and be you developers are kind of already you know talking with us for but you know the Bitcoin cash like what I see as that coalition was bigger like you know you had a lot of these big miners like bit me and you had like you know public figures I'll call them like Roger ver like who how did this like you know thing just like in a short period of time of like you mentioned two and two two and a half months like really come together and coordinate to like it

seemed well if I remember from my memory like you know this Bitcoin cash hard for it actually seemed very well coordinated there was like you know some like unified messaging hit there how did like all that coordination calm who like who's the one who really stepped up and organized this what I probably look more organized than it actually was from the outside from what you're saying so who stepped up so I I stepped up for this back on the code and did some coordination obviously but a lot of us are people actually a lot of people that were in you know the big block movement wanted to see that happen it was very organic there was no you know there was no mastermind being it it was her again

and so let's speak a little bit about I mean you touched on it before I did there was a big disagreement was not so much so much around segwayed but sick around Sigrid as a soft fork and and there was there was this strong argument in fear which I honestly never fully understood that software were such a soft works or such a dangerous thing and of course other blockchains have taken a different approach pecan cache taking a different approach it's here I'm signal different approach and can have to regulate hard Forks but what what is what why is this such a big disagreement around that and what's what's the sort of your perspective and

maybe it bacon cash approach to Forks versus the Bitcoin one so yeah I think it's a bit like post position are a bit strange to me they'd like to know no hard for ever whatsoever and the one we need to do everything as a heart for our you know that big weird kind of ideological positions right yeah at area it really depends on it really depends on what you want to deploy in the network some something just make more sense as a hard fort or soft word if you have if you have a natural way so say you want to add something new to the protocol if you have a very natural you know extension point where you can

include that stuff then you should do it that way and it's ground up being a soft word but if there is no natural extension point you should probably not try to retrofit something that we had in a place it doesn't quite fit and just to a hard fork instead there is also there is also this interesting idea that there is actually no difference between the soft fork and a 51% attack it's just like a software is just minor refusing to mine on on top of block that have some properties and the 51% attack is this thing right so the main difference is not a difference of what it is it's the difference of perception

if you like if you like the new rules that the minor are unforeseen that it's the soft 4 it's not a 51% attack but if you don't like the new thing that the minor are on forcing effectively you are fishing a 51% attack so some people are a bit you know put off by this yeah I memory that was one of the arguments have my current mate and I think we talked about it back then where his argument was basically that soft fork it's like more dangerous rifle uses because they don't explicitly it all kind of explicitly agree with this update and they just kind of go along because that's the new rumor it's in the

heart folk okay if you don't actually download the new client and run the new client then you're not like kind of participating in this so yeah that's why is it's similar in the 51% attacked in many ways because as a user you don't have a you know a lot of say about what's going on in case of a sophomore right like this you know a censorship of a you know let's say we decide to center a certain account that that is a soft fork really that and so yeah for between us off fork and a 51% attack is very much do you see the change as a good thing or a bad thing that's that's the difference it's the very much of its the

perception difference on the technical level there is no difference and so what does the Bitcoin cash ecosystem look like today so what are the different teams and you know the different clients okay so in terms of dot software a Bitcoin ABC is still the main client which is just a client that we wrote and continued to write deu is still very big within the the bch ecosystem and I'd say one of one of the client that is quite interesting is PC HT because those guys are you know it so it's a bit more of an experimental client maybe I would not recommend the miner to use it to mind blocks or

whatever but because they are more experimental they can innovate much faster so they are playing with a bunch of new IDs faster than those are client are doing it so it's an interesting client to keep an eye on and maybe what is it like specifically about now software or more generally about the different actors yeah no so more generally like what else like what does the community look like today and how has it evolved since since split okay since the split in in August or the one in no no I need you original split away from from Bitcoin okay I think the

