#277 Amaury Séchet: Bitcoin Cash - Part 2

Transcript

[Music] this episode of epicenter is brought you by cosmos cosmos is building the Internet of blockchains an ecosystem where thousands of blockchains can interoperate creating the foundation for a new token economy if you have an idea for adapt visit cosmos Network slash epicenter to learn more and to get in touch with the cosmos team and 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 akms slash epicenter I and welcome to episode my name is Brian Harvey crane and my name is Sonny Agarwal so you know once again jumping right into some announcements this week like I said mentioned last week we're holding a meet-up in Paris an epicentre meetup where you could come meet the hosts the guests and some other listeners and you know it should be a good time ECC as well I'll be giving a talk there this week on a workshop on the cosmos SDK so if you're interested in checking

that out come check out my workshop oh and what we forgot to mention last time we put this link in the show notes too if you want to register for this Meetup then go to the website epicenter dot rocks slash FCC so we're gonna have to think the show notes too so if you if you give the sign up there RSVP even gonna get informed about the venue or by the time you go there I think then you will probably already be there but so so go to that make sure to go to that URL Sony before we get into the episode tell me the story of how you became the star of pick on cash yeah so a couple about a year ago

the Rick Falkvinge who is the founder of the pirate party yeah I'm a huge fan of him I I remember in our five-year AMA episode I mentioned he's a guest I'd really love to have on at some point so he wrote this really great let it was called the letter from the CEO of Bitcoin cash and it was just like this like joke kind of thing very good point you know it very similar to his book swarm wise but he was kind of critiquing like formal positions of power and kind of saying like talking about how Bitcoin cash has to be this like decentralized community and we shouldn't be like going with like figureheads and so he kind of said that like you know everyone should just give themselves made-up titles just to like make fun of the legacy title so

he gave himself CEO Bitcoin cash so you know I decided you know I'm gonna give myself the Czar of Bitcoin cash and so I went ahead and did what did a little bit Photoshop magic and now if you ever call my Twitter profile my Twitter profile is myself as these are Bitcoin cash and so you know I wasn't actually I didn't really get too involved with Bitcoin cash until like just this past December I was in like I went to this conference in Hong Kong where I was speaking about cosmos and I met that's where actually where I first met Amari as well as you know Jason Cox another one of the core developers and some of the other developers from the other Bitcoin cash implementations that we mentioned last week like Big B Bitcoin unlimited and whatnot and so you know I after talking

to him Ari there I got like you know I got kind of got actually like okay that was like the first time I really actually took the time to understand like what was going on in Bitcoin cash and I thought it was really exciting I got this cool mug out of it which I'll be drinking from this entire episode my Bitcoin cash mug which is nice but yeah I'm honestly like pretty excited is but in this episode we'll definitely talk a lot more about you know some of the future developments it's just kind of what intrigued me a lot in this Bitcoin cash narrative yeah absolutely so with that let's go to our conversation tomorrow so we're here again this week with armory sesh a he's the lead developer of Bitcoin ABC which is the main implementation the main client for

Bitcoin cash so this is our big kind of big exploration of all things they can cache if you haven't heard last week's episode I would recommend you go back to last week's episode we spoke a lot about Emily's early work in Bitcoin then kind of the block size debate segue to eggs it's kind of a little bit of a history expedition in both take on a Bitcoin cash and then how Bitcoin cash came about and and also the kind of the first technological things where pickle and cash really differentiated so in specifically transaction ordering and and I think called graphene and we spoke

about hard Forks a bunch of other things so I recommend people check that out but this week we want to kind of move you know continue our exploration pick on cash and dive a bit deeper into into some more recent events as well as the future roadmap yeah so thanks for joining us again Emery all right so we left off the last time when we had you know Bitcoin cash as this new chain with in a different vision right a vision that was more focused on you know improving quickly being ok with hard folks being maybe ok take more risks and

and really trying to do the cash part right so having a direct peer-to-peer blockchain rather than kind of a settlement layer and you know that seemed like a unified kind of community back then and now over time it seemed to have grown more apart and of course this ended up resulting in the fork of Bitcoin ABC and pick on cash and then a Bitcoin became known as Bitcoin as we can he tell us a little bit how did they did their divisions in the Bitcoin community emerge early on and what were they yeah but I think Craig right

especially with for me the most big figure behind PSV was always a very polarizing figure because some people believe is that oh he and some people believe in the scammer right that was that was always you know very controversial fear so yeah not controversial or we came up to you twits at hotels and we can move on when did Craig Wright started entering the bacon cash ecosystem so we so we are not speaking cash at a conference in the Netherlands in Alan and at the time Craig Wright was promising to do a to

mining tool on PTC that would block seguida and obviously it never happened but while he was making those claims he made a lot of decoration about pit blocks and stuff like that that several people are light and so what happened subsequently is that he had an easy time inserting himself into that community essentially by saying what people wanted to hear and many people were not very careful about that and so that's that's how it happened I guess I have to ask this question where do you personally stand on this issue of Craig Wright being Satoshi or not so there is no

proof that carbureted Satoshi so in that sense regret is as much Satoshi as as anyone else if you were to produce the proof I would have to ask myself the question do I you know believe that proof or anything but as long as there is no true you know there's not much value in that question I would say it is unlikely for many reasons one would be very similar to what hit a lick Bertrand said at the time right if you have an easy way to prove something and and instead you choose like very convoluted and not very convincing waste it probably like most likely means that you know it it's yes it's not right and and you know even if it turned out to be Satoshi

which I don't believe is very likely even if that was the case it doesn't remove from the fact that you know it plagiarized many scientific paper it produced many fake documents you know like generally is not the kind of person I would want to follow so it would it would more you know it would change my opinion of Satoshi more and it would change my opinion of Craig if that makes sense yeah I mean one thing that stands out to me so there's this book called the book of Satoshi and I mean you probably read many of these forum posts originally but this is a person who just went through the Bitcoin talk forum and basically compiled a lot of the answers from

