S17 E19: Deadalnix (Amaury Séchet) on Forking Bitcoin & Ecash

0:47Vlad CosteaWelcome to the Bitcoin Takeover Podcast. Sorry? I'm introducing you, Amaury. We just started. You wanted to grab a drink? You can. It will take me 30 seconds to do this, so you can grab your drink. This is Season 17, Episode 19. We are live with Amaury Séchet who just went to grab a drink. He is the person who forked Bitcoin to create Bitcoin Cash and then three years later he forked Bitcoin Cash in order to create eCash, which is XEC. He is sort of the Greg Maxwell of the big block community in technical terms. He's like the person that they were looking up to, which is part of the reason why that there was so much drama and tension in the system.

1:32And this episode is sponsored by Cake Wallet, SideShift.ai, Braiins Hashpower, Bitcoin.com News, LayerTwo Labs. Thank you very much for being here, Amaury. I'm happy that you grabbed your drink. I just called you the Greg Maxwell of big blockers. Okay, fair enough. You're like this person who was in a position of authority. So in the way that Corbin, the CEO of Bitcoin.com, said, you went French in the summer of 2017. You got sick of all the conversations about how we should improve or scale Bitcoin. And you just forked off, you created your own hard fork, you called it Bitcoin Cash.

2:13And you said, basically, join me. Forget about SegWit2x. Forget about all of your nonsense that you're talking about. This is it. Let's build here.

2:25Amaury SéchetYeah, pretty much. I don't know. There isn't very much to add here. But yeah, that's what happened.

2:33Vlad CosteaYeah, it's been almost nine years since then. And some people are still sour about it. And this is our second interview. It's your second time on the show. And let me start with the hard hit. Since we spoke for the last time, the price of eCash, which is your new project, went down. The price of Bitcoin Cash went up. What do you think that is? I don't know.

3:02Amaury SéchetDid BCH went up? I think it mostly went sideways. But yeah, I mean, network effect is important. That's one thing. Bitcoin Cash is in a very favorable position in the market. It has Bitcoin Cash. It has integration into everything.

3:29It's one of the coins that was big enough very early on that it's essentially everywhere it matters. And it has all the pairs, like the trading pairs of a lot of liquidity and stuff like that. And then to a point, I'm actually kind of disappointed that it's not doing better. ECash is in a more difficult position because we need to create all that stuff that BCH has. At the time BCH came out, it was easier to create than it is now. Now the market is more crowded and people have, in the time of BCH, the whole idea of digital cash was very present in the mind of people.

4:15No, much less. The past few years it was all about memecoins and bullshit like that. It seems like it's been dying down. But the focus on fundamentals is not what it used to be.

4:32Vlad CosteaI think I hear that from the Litecoin people also, even though I think they got wrecked by merged mining with Dogecoin because that one sort of became the dominant asset that the miners are holding and they're dumping Litecoin. But yeah, I do see this trend where it became nihilistic to a point where it's just a race for people to build the casino and then get the information out there. And the first one to get in gets the lowest price and then the newcomers are going to get dumped on the exit liquidity.

5:09There's not too much focus on technical conversations, even though I was surprised to discover that Ethereum conferences of all places have most of these fundamental conversations. The Monero ones are pretty good also.

5:25Amaury SéchetBecause if you come to it with a mindset that everything is going to pump and dump and you have to get it as early as possible, and exit as soon as the price pumps, Making a good project is actually a liability, if the thing is going to be dead in less than six months anyway, why would you put all that work and effort to put something out there that is actually good when you could put five of them out there at the same time that are complete garbage and that are going to be dead in six months anyway? The market expectation is that today.

6:12As you mentioned, it's a very nihilistic market. I guess with some chances, the market is going to clean some of that up.

6:23Vlad CosteaLet's backtrack a bit. We can talk about the status quo. I also want you to comment on what's happening in Bitcoin right now with the conversation. First of all, there was the covenant discussion, then we sort of paused that so we can talk about filters and whatnot and spam and whatever that is. Now, it seems like everyone is very focused on quantum resistance. I think today, we saw the launch of BIP-361, which is a response to BIP-360, which is supposed to be a soft fork that purposely is going to freeze Satoshi Nakamoto's coins so he cannot move them after this upgrade.