community is actually stronger now even though it's the dumb market so the situation look worse if you you know if you look at it from the outside but I think the community is much stronger it took you know at the beginning like we mentioned it it was put together very quickly actually and and so it took a bit of time for everything to settle down to identify who are the good people to install it worked were the people that purchased doing noise or making noise razor and and so it takes it takes some time for everything to emerge and for people to take position that makes sense for them and I think we are we're in the better position on that front

well Morgan I stand and generally like everything is much higher level at sea so another question then actually as well that I had about like you know the planning of the fork was how did you guys come upon the name like Bitcoin cash like why was this name chosen and like you know obviously one of the most contentious things about this name is that like you know people that say oh you're trying to like subvert the brand of Bitcoin so how did this come about and you know the famous like Roger ver catchphrase is like Bitcoin cash is bitcoind like to what extent do you agree with that statement and is that like what you're trying to do are you to shop are you trying to replace Bitcoin are you just trying to create some

alternative that's like you know that that will coexist what's the goal here okay so yeah we we kept the name Bitcoin with it become charge because I think it is it has the legitimate claim to the name Bitcoin but in a bit of a different way than people who say Bitcoin cash is the real Bitcoin or something like that I don't think I don't think the question of who is the real Bitcoin makes a lot of sense I think it's so you know if you say a big contrast is the real Bitcoin right that people wouldn't become charge are gonna be happy with that statement but the people within BTC are probably gonna see that as a bit scammy the people outside of crypto are like

you know don't care about what's the real Bitcoin or or what's not right it's not even on there it's not about a question they are interested in so I think it's a bit of it's a bit of a red herring right people are putting way too much attention on that so mahabhava he to say that bitcoin cash is one Bitcoin maybe and there are other flavors of Bitcoin no there is not like you know there is not just one Bitcoin like it needs to be and and so then the name cash is there obviously to to say that you know this is this is what we think is important about Bitcoin right this is the peer-to-peer cash system aspect of

it like like in the title of the white paper and it's a bit of a statement that what we think is important is is you know like the Advent building this peer-to-peer cash system rather than adhering strictly to every single detail of what was coded and described in in various early stuff we recognized that you know maybe some of those stuff me to be improved like the block size need to be increased for instance so so it's you know it's a bit of a yeah it's a bit of a statement that this is this is a kind of Bitcoin and this is what we think is important about become

and so how do you personally feel about the nickname be cash like is that you know do you think it's okay to use term so the problem I have with it is that is she used often pejorative manner there wouldn't be so much people doing like a - - then I probably wouldn't see a problem with it is for the useful you know shorthand but because it because it now has acquired that negative connotation then I don't like it too much today you know at one point big on cash was up to you know 20% of the Bitcoin I think market cap or maybe even higher

and and you know in terms of the hash rate to the to chains for at some point almost that parity I think in terms of the hash rate but like today of course bitcoin is like much much higher in pricing today because one you know four thousand dollars when we record this and Bitcoin in cash I don't know in the hundred ish 130 so and also that hash rate there's this big difference now it's become as a very high hash rate and you know as you would expect you I'd pick on cash your friend is low price so that's not very surprising about fraud yeah it's not very surprising right but of course the whole security assumptions are proof of working off Bitcoin are really that a 51% attack is you know

expensive and that was what makes it secure also a big con cash today that's not really the case right like a big Bitcoin miner on its own could maybe do you know 50 up senator Harkin pick on cash so is that something that concerns you yes Annelle so obviously the security on PCH is gonna be smaller than on BTC because the the price is smaller when you put in in dollar term they are running an attack is still fairly expensive and also minor have demonstrated in the past that they were willing to pull out right from BTC to put them on this year's top rally a valid laws to protect the chain so it's I think it's a very very strong sign

that you know the minor that are mining BCH right now are totally committed to protect it if if the needs if the need is there right that's not putting a lot of dependence on like the altruism of certain miners or like you know the external incentives of certain mining pools to protect the network because we've already seen like a number of like minority hash for a change get 51% attacked in the last year and a half like know the biggest example I think is probably a cerium classic which you know you know I guess shares a lot of similarities in to positioning as Bitcoin cash were like you know it's positioned to it's like older brother will say right and yeah so keeping your constant to be weaker in that regard because with GPU you can mine any other