Satoshi and then kind of published as a book so I read that at one point and it was actually really really interesting I thought what was a super fascinating to kind of get to look into the discussions they had back in the way he was arguing and you know I came away really impressed I was like wow this guy so you know smart articulate balance he seemed to be very open minded and then you see like Craig Wright show up and that guy is just you know constantly making these false statements being super loud obnoxious angry belligerent and like these obviously are not the same people I mean I've never I met a lot of like Bitcoin cash people in the Bitcoin cash

community even people who are very anti like you know disagree with a lot of Craig says who still buy into this narrative that Craig has like spun that you you know he maybe wasn't the only one who was part of Satoshi but like you know was part of this group of Satoshi that the most common narrative I've heard is just like Dave Klieman story and like Craig was like working with him and so like you know maybe the original Satoshi was Dave and Craig kind of like took over that mantle kind of it's it's possible but there is no you know there is there is not that much proof that it is true or false one way or another so all of that is just speculation and people always have love you know speculate about Satoshi maybe and all of

that but it's just that yeah okay so you know Craig and and chain kind of you know Scott by the way for those who aren't aware and changes the name of Craig's company they kind of got involved with the Bitcoin cash project a little bit early on like you said you know when did was there like a sense of growing division like from that early on or but I remember I remember there was big conference called the satoshis vision conference about a year and a half ago or so and it seemed that everything had like a very unified front back at that point and I don't know have you seen his entry that come from that I think that was it's really cringey

I actually don't know anything about this so good okay so so in what about stage was like some kind of rock music you know clapping ends of people along the way or whatever that was that was extremely crunchy I don't I don't think right can feel shame but you know I think a lot of people say shame for it in that day I see and so you think like so do you think that there was like an early divisions showing up just purely around like the cult of personality that Craig has built up and like so you know maybe it wasn't any maybe early on there wasn't much technical division but there was a feeling of like what's this guy doing like he's building this cult of personality and it might be a threat to like the success of the project or oh

yeah yeah even before he started like Evan before the forum that was that was something that was there a lot of people were very worried nothing the problem is or you know it's a problem or it's not a problem it's a problem in that case I think it's generally you know it's generally a good thing but it's a problem in that case if you have a disenfranchised community that is you know like very formed itself from the ground up then there is nobody that can say okay this this guy is not part of the community and needs to go right right and as long as you have a significant portion of the community that is winning to have him around then you know he's gonna be around I see and

so why do you think there was like you know at least for like you know I guess the what we talked about last week was uh you know the year one of Bitcoin cash and so why do you think during that year one of become cash like there weren't many people calling him out in that like at least publicly I don't know they were there like almost all most of the technical people called about at some point especially when he did is you know it's stuff about selfish mining a lot of people call them out the problem is that those ID are really complex like you know that the idea of selfish mining is you know really you feel it difficult to crush to someone

that doesn't have a technical background and it's fairly conservative right so if you if you just have a cursory knowledge of all that work it seems that it seems that something like selfish mining would not be but it turns out that when you run the bath it actually works out and so when the happen a lot of people called him out this is where he came up with the negative Gemma where for people who don't know Kappa is like a proportion of note that take some action paste compared to the total the broad nut so it's obviously a number range between zero and one 10:11 b01 actually between zero and one excluded and so so

you see how much of a pinnacle if so that was there was a lot of fun that's the one where like metallic called them out iron like 12 Italy called him out to Minkus you're called Ahmad I called him out Peter Eisen for the kind of limited multimode like almost everybody that I was solid technical background was about to call him out on that one actually it's it's very funny because then it was like okay negative Java is possible because the notion of negative probability is the same and he accorded a paper supposedly that would you know support his claim and it turns out that a friend of mine know the guy that wrote the paper so so that friend of mine you know got in touch with the person

writing the paper and and that person essentially came out and said that the interpretation of the paper that Craig was making it socially completely completely wrong and this is I don't know famous it is spiritual was in the bch face there is discord risks finance where Craig essentially like his all argument was crumbling down and he answered by risk finance like enacting the tweet of the words that you already told me anything but that was quite yeah so now no people use risk finances like you I go to get phrase when you want to what you want to you the most like when you want to say

that something is completely nonsensical so some people I got a good step now I think the big point sv I haven't I mean it was it was a mystery to me why anybody anybody would buy this why this was so I think bitcoin sv doesn't seem like a particularly serious project and and Craig Wright I think we all share or skepticism about him so I don't think we should spend too much time on but just briefly so I mean were there really any can you talk about the fork or like what were there were there's some technical differences in and you know different opinions about where Bitcoin should technically go and and can you talk a