7:08Amaury SéchetI've seen the one that was proposing to block coins that are not quantum resistant, but I've not seen the response yet.

7:17Vlad CosteaIt's crazy, to be honest. I think over the last couple of years, we went from questioning the censorship resistance and the permissionless character of Bitcoin, which was this whole backlash to ordinal inscriptions and people calling them not just scams, but also spam. Then we went to filtering, which is a matter of, well, are we still trying to encourage people to use Bitcoin in the way that they want? Then we went all the way to, there was a proposal to confiscate UTXOs that are smaller than a certain threshold, which most likely are going to be dust or these ordinal inscriptions.

8:01That was actually a conversation for a week. Now, I think there are two proposals for alternative clients to Bitcoin Core. We're also talking about quantum resistance in a way that's not even healthy. To be honest, and you're the king of hard forks, I think, but to be honest, the fastest way to fix this is to just move to a different network and just leave the old one behind to get captured by whoever builds the most powerful quantum computer and just build from there so everyone claims their UTXOs one-to-one as opposed to, well, if you move it within this timeframe, then you're going to have your coins, otherwise they're going to get stolen by whoever invents the first powerful quantum computer.

8:51I don't know. It seems like a lot of the tenets of Bitcoin, like unconfiscatable and permissionless and open to all universal, are being questioned.

9:03Amaury SéchetSo the first thing, so let's go into the quantum and then we can go into the spam and filtering and all those debates that happened recently. When it comes to quantum, I have several things that come to mind. The first one is that we're not actually sure that we are ever going to be able to beat the quantum computer big enough to break something like Bitcoin. And the way people working on that, the way they are communicating about it, lead me to think that they are themselves not so confident.

9:38And the reason is one of the things that kicked that into gears is there was a recent announcement by Google that essentially, like, gave the crypto industry up to, was it like 2029, if I remember correctly, or, you know, like a date in a few years, not so far away, to release quantum resistant technology or all bets are off essentially. And there is the deal, like a whole cryptographic universe is broken by quantum computer, right? That means HTTPS, for instance, or, you know, all the SSH. For people not familiar, SSH is Secure Shell, it is a way to connect to servers to, you know, deploy software and whatnot.

10:26So maybe like end user, like random people are not going to use it, but anyone working in the industry uses SSH all the time. And like you break that, you break the security of any major platform out there, right? Like Google, Facebook, Amazon, whatever you name it, they are broken if SSH is broken. Yeah, same with HTTPS, same with like signature verification. So it seems like all in all that the crypto industry would not even be remotely close to the main problem you'd have. You know, if ever you were about to release a quantum computer big enough to do something like that, I mean, like, every single communication over the internet is now insecure.

11:16I mean, it's, it's, it's probably way bigger than crypto. And the fact that they focus on crypto in their announcement makes me believe that they are not so serious about it, that they are, they are aiming at crypto specifically, because it's money, it's a universe that likes to be very controversial and make a lot of noise about stuff. So that's a very good way to get people to talk about the quantum effort at Google. If you make this kind of statement more than, you know, we are actually warning people because we are worried because they are bigger target that you'd have included in the announcement. Does that make sense?

11:57Vlad CosteaI think there's more to it than this, because if you think about it, the cryptography used by banks or institutions or governments for communication, if they're going to threaten to break that, they're going to jail, right? So crypto is basically the only field where it's legally unenforceable and they can just say, yeah, we can break Bitcoin or we can break Ethereum or Litecoin or whatever.

12:23Amaury SéchetYeah, but the thing is that if you can break Bitcoin, it would probably still lead you into legal trouble if you were to steal the Bitcoin, say, of Coinbase or some major US exchange, right? Oh, yeah.

12:37Vlad CosteaThat's why Satoshi's coins are such a bounty, right? Because technically, there is no entity to claim them. So...