GPU coins right so the pool the pool of available ash rates can be much bigger than what it looks like it's not like people can just pull from ETH to attack et Cie they can actually pull from almost every coin on the market except that isn't the goal of Bitcoin miners is even bigger than the pool of all GPU miners from all coins probably not like except if you are ETH that is that is really big but for most GPU coins it's it's much worse I mean I think your point is is sort of fair that okay the miners have kind of proven that they will to some extent protect Bitcoin cash and maybe step up but that feels

like it feels like very weak you know it feels like in Bitcoin you have you know you have this game theoretic assumptions and then you say okay it's actually economically infeasible to attack this at some you know at some scale and then in this is in this scenario you say okay I mean maybe that's kind of broken but at least we kind of trust the entities that control is so yeah I mean it feels something essential was lost here you always trust the miner though the trade-off that you're making here is a bit different actually fairly interesting and some so I don't agree with that I kind of agree with you that it's weaker but actually some people agree that is stronger the argument goes

as you are paying for that Ash right all the time you're in the majority chain but I thought it having so much trash right of the change is only useful when you are under attack so it values where you are overpaying for security whereas if you have a pool of available hash that can you know be used to defend against there is an attack then it's more economically efficient and and I would actually both of those argument are true in some ways so the security is weaker but it's more efficient was merge mining ever a consideration so because this is something I've talked about extensively with the etherium classic dev team so you know what is this ever

has it ever been open on the table like potentially merged mining with Bitcoin well the problem is so the problem here is that if you ever get close to the size of the chain you are managing from that you are in the world of trouble because the incentive don't work anymore and I think I think this is likely to happen so we talked about Oh B ch ended up being like a Dalek visible portion of BTC before endure this condition much money would not have worked very well have been a big problem actually I cannot predicted that the the share of BCH copter to BTC

would decrease the bit during the bail market and the reason is the reason is that people are more responsible to the problem that causes immediate pain reserved and possible problem that's going to happen in the future right and so right now bitcoin is not running at capacity so bitcoin is working like telly well if you want to transact it's maybe not as cheap as bth but it's fairly cheap right now but what can happen is that when you would like you know during the next bull run when people are gonna come in you're gonna see the same problem that we saw last year on BTC and I expected this I expect when that happened that the share of BCH

compared to BBC to increase again and so that that would be a mistake to do much mining in those condition and you think you'll ever make sense to Explorer like really very different approaches to securing pick on cash whether I don't know that's proof of stay or something else so we have in the pipeline the technology called avalanche maybe we want to talk about it later but avalanche essentially this is something we want to use you in true zero curve but one of the one of the side effects you get out of it is that it's much more difficult to do a 51% attack on the coin and so that is that is the kind of stuff

that is in the pipeline as well and I think it's probably a better approach than to know anyone if you buy this narrative that like you know the majority of the miner so a miners on Bitcoin were like you know big blockers couldn't you do wasn't ever in the books or like thought process of you know soft forking a block size increase into Bitcoin and so obviously by that I you know I mean things like extension blocks or like you know you you merge my Bitcoin cash and and soft work a drive train between them and like you you know force them to be actin parity and stuff like where any of these kind of things ever in the consideration of like forcing big blocks upon Bitcoin it was off work yeah but obviously I've worked

on extension block so that was kind of one of the idea behind extension blocks though I don't know I don't like this idea of forcing unto people whatever if there is a disagreement on something I think it's better to for it and so okay it's not better it's better to find an agreement right but if no agreement can be found it's I think better to fork and see what the market value at the end when when this kind of stuff happened you actually sell bonds branch of the 14 Christian values so the case of of PTC and B CH of the case of ETH and et Cie in both cases the sum of the two coin is larger than