little bit about that yeah sure so one of the especially there were two very big argument coming from the edgy side before the fork one was about this wormhole project so what hole is a token solution that works on B CH and to ensure scarcity so that you cannot use all the resources available on the system they use they use a mechanism where you burn some cone right and so that was very to the dislike of the PSV camp which I find rather funny because if people want to burn their point as far as I'm concerned like I wouldn't burn my point but people want

to burn that oh this is theirs right this is like exactly the the financial freedom that we want to to deliver to people right if people want to although they can hold on if people want to spend their coin they can spend a car if they what determined yeah it's up to you it's up to every single individual to decide what they want to do with that point so that that part was a bit a bit of a problem and the second part that they argued a lot about was canonical transaction muttering but what happened is that early on he can even find out the ancient website what worried the removed it by now but it was at the time for like the whole year that it wasn't their roadmap because it was something that was discussed a long time ago and then trade was again and then we had

meeting in Paris with a fusion of people where in the the factoring again and then he was against I can see it again so it was that constant flip-flopping so and I don't think I don't think this is the actual reason I think those people wanted a wanted to fight this issue and they picked up whatever reason was you know available at the time but I cannot read mine right so that's just that just what seems to be the case so is there anything left to this story like you think bitcoin sv is just going to disappear or is there still kind of issues remaining from the split well I

don't think that roadmap makes a lot of sense but you know if they want to do it you know this is this is the freedom that four brings to the table right this episode of epicenter is brought to you by cosmos the Internet of blockchains we couldn't be more excited about the upcoming main net launch and to see so many projects already building on it blockchain technologies are evolving fast and development shouldn't be one size fits all that's adapt developer you need the tools that will allow your dad to scale grow and evolve over time the Kosmos sdk is a user-friendly modular framework which allows you to customize or adapt to best suit your needs it's powered by tenorman core an advanced implementation of the BFT proof

of state protocol cosmos takes care of networking and consensus and allows you to focus on building your application in your language of choice if your iam smart contracts will be supported soon and the SDK makes it simple for you to connect to other blockchains in the cosmos network if you have an idea for a DAP and would like to learn more about the cosmos SDK or if you'd like to connect your existing adapter cosmos is a cosmos network slash epicenter for represent our listeners the cosmos team will reach out to answer your questions and help you get started we'd like to thank cosmos for those support of epicenter so what exactly is the roadmap here like you know they have this like tagline of Satoshi's vision and what is so I know where's right it comes from the conference that there is

vision that were organized by other people everything they add like it comes from somewhere else the whole stuff is a giant copy-paste from my understanding there was this like idea that there burnings in Bitcoin everywhere they're trying to like push it back to essentially like the Oh Bitcoin 0.1 was the ultimate perfect version of Bitcoin and that's why they're the grilling opcodes I don't know I think they're a strategy that is more interesting than that not for technical standpoint but from more of a sociological standpoint because the motive they are going for is that it's what bitcoin was intended to be and what is great is that Satoshi is not around

anymore so Satoshi is not gonna say you know this is not what I intended right so so when you do that you don't even have to do exactly what was in 0.1 or whatever you can claim that oh this is what Satoshi intended and so there is a very religious aspect to it you know like like people that are gonna preach are can I say okay this is what Jesus met when you know whatever whatever story from the Bible happened right and you have like different different priests that have different interpretation of what that is but they all like okay this is this is what Jesus met right and okay and you have a very similar phenomena where the leader of psv they pose themselves in

kind of a high priest who can interpret the Holy Scripture of Satoshi and told the people what's that was intended there which I find a very it's a very fascinating phenomena from a surgical standpoint but I don't think it's very solid base to be the cryptocurrency oh I see and so I remember also like part of what led up to the split was that and chain-like submitted a proposal about adding like some specific op codes and those were chosen not to be included in this hard work but rather than the next one can you tell us a little bit about like what what exactly was that like you know timeline thereof like that of the technical roadmap which caused this like

final the last straw to break essentially okay yeah sure so and Shane wanted a series of opcode to be really bold that that used to you know that used to exist in the very initial version of Bitcoin but that were disabled because the implementation was buggy and so they were disabled at the time and I'm Shane wanted to enable two sub codes and so in the in the for kid may before before the one where there was a speed the the one before that we're ailable some of the opcode and Trent said they would do the work and everything but at the end at of the word ended up being done by Shabbos

Wilson or and Jason Cox and myself to make it happen because there is a lot of there is a lot of work to do between you know something that that works and something that is production quality and we were not quite willing to you know they delivered something that that works but you know they were not willing to push it to the kind of quality requirement that that we wanted and and so the first time we did it but the second time we don't want to do it and so it did not happen that's what happened yeah okay so we had these like two conflicting technical

visions and no largely fueled a lot by Bruce Lee yeah personal issues so could you walk us through a little bit about the timeline of like what exactly it happened during the hard for cuz like you know a lot of people I think a lot of people may have like you know heard of this and like you know they're like oh there's something going on some hash war or something I know what like Roger ver keeps flip-flopping back and forth so can you explain to us like okay so you know and you know there was some drama around replay protection so could just like take us through a walkthrough for like people who aren't really that familiar with what exactly happened like what was the timeline of the like the

month or two leading up to this for I can ask as the fork was happening okay so three months before the fourth it's when we have free state for you know what's going to be in the fall so that the ecosystem can get ready and we kind of you know a lot of time to test and if there is some problem we have time to readjust everything so three months before the fork we end up with the free state and it turned out that those codes you know don't make the cut after that it was me team in Bangkok where Centralia was a mistake you you know try to find a common ground from try to find if there was a common ground that

existed you have to do the audio recording at that meeting are available online if you want to pretend but essentially what happened is that the first day in the morning Craig Wright stormed out of the room screaming screaming insults and stuff and so they have not being a very productive meeting because then they were two people really not really these were people remaining representing and sharing and stuff that they were not the one having too much you know decision-making powers so in a little being not very productive right unless it happened there so so moving

forward they decided of that you start an alternative client so they they for Bitcoin ABC before we you know at the stage before we improve on the port and and they call it Bitcoin Satoshi's vision because there was the Satoshi vision conference and was the name that you know and was the name that that was popular so they reduce that and then they decided to run that client and then they were insuring everybody that it would be no fork they would be like one points and but everybody that knew of all this technology is working right was like okay if you are running a client that have different processes rules then

they're gonna be teaching right this is this is at work right but all those people were like no no they're not gonna be any forward Loblaws you know and did happen and there's two client with two different routes oh no those two change that's that's that's simple as this okay so then you know we have this for Cap'n there was this hash war that happened once the fork started right and kiddo could you tell us what the what exactly the goal was here like who are the major mining pools that were supporting Bitcoin cash or pick on ABC and who were the major mining pools supporting between SVN why did people make such as whole the whole ash world narrative was

always very bizarre to me because I don't think it makes a lot of sense because once you have to change right they are never gonna merge into each other or anything right it like it doesn't really matter how much ash there isn't which one are your three chords and and that's it's not gonna change anything so what happened is that you had mostly County and BMG which is the binding branch of event chain so those people were mining psv are really significant loss and then the next threat of 51% attack and stuff like that so they were

some also miners that were friendly to bch decided to need extra hash on bcx - you know disincentivizing kind of in the king of 51% attack and there was no that was the element there's a little bit of I remember there was also a little bit of the controversy around like I think Bitcoin calm I think it was who like you know started to move a lot of its hash power over to Bitcoin cash from Bitcoin but like you know without really informing their constituent miners that like oh your hash power is being used for a purpose other than what you maybe expect it's being used for and so do you think like you know I guess it's kind of like a separate question but do you

think this is like you know an okay thing to do for on on the behalf of a mining pool operator or do you think like we should put more accountability on these mining pool operators to prevent them from doing these kind of things okay so I'm not exactly sure I don't not like all the internal information of what's going on at Bitcoin account so if you want this specific dating on that one you you would have to have an episode maybe with water or or someone else on the cannot come but generally right it really depends on the contract at the landfill and the mire between each other a lot of a lot of the mining tools nowadays of the kind of contract where the money

would say work at a mine BTC and BCS and try to you it could be break between the two and and then you know pay back depending on what the reward is you know the payback may not even be in the content that the people are true sir so this is a kind of contract where people are under I don't think this is that much of a deal but if the contract is very clear that I am mine BTC or I mine B CH then that's that's a bit of a different that's a bit of a different issue it's all about you know what what was the agreement between the put on the manga right yeah so that's just a final thing on this and then I would say let's let's move on from this topic so there's

a lawsuit going on now Craig Wright is suing you and some other people can tell us what this lawsuit about yes I'm not a lawyer or so it's a bit difficult but there is a there is a lawsuit where some some company in Florida that is a parented to the PSV community is suing so myself as you mentioned but chan who wrote to her just follow from crackin fuser BCH developers think that's it from the moon yeah so they essentially issue those people because supposedly there is a great

collusion that happened to not respect what was written like this it's very bizarre it seems it seems to me but I'm not a lawyer right so but it seems to me that they are interpreting the white paper has some legally binding document or something like that and they're extracting some part of it and then they are you know saying that there is some corporation around et super-earth legally the white paper between you know myself and those other people which is me yeah we'll see how that goes but that I also can't mix at all sense you have to take it seriously though it's always

the good stuff but from from the aspect that that is of interest to us like the you know crypto currency and stuff like that I don't think what I don't know what a church is gonna sort of it and I'm not qualified wasn't there also just if you say anything but from from a crypto or a technical perspective and also it makes a lot of sense and there's a part of the lawsuit I remember was also around something around the ticker where like you know there's some grand conspiracy of like stealing in the Bitcoin yeah exactly yeah yeah that's that's what they're saying and they are interpreting so part of the white paper saying that you know according to the white paper or something else should have happened according to their interpretation of the white paper and it seems to me that they are considering it

legally binding documents I would say I would say the interpretation of the white paper is wrong but it doesn't even matter because it's probably not gonna get even the document but you know like I've already not I'm worried not the best person to ask that you should ask a lawyer or you know a judge or someone like that I'm not even an American citizen super funny officer that all right so you know let's go ahead and move on you know past the fork and like you know what saw into the future of Bitcoin cash so you know when when I met you for the first time last December one of the proposals you were talking to me about which I thought was

actually very fascinating and exciting was this idea of avalanche pre consensus and so really helping and especially like you know you talk a lot about why it will help improve zero quant the security of xerocon transactions so could you go ahead and tell us one why is why do you care so much about the security of xerocon transactions and then two what is avalanche and how will that help so to begin with if we go back to the goal of the project the goal of the project is to create a form of digital cash that as you know as best as possible property like monetary property right and so very early on what was