the sum of what was before and the rhythm is you have to vision right and none of the vision can realize itself while everybody is fighting with each other and after that you have two vision that can be realized so that the overall value is increased so just if you fault for more rigorous reason then this doesn't happen right is your net destruction of a new path but if the situation is really such as you have to vision and the people that have those two vision are fighting with each other and they cannot come with an agreement then you are better off working than forcing you know Alf of the community to something to demote now can we like talk shift gears and

talk a little bit more about like you know Bitcoin caches approach to scalability and so you know you had this great blog post talking about like you know how you really you guys are really focused heavily on like client in like improvement and how we can create clients that can like start to support bigger blocks and so can you go ahead and just give us a bit of a summary of that you know vision there okay yes so on the high level there are many arguments that were made by the people that are more the small block size that they are problem when you increase the size of the block and those argument tend to be right on the qualitative aspect but not very right of the

quantitative aspect right so you don't run into all those problem when you increase immediately to a few megabyte and you know instead of one megabyte but if you want to go to very large block then there is there is that there are actually many problem that that you run into and basically the boil down to that assumption so for a blockchain that is based on proof of work to work well and all the incentive to work properly do you need that the time required to propagate a block on the network and validate it you need that time to be small compared to the block time because when that's not the case you first stop

to a perverse incentive in the mining that stopped you a cure and after that the next step is that it doesn't work anymore right so if the if the time you need to propagate a block and validate it is more than 10 minutes on a Bitcoin or you know any variation of Bitcoin that have a ten-minute block time then what can happen is that you're going to find block faster then block and propagate on the network so so the lead institution is that the network doesn't converge the one you know one truth anymore is just like Forks more and more and more and more faster than it can converge and so if you want to add video blog you cannot just say okay we change that

number in the software and everything is gonna work great you actually need to solution for those various problem that makes the propagation and the validation of a blog slower and so on the very high level it's not like it's more of a death by a thousand cut kind of problem then there is like this big issue you want to solve but generally you want first if you want to make the propagation faster you need to propagate less information right that means that you need you need the node to be able to predict what the next block is going to look like as much as possible and so then you need only to transmit the difference between what they not expect and what the reality is

and you want to keep that difference as small as possible so that's the that's the first thing and then the second thing is that you want to be able to validate the block very quickly and to do that you need to be able to validate the blood in such a way that you have many small independent chunk of work to do that don't depend on each other and that way you can you know different corner of a machine to do each of them or even if we scale very big you can have a rack of machine and each of them to a portion of the work but if you have if you have word that they plan on each other like what we call scale then it's a bit of a challenge so so the general

idea is like limit the sale stuff and deploy technology that allowed not to synchronize with each other as much as possible ahead of time so that they have you know less work to do when the block arrives right just last week we actually had Alexi yakonov from turbo gas and he's like kind of approaching a lot of these very very similar approach to the scalability issues in etherium we're like you know a lot of other people are focusing on like starting and stuff but Alexi he's been really focusing on like you know let's push down the propagation time looks like improve this improve the sync speed let's improve the validation speed so a lot of similarities there well those are not you know those are very UID this is all many large-scale

system this is all Facebook works for instance where the world is done in such a way like there would be no way to do any kind of serial work at Facebook scale it's just impossible so the all the work is organized in such a way that you can distribute it on many machine a small amount of work and this small amount of work don't depend on the word that they also machine up right and then all the machine propagate a result back to you and you can aggregate those result and deduce whatever you want to compute from it I would say let's go into so you mentioned a little bit that the performance increase comes when you know propagation happens more quickly

and propagation can happen more quickly if you know I as a node can already kind of like tell what the next blocks gonna look like without having you know whole blocks being sent around I guess that ties into the topic of transaction ordering and then the changes you guys have made there I mean but first of all it's like how does transaction ordering work today in Bitcoin and what were the downsides of this ok so right now in Bitcoin the transaction ordering is such as we call it topological in in computer science them and what that means is that