indentified as point we need work on our confirmation time and function bility and scanning right so we talked a bit about scaling before but but your conscience sir confess something else because right now in Bitcoin or any Bitcoin derivative the block time is ten minute and so it takes on average ten minute value between the time you make a transaction at the time this transaction Cochin right and during that ten minute window there is a lot of opportunity to do with the bus spend so we don't think that's ideal and and one of the the solution people are working on to make

sense better on that fault is a technology called so avalanche is a technology where essentially when there is a double spent going on nuts are gonna run a protocol between themselves to decide which one is the which one is the correct one and which one is not and then the result of that algorithm can be used by minor to mind one of the other and so that can give you a very fast very fast information about which one which was actually our Canada paladin and our can eventually be mine and which one allowed we want to dig more in some detail was like very high level but that's such an run I do this episode of epicenter is

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know we definitely love to have him on we just haven't you know gotten time to organize that around and talking a bit about avalanche but you know so this avalanche that you're talking about is it at all related to that paper or is it are these as two different things or just like you know loosely inspired what's the relationship between this avalanche pre consensus we're talking about here versus the avalanche consensus protocol this is what is explained in the paper do we use it in a different way from what I mean consider team wants to do so what I mean consumer wants to do is something called a backhaul and this is a cryptocurrency that is going to be based on a bunch on the average being the only kosis

mechanism that this is perilous this is not what we want to do with this eh so what we want to do with BCH is a bit different what we want to do with BC edges is keep the blockchain like it is no not change anything on that front as per Avinash because there is a huge amount of software that rely on that and it's actually very it's a very strong consciousness mechanism it's very hard to rewrite history and so on alright so as it has very very good properties but it has one property that is not very good it's that slow to converge and there is no way to make it fast enough for what we want you want a transaction

to be essentially final within a few seconds right the more you reduce the block time the faster you need to propagate the blocks and validate them at the given scale right because you always have this constraint that the time you need to propagate and validator block need to be small compared to the block time so you already have a tension here between oh fast you can validate validate that a transaction is not Gaddafi double spell and almost killing you want and because we must both killing and and fast confirmation on this eh we have we have a bit of a problem here so the plan is to keep the

blockchain as it is with 10 minute clock time but in between the block the nut can run avalanche to to decide essentially what's gonna go in the next block and if you do it that way you still have all the the good property of the blockchain but you can improve that can you prove that with a range but in order to do this Avalanche pre consensus you you you need some notion of choosing who the nodes are right yeah so you usually you either do this through some sort of proof of work mechanism or through proof of stake and so what's the is the idea here to use proof of stake essentially to choose the nodes in this

a blanch consensus over the the tapas are right now is still a bit up in the air it seems that you know like some people want to do it based on to forward so you can have like you know the set of previous miners that that choose you know that front avinash the trend the avalanche for success mechanism you can also have people that have a certain a lot of coins that do it we haven't really settled on one of the others or yet and the reason is there is enough incentive to be considered right it's it's a very difficult problem and you don't want to screw up the incentive of the system so we we haven't finalized a decision on that one I would love if we

can just explain that avalanche a little like take a step back and try to explain avalanche for somebody who who doesn't understand it I mean I think the zero confirmation challenge I think that's that's kind of clear right so issue is basically III do let's say I send some coins Bitcoin Kasia sunny and the problem is I can just send another transaction sending it to myself and now before it's in the next block sunny can't really rely on that payment too much and I could go to a miner and say hey listen I send one Bitcoin to sunny he gives me I don't know some product for it and then I go to the

miner and say hey listen I this is transaction one Bitcoin to me I give you ten percent of it but like put that in not Sunny's and I can defrost right so that's the kind of traditional fear there of course of course historically and I mean that's some risk but it hasn't actually happened often and traditionally you had big containment processors like bitpay they would just accept your confirmation payments for at least for a lot of things maybe it depends on the amount and stuff but it always was considered within secure many Bitcoin developers fault this was reckless shouldn't be done but quite obviously right so I think take the case for oh if you can

make sure your confirmation secure like that's fantastic but can he can he explain again like how this Avalanche accomplished this I need to explain maybe why it's a difficult problem and in in traditional payment system it's not a very difficult problem right so if you send two transactions to PayPal and one that send money to Sony and one that sent money somewhere else then PayPal is going to decide you know as or what are the other is valid and reject the other and this is the end of it and they can do that very quickly but because bitcoin is a dysfunctional system then there is not one authority that can decide here is here is the one and here is the one that

like here is the one that is right and the one that is wrong right and because it's distributed then you know maybe some people are gonna see in the transaction that send the money to study first and maybe some people are gonna see the transaction when you send the money maybe to yourself first right and those they are not gonna agree on which transaction is the real one so what they are gonna do is that each each node is gonna randomly choose a set of peers and for them and they're gonna ask them like do you think the transaction too sunny and or the transaction to yourself is is the correct one and the node itself has its own opinion depending on which one