you can essentially put transaction in any order in there with the only constraint that if one transaction spend from another they need to be order such as the you know the parent transaction is first and then the one that spend from the parent the check transaction is after in the block so you have you have this constraint but you have another constraint in in the block okay and so that means that if I am as a miner I create a new block and you know Sonny is a different minor then Sonny has basically like no I mean he may be able to sort of predict what transactions will be in that block but he doesn't know kind of the structure of

the block yes exactly because because there are many possible valid uttering then when you find a block you not only need to transmit to the other party what transactions are in the block but you also need to trust me the the order in the block and when you do the computation based on information theory let's say assume you know of a set of transaction and Tony knows also of a set of transaction that is almost the same as you right because your boss connected to the same network and the transaction propagate on the network so you both know of about the same transaction so let's ask you that you want you find a block and you want to tell Sonny what

this block is looking you know what what the block looks like well if you love the same transaction you just need to send in one bit yes or no for each transaction right so if there is and transactions lying around currently you could trust me ten bit of information to study to tell you what transaction is in the block and what transaction is not in the block obviously in practice you need to send more than that but that's the you know tariq Ali bit now if the authoring is important then you need to stand also the information about in what order they are obviously if you have n transaction then the first transaction can be in n different position right and the second one in n

minus one position because it cannot be where the first one is and so on so you get n factorial possible ordering and to transmit that you need n log n bits of information so you have a fact on log in here of difference between the two so say if you have if you have a thousand transaction in your block then you literally have 10 times more information that is about ordering the transaction that is about what the block and once not and as you grow bigger it only get worse so any kind of technology that rely on you and Sony you know having a common knowledge of what the state of the world is under

essentially transmitting almost only information about authoring and very little information about what's actually in the block so those aren't the theoretical limit but in practice you have this technology called graphene that allows to you transmit blocked and there are a two version of graphene that have been implemented right now they are in the prototype stage and one that trust me the other and one that doesn't and you see that the one that doesn't transmit order needs 7 times less information to to propagate a block sets up not as good as the 10x you will expect from the theoretical perspective but we can see that its distance in the

same ballpark okay that's amazing and I mean I know in Bitcoin there's also been you know some kind of efforts on you know reducing propagation time there's a relay Network but that works differently because that only transmits the headers or like is there what are the similarities and differences with the efforts that have happened on the Bitcoin side to reduce propagation time so so the general idea is the same right the generality of all the fast relay techniques being a compact blog or the faster network or or graphene or whatever right they all rely on the same assumption that if you want to send a

blog to sunny the two of you have a lot of information come on already you know about most of the transactions that possibly can be included in the block and so instead of transmitting the content of the blog to sunny you transmit it as special you trust me to image patient data structure that's can I say usually there is a short ID that is associated with each transaction and you're gonna say to study the blog of this this this this this this and that transaction by sending a list of short IDs and then sunny is gonna look into the transaction he knows about match the short ID to know which one are in the

block and you need to have those short ID that are ordered in the way they appear in the block and that's almost you know must pass block relay you know take they all do some kind of variation of this and I guess in Bitcoin the thing is that well you guys over you guys are trying to do here with having a kind of a predefined order right where it's exactly like if I produce a block with a certain number certain list of transaction in it that block is going to look the same as if sunny produced a block with the same transactions that'll basically yeah so so let's imagine we we continue under the same technique right

so you send to sunny a list of short ID that correspond to each transaction then for the first one sunny need too much all the transaction it knows about you know if it matched a short ID and for the second one the same and the short one the same and so on right but if you have a predefined ordering sunny is only gonna need to match the transaction that could positively fit at that position in the block right so if there are ten transaction in the blocked and for each ite selling it you essentially up like one tenth of the amount of transaction to match that shot ID which means you can get much more aggressive on all small the short IDs are because they

need to discriminate between much less transactions that's that's the intuition behind why you can just make much less information but the change that that so you said that's in in tests now and in exploration is this graphene but when this graphene would come to bacon cash you basically have you know Kanani like a predefined transaction ordering and if I have I produced a block certain amount of transactions it will look the same as we've Sonny and so then we can we can cut down the amount of data that's being propagated yes but and this would of course be a hard fork as well no no the odd part is on forcing transaction of