it has seen first right and so what's gonna happen is that depending on the result of that polling the node is gonna say okay it's the result of that phony agrees with what I think is true if the answer is no then the node is gonna change his mind and start again from scratch but with you know the other position and if the pulley agree with what the knot is in T then the load is gonna increase its confidence that this is the correct result and you run several rounds of that and and once and once the node reach a certain level of confidence once it's high enough then do not consider okay this is back this is the funnel this is a final decision of

that matter and so what happened is that you can prove that all the onus node on such network are gonna converge toward the same result what you see in practice is that it happened very quickly typically in a two seconds okay okay so I'm getting this transaction from or like let's say you do minor you're getting the transaction for me and then you'd like you query the other nodes and and now you're getting another transaction spending the same output after them after that now you have both transactions you query the other nodes and you basically so it would it be like whichever transaction you get first

that's kind of the one you say that's the valid one unless others convince you that the other one was propagated yes yes exactly okay okay and then and then I guess thus in the risk scenario here would be of course some minor the the next minor who minds a block I mean he could just put the other one in there anyway cuz and then then you discuss reword it nonetheless or well in that case what what mine are gonna do is that is this block is not gonna match what the preconscious agreed upon and what the proposal is a bit more subtle than that the proposal is that you're gonna orphan

the block that has something that contradicts the decision that has been made that makes sense it's it's a bit different because it's you don't have to mind exactly what the pre consensus has decided maybe you want to my little key block maybe you want to find some transaction that you know nobody agreed upon yet but if there is something that people are agreed upon so if people have agreed that the transaction to Sony is the right one and the miner decide to put the transaction when you Center going to yourself then the network is going to consider that this miner is not an LS minor and that also minor and look at a mile on top of this block okay okay

so basically the different transactions get sent around and there starts to be some agreement that okay you know this is a this is sort of a transaction we have some loose agreement on and once that becomes pretty strong if somebody else mines a block ending Clou the transaction that you know contradicts that then you know start orphan it and I guess that becomes sort of not like it clear binary thing but more so rough so the general idea is that yeah you you you do what we call you park the block so the block is not invalid per se it's respect all the consensus rules but we are not just gonna activate it yet and you can run around avalanche on the block itself to

know if for certain people are exiting the block or not but what can happen is that most people are going to reject that block and so it's gonna be declared they can't all fun so what do you like start giving it like some sort of like negative bias and like the gift like if in each difficulty calculation maybe that's how you would do it or so what you do is that every time you you do a round of avalanche and that the result is conformant with what you expect you increase your confidence right and when the confidence goes above a certain threshold then you consider that this decision is finalized I see so this is like a you know essentially a very heavy

change to the consensus algorithm it's no longer like a minor change anymore you're actually changing the pork Choice rules themselves on yes what is interesting though is that it's actually what is described in the white paper that like the doctor from what people refer as nakamoto consensus in the white paper it is said that if a minor consider a blog to be valid they're gonna vote for you know that blog to be valid by trying to mine on top of it if they consider a blog to not be valid they are gonna mind you know thought against it by refusing to mine on top of it but so far in Bitcoin there was no

mechanism for for any minor to be able to agree on anything they're right they cannot communicate ready their action on that front and they cannot coordinate in any way so 100 up happening is that the minor so far have been voting yes all right I retyped your receiver blog if it's valid that person asked where the cross is rule everybody what yes all the time and the idea is to change this so that you know miner can vote yes or no but if you don't have some kind of saturation mechanism then voting no is very disincentivized but by offering a way for minor you want to vote no to

coordinate we can make that happen do you have like some sort of like paper or something in the process of like you know analyzing this because it like I said this just sounds like a very large change that'll be very interesting to read like something like proving the safety and liveness of this system so the liveness is not insured right there is that's actually kind I'm what I'm more worried about is the lightness where like you know you have a bunch of miners mining on one thing but everyone else is projecting it and it is like yeah well but this this is where the economic incentive of the system you know getting place if you if you mind

something that nobody except you are essentially burning electricity away with no revenue so you cannot be give me that for so long I see this is this is where the net cameltoe consensus is actually quite brilliant because you have a very strong economic incentive to whole processes with everybody else so you know the goal of this was to solve the xerocon problem isn't the zircon from also solved by a other one of immense proposals Bitcoin and G like I feel like Bitcoin energy okay so choosing a lot from the fact that it's all zero curve is actually not the primary but it's actually not what

it does it's it's a consequences of what it does but what it does is maybe a bit deeper what it does is a low notes to sink rise their state on an ongoing basis instead of doing once every 10 minute and if you do that you have better zeroconf you know insurance about zeroconf but it's also easier to scale the system because now the reconciliation that you have to do when you receive a new block is smaller right you can you can prepare most of the block ahead of time because you know what its gonna look like you also get stronger property when it comes to 51% attack and but an XI and XI have similar items so ng the way it

works is that the miler that find the block essentially becomes a leader for the next ten minute and when there is a double span or something like that the leader is gonna be essentially the leader is gonna be Visa or MasterCard or PayPal or or whatever for ten minutes right and it's gonna say okay there is a double span here here is what is the correct one here is what is one so this is a system that works though it has different trade off when it comes to average and the first one is because you elect a leader if the leader is true or if the leader is dishonest or if the leader or screw up or Italy there fails for some reason then the whole

system need to wait for 10 minutes for a new block to be found and a new leader to be elected right so it's not as reliable and then you have an obvious attackers that if you know who the leader is you can deduce the leader continuously right and after the system never deliver another another concern about it is that the economic incentive are not very strong for the leader to behave properly because the economy conceived are based on fees and fees are low on this nature so as a result incentive for the miner to behave poor Tommy alone and so it was it was not an ideal solution but it's a solution we

looked into what we think that avalanche is a superior proposal so are there any major downsides to this like do or maybe new attacks new vectors of maybe centralization I can open up by adding Avalanche yes or no so avalanche is so just like the blockchain a crater is a consensus mechanism Allah Allah she's another consciousness mechanism that have a bit of a different trade-off one of them is that even though most of the time it converts all the solutions very quickly it's not warranted it's not warranted by the protocol so if you have

large amount of hostile actor in there they can prevent avalanche for from finalizing any decision especially by flip-flopping them separate so if a large proportion of the load flip-flop constantly it's going to be very difficult for the network as a whole to come to a conclusion whereas this kind of flow doesn't exist on the blockchain right if a minor put something in the block this is in the block right there is no situation where something is gonna be you know unknown for forever and so having a combination of the two essentially ensure that worst-case scenario in ten minute you would know but most of the time you will

know in two seconds you know and also trade-off that you make is that when you have a blockchain you have a very easily verifiable record of a story so if I boost rap a new node I can connect to the blockchain see what is the longest chain and synchronize to that right if I have another launched kind of system well I wasn't there when I balanced made the decision to begin with so I don't quite know what was the decision at the time so I need to you know repol all the nodes but it that means that you need to have like a whole history of transaction indexed so that that you know it can run that from all those you know also know it can change their mind later right now you can connect to a new network and

there's a bunch of malicious not that that you take the wrong branch or whatever there is there is a ton of problem that exists with avalanche on that row that don't exist with the blockchain and so you gotta you gotta see avalanche as a mechanism that is much faster most of the time but that is not very good if you are not there to participate at the moment right if you are there and you see everything going on then it's very good but if you know catch up later on or if you are a mobile device you know that connect to the network once in a while to see what your coins are like a mobile wallet is not very good either so I think the combination of the two makes

more sense it's like analogy is not this magical stuff that's all versus our problem you guys have this like really a nice graphic roadmap on your the Bitcoin cash comm website and it's very like nice roadmap but it kind of has these are three pillars to it and so you know we've taught which I remember being scalability usability and extensibility and so you know we've we've taught we talked quite a bit about the scalability side of things is now and as well as like you know the usability with the you know improving zeroconf and you know there's many other things on that roadmap we obviously you don't have time to get to all them today but I'd like to touch a little bit now on that third pillar which is the extensibility and so

what is the goal for what what does this mean in like becoming cash what does this extensibility mean and you know could you tell us a little bit about this new opcode that I've been hearing buzzer buzz about object data saying and like how that yeah contributes to extensibility yeah so extensibility that the general idea of extensibility is provide way for people to do more like to be able to loop them add new functionality or whatever and and yeah one of the big step that have been made recently is object aniseed so object elastic is an up card in in script that is gonna check a signature on that

Batory data so right now all the all the operation that check a signature check a signature based on the transaction itself so that's good for payments you can you know sign the transaction and someone can verify that you know you are the the accurate creator of the transaction but if you can sign any piece of data you can implement a bunch of new feature so one very interesting one is what's concerning for that so this is a technology where you can make a script and the script is such as if I can produce the real signature for the same public key that means that someone tried

to spend the second twice right and so you can attach the Moton to that and it is you cannot attach an amount teach you that and it's essentially an insurance against from right like I can I can essentially put some counted some smart contract with you and this is okay this is a guarantee that I'm not going to double spend you and if I ever try to double spend you then you can claim you can claim those cons right so that's that's what I did at people and with it and those are IDs or records so the blockchain you can write contracts in the blockchain based on any information that exists in the blockchain but you always run into some problem

when you want to base a contract based on something that is not in the blockchain right so maybe we want to bet of about who is gonna be the next president of the United States back in two years 2020 I hope the next election is in the US anyway we can bet on that for instance but it turns out that the president is not in the blockchain right so we don't quite know how to write a smart contract between the two of us make that happen and what you can do is actually you can ask an Oracle so an Oracle is someone that we must trust or maybe we can ask a set of Oracle instead of one a record if you want to be more

at less trust into one one specific entity and this Oracle is gonna authenticate some result some information from the real world and sign that with this 50 key and then we can use that within our contracts and so we can make all kind of flag the possibility are truly endless with Oracle we can make any kind of contract Arsenal where some Oracle that is willing to certify some information from the word that we bosphorus we can do anything we can say okay if the price of Bitcoin next week is you know more than that then then do X right and then we can have an Oracle that saying sign the

price of Bitcoin you know every hour or every day or whatever and we can use that to be our contract really act that the possibilities are very very very wide and people are doing okay not stuck to that there's a new opcode that's being added into Bitcoin called checked signature from a stack and so that will that's very similar and you know they're working on a lot of stuff around things like no script lists scripts and like a lot of these things that will basically add like complete smart contracting functionality to Bitcoin is this something that you guys are also looking at for Bitcoin cash or kind of is anything I'm sure like you know is there