during which we do so now we can deploy graphing you know whatever whenever it's ready but no it's in prototype stage but you know we gonna be ready during the year so now you do have a transaction ordering which is enforced already but there isn't the technology to kind of take advantage of that order to like the amount of data is being sent around and that's the graphene thing exactly exactly that technology is in prototype stage at this point it's not yet deployed but so really quick though this does come at a cost there all right because so once you've gotten rid of this the what was the term you use the natural transaction ordering or whatever

the logical topological transaction once you get rid of that now you have now you put a extra burden on any full node or anyone who's verifying a block to basically make sure that you don't have like you know you don't have what how do you deal with like this child pays for parent and whatnot okay so from the clients perspective the person that received the block and needs to validate it what actually happens is that topological ordering is exceedingly difficult to validate in parallel and this is one of the reason we wanted to remove it because you can you can finalize the block validation you know it's easier to

polish the block validation and the way you do it is that you pass over the block twice so once you pass over the block and go over all the outputs of all the transaction and you add them all to the GTX saw set so that part can be done in Palin it's like very embarrassing in Portland and then you do a second pass on the block and you go over all the input and you mark all the input that are being spent in the block as spent and if you do it that where you essentially have a two-step process to validate the block and each one of this step is you know very polar reasonable yeah but I don't see how this helps with

the parallel eyes ability here and it seems like you could do something similar with topological I don't see why topic in the optimistic case in topological you could be doing it in parallel and only when you hit like a pair a child pays for parent then you have to deal with that right yes oh yes yes absolutely you can do it optimistically in parallel and then fall back to to the topology and stuff but but your fallback is gonna be Scalia right always so I can produce the block with a lot of chain transaction in them and get you to validate it in like you know you have no essentially you have no parallelism good of that so I can poison you with with a bad block but it's not

true in this as well can't I just write a block of like a chain of child page for parents and just like and then you basically essentially end up falling back to sequential as well because you don't have to do it eration it's like no times because you are going to add all the output to the UT Exocet right so say you have a thousand change transaction and they all have one input one output to me you know to make it simpler to understand then you're gonna add the 100 output to the GT Exocet and then second pass you're gonna spend 100 or output and so at the end you're gonna have that you know one that is Fenton and one one that is created in a dataset great no that's that's that's very

helpful that sounds like a very interesting change now in other another thing that's interesting so bacon cash when you guys fork the new block size in bacon Cassius eight megabytes and in the since then there's been a further block size increased to 32 megabytes like why is that I mean the Bitcoin cash today there's not that much usage to block so mostly empty who's never really at capacity so what was the reason to go to 32 I'd say probably because we can yeah you got to understand that because because there was so much contention to increase the block size to begin with there is a

bit of a preemption within the BCH community that the block size is gonna be stuck and so so I think this is mostly why even though it's not it's not needed right now we would have 8 Meg right now we would be perfectly fine like we we are not we're not using that much capacity but people are afraid that by the time we need that much capacity then maybe you know the ecosystem would have grown a lot and we would have like another class of blocker in there or maybe yeah okay that makes a lot of sense the basically saying you want to default to change the default now when you know there's no real controversy around it rather than get into situation

again like in Bitcoin and of course in Bitcoin - I mean I know initially when VidCon was launched I think there was I don't know block limit or it was like a really big one and then at some point it was added as a sort of hack oh let's just put this in for the moment so that like somebody can create a giant block and then later when you each every get rid of it I think that was the thinking of Satoshi back then and it didn't seem like he anticipated that this was going to become contentious issue yeah I think this is what happened yeah so so because the happened once you know people are kind of afraid that it's gonna happen twice so right now there is a discussion within the bth community to have an

algorithm set the block size rather than then having people deciding once in a while to increase it yeah that was the original idea behind like the original Bitcoin unlimited proposal right no be kinda limited is a bit of a different proposal what we're doing is what they call emergent processors so essentially it creates the notion of the soft consciousness rules right so if you have a block that is very big and that is to be bigger than you block size instead of marking that block invalid you would mark it excessive right which mean it's not invalid but you are not

gonna follow that chain right now and then what happen is that if you see that most of the network is building on top of that also block that you consider excessive rather than on top of what you consider is you know the main chain then you are gonna reconsider that block and try to actually evaluate it so that is that is the idea behind emergent processors one of the problem with that is that it creates it creates a situation where it's quite difficult to upgrade actually because everybody needs to do it at the same time because if you if you do it by yourself she you know may end up creating vlog that are too big that everybody reject and you lose a bunch of money so it puts minor in a bit

of a tough spot so I think this is why wise wasn't widely adopted I see I also heard like some stuff about like the Bitcoin unlimited team working on what they call gigabyte blocks is that like you know how realistic of a proposal is this and I guess it's like some sort of like you know a long-term vision thing was just like something that you guys are looking into it like the very near future so the Bitcoin unlimited people are running what they call the Chicka block test net that is you know that is what the names say that's the test net with like ridiculously large block size and they have tool to generate a ton of transaction on there and the main goal

is not to eat you like gigabyte plot right now but it's you identify what kind of bottlenecks exists and what kind of challenge exists what you want to grow the capacity of the network and then we can have we can take listen enough data that come from that experiment and use that to to improve the software today but there is no immediate plan to move to one gigabytes do you mean like if if the software can't support it and if it works and everything why not right but it's not it's not the case right now that we didn't do that very safely okay cool and then so you know I guess the last thing you know as we're running up

on time for this week one of the last thing I want to ask about like you know one of the reasons that I actually personally got like you know pretty interested in Bitcoin cash was you guys seemed to ever like you know we've discussed this throughout but you guys seem to have a very open policy on hard Forks and so you know to me big going cashless team does this place we're like okay all of these like ideas that could be done as hard for us on Bitcoin now we actually have a place to like try them out and touch them and so I know that you guys came up with like some roadmap process where like you are committing to like hard Forks every six months or something similar to that

could you go ahead and discuss a little bit about you know how this was agreed upon and like why it was agreed upon yes so there was yeah this is what we do we do a live grade that usually pulled a few out for confused soft for change every six months and we end up the first to do that actually Manero have been doing that for a fairly long time and you have other coins that don't have a very specific schedule but that also do a original basis like eth so the the reason the reason why we went that way is because we knew that we if we want to increase the capacity a lot

we're gonna need to change a few stuff it's not enough to just change a number and expect everything to work well right because the number is more of a security measure because there are stuff that don't work when you go bigger and it's not because you change that number that finally it becomes secure to you know do you big blocks and so we knew that we would need to improve all that thing works to be able to create and propagate and validate those large block faster if we wanted to you know realize that vision essentially so so we needed to have some way to do out for to do that

and doing it on a schedule that is said ahead of time makes things easier for everybody because know everybody know what to expect well then thanks to much memory this was really a really great discussion and so I think that concludes our first part of this Bitcoin big Bitcoin cache episode or interview and so we're gonna we're gonna do a second part which comes out next week and we're gonna speak about you know bit the displayed you know there was a for Bitcoin big on cash and then of course there's the forth between Bitcoin cash and now what became bitcoin SV so we'll speak about that and then we'll also speak about you know a lot of other things that you guys are working

on technically because pick on cash is certainly like experimental in exploring a lot of interesting new technology so yeah we'll come back to that interview next week thank you for joining us on this week's episode we release new episodes every week you can find and subscribe to the show on iTunes Spotify YouTube SoundCloud or wherever you listen to podcasts and if you have a Google home or Alexa device you can tell it to listen to the latest episode of the epicenter podcast go to epicenter TV slash subscribe for a full list of places where you can watch and listen while you there be sure to sign up for the newsletter so you get new episodes in your inbox as they're released if you want to interact with us the guest or other podcast listeners you can follow

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