anything that you guys are actively developing or are you kind of just letting you know the Bitcoin core team like develop this and maybe if it works like poured it over to Bitcoin cash so so far we have been developing those stuff it's quite funny that you can send the check signature from stock or and I'm not sure what the code is named but something like that because we had several iterations on check that I see and the final iteration of that being exceedingly similar to check signature from stack but I assume that the must have went through a similar process and you know I've discovered a similar issue because we kind of realize that at the end of the process that we have we have done something that is you know it's

very similar to what they were doing but for those other out codes and always saying well you know we'll we'll see I guess it depends you know case-by-case basis one thing that is missing on BCH that that would like to see happen is script versioning so skirt versioning is something that's been introduced by Sigrid that people are not talking about that much because they were focused on you know the capacity craze and variability fix one item network enough that this is what everybody was talking about but what I think is one of the interesting feature of segue discrete versioning and screw versioning is essentially you know what the name is right there is a version number that is

attached to you cygwin screen and that allows you to add new version number that do new stuff over time so that's a very that's a very nice - it's a very nice way to extend the scripting capability of people and this is something I would like to see up on the stage right now it's not the case so speaking of Sedwick segue and lightning and extensibility what is like you know one of the big questions so you know we kind of talked in the last episode about know partially Bitcoin cash was a rejection of the sophomoric segue but you know why hasn't said Bitcoin cash provided any alternative solution yet to

transaction value billion there are there were proposals I know there's one called like flexible transactions and stuff but like you know is there like I'm sure like you know you what you you don't think that the Lightning Network is useful right and like so a Bitcoin cash like you know I understand that you guys want these larger block sizes but at some point you also want to enable things like site second layer solutions and stuff so where is this where is this on the roadmap of like putting the feet putting the pieces there's to enable lightning on Bitcoin cache yeah so that would definitely fall into the extensive meaty you know bucket I'm all for personally I'm all for its availability

and allowing people to play with second layer so what I'm against in the case of PVC is you know betting everything up the second layer solution and essentially preventing people to use the first layer so that I'm not very fan of but if people want to bid second layer on bch then you know I'm more than happy to have and help them if they need if they need something so in order to specifically we've fixed some vector of malleability that are enough to play one channel and stuff like that so if people want to do time on channel they can do that actually someone use that you

implement atomic SWAT on BCH not some go back little bird but personally I would like to see malleability fix completely but I know that a lot of people in the BCH community disagree with that so I'm not quite sure I'm not quite sure what's gonna happen on that front I would love to spend like a few minutes before we wrap up just on you know what is your high level vision for Bitcoin cash in the long run so we talked a little bit about you know mentioned Oracle and smart contracts and and layer two do you think I mean it's your vision Bitcoin cash and it becomes like the blockchain where a lot of these things

happen or do you think it makes sense that there is you know let's say a pic on cash blockchain which is focused on electronic cash and payments and then there's something like Ethier which focus on smart contracts and then there will be some other blockchain focused on I don't know gaming did you think ideally yeah so again my vision personally is that during the whole human history we had to make a choice between technology for money that good arm on a property meaning like there are very scarce and you know very hard to contact it and so on and also technology

for money that didn't add those are money property but that were much more convenient as a medium of exchange and so the way like the thing that I see being three revolutionary in what we are doing is that maybe for the first time in history over the past ten year we had technology that can do both very good medium of a change and very hard military property so for me that's what is the most important and everything else on top of that is nice to have but it's not the ground breaking you know it's not a ground breaking aspect of it and I don't quite believe in the fact that we're gonna just one blockchain to

root them all and the reason is in engineering you almost always need to make trade-offs right so let's take let's take BCH on ethereum for instance BCH has a beauty extra models you've got to be corn which means that you can evaluate the script for every single transaction when you spend in isolation right the UT Excel and the transaction that spend it and you can do the computation so the nice aspect of it is that it's much more scalable than what the terraeum is doing because in each area can make transaction that rely on some you know global state in the blockchain and query that state or even modify it and that allow them to do all all kind

of very cool smart contract but that is much more difficult to escape and so there is clearly a trade-off here and we're making the trail of direction to be easier to scale and that means that we don't have smart contract captivity that are as rich as Italian and terraeum tells the the opposite you know they have very rich much contract capabilities but as a result they are much more difficult to scale and because those trade-off exists unless there is some technology at some point that you know essentially remove that trade out because we find a new trick you know there are probably going to be a handful

a handful of blockchain that make different trade off that people are interested in for different reasons so yeah I see a technology like this eh and the typical energy like a terrarium you know was becoming big and was you know having their own stuff that it well I don't I don't think this idea of one blockchain to rule them all this will dramatically allows the right now will solve a ton of different coins I'm not sure this is very sustainable but but I don't see the opposite vision that one coin is gonna root them on mix of cents cool then well armory thanks so much for

joining us both these episodes I think there was a super thorough exploration of Bitcoin cash and it's really very impressive like all of the different things you guys are working on and I I think what stands out to me most of all it's just you know Bitcoin and bacon cash really like diverged in a significant way right it's like way different vision different technology different priorities different roadmaps and in these are you know two very independent projects at this point you know if each they're different pros and cons but like it's not just a sort of you know simple fork running of Bitcoin so thanks so much for for exploring that it's the tip of us well thank you for

having me 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 us on Twitter and please leave us a review on iTunes it helps people find the show and we're always happy to read them so thanks so much and we look forward to being back next week

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