12:47Amaury SéchetWell, you don't know, right? Like, we don't know.

12:51Vlad CosteaIt's gonna be funny if Satoshi comes out and he's like, just leave me alone. What the fuck, man?

12:56Amaury SéchetLike, leave my coin alone.

12:59Vlad CosteaAnd then he moves his coins to a consolidated UTXO and he's like, yeah, try to steal them now.

13:07Amaury SéchetYeah, so that's one thing. I'm not saying it's impossible, right? It's definitely possible that one day we have quantum computers that are powerful enough to break this kind of cryptography. But right now, it's an open question and it's an open question even at the physical level, right? Because quantum computers rely on like some quantum mechanic property that, you know, when you, like essentially in quantum mechanics, you work with what we call the wave function. And when you observe a quantum system, the wave function collapses. This mechanism of collapsing the wave function is not something that is very well defined.

13:49It's actually kind of like wishy washy. We say like when you observe, but like, what does that mean? Like very concretely in a physical sense to observe the thing. We don't have a very good definition of that. Depending on that exact definition of that, it may or may not even be possible to make a quantum computer big enough to break this kind of cryptography. Like we just don't know.

14:17So I'm not saying like it's not possible. I'm not saying it's possible. Like we really don't know if even at the physical level it's possible or not to do. Like we just know that right now we have not bumped into the limit. Actually, I have a friend that worked in the quantum computer industry for a while and he's like a physics PhD. And, you know, once he told me, like, I hope that what we're doing is not going to work so that we can learn more about the wave function collapse and the condition with the collapse, because that would be like new physics.

14:53And he was more interested by, you know, like the kind of discovery that would lead to that actually making the quantum computer work, which I found was like a funny way to look at it. But anyway, like even today, it was more than 10 years ago and I had that conversation. And even today, we don't quite know, like we don't know the exact mechanism of the wave function collapse. And this is where, like, you know, you probably see like all those discussion about like many word interpretation and whatever, right, around quantum mechanics.

15:24All of that is people making speculation on, oh, the wave function collapse works in practice.

15:33Vlad CosteaYeah. The thing about quantum computers is that we don't know when they're going to happen. And we know that basically Satoshi's coins are going to be the first target. So whenever they move, we're not going to know exactly why they moved. It could be Satoshi coming back.

15:50Amaury SéchetMaybe it's Satoshi coming back. Maybe someone was broken. And there is also another thing is like, no, we're using hashed public key. We don't put the public key on the blockchain. We put a hash of the public key on the blockchain. Right. And if you want to, you know, it's like pay to public key hash type of address.

16:11These did not exist at the time of Satoshi. So all those very old coins, they are, they pay directly to a public address. They don't pay to a public address. That makes them much more susceptible to a quantum computer attack.

16:33So this would be like another reason to target those coins specifically. But anyway, I find it. So, yeah, that's the first thing. Like, we don't know if it's going to happen. So maybe it will, maybe it won't. But the second thing is, like, for years, we were like, we don't want to change anything. Like, even changing the block size is like tantamount to heresy, right? Which is like a relatively simple change that is well understood. That was well needed at the time. Probably not now for bad reasons.

17:06But anyway, and we went from like, not even that is possible. Like this stuff is like sacred code, you know, to, well, we're going to freeze Satoshi's coin, right? If it comes to it. Which I find to be, I mean, like a staggering change in the position of Bitcoiners. You would have, I mean, 10 years ago, you would have suggested that, you know, you need to freeze the coin of Satoshi or whoever else. People would like laugh at your face, you know, like, just don't do that.

17:51It's not even like in the realm of conceivable options. But no, apparently it is. And that scared me much more than than quantum computer at this point.

18:03Vlad CosteaOh, yeah. We're just normalizing confiscation. I think it was also Mark Karpelès who was on the show a few episodes ago. And he was proposing for the purpose of seizing some coins for which there is like a court order and the proof that they were stolen. And he was asking basically the Bitcoin community to fork and unfreeze that UTXO so that he can give it back to the Mt. Gox creditors, I think. And I told him, you know, I think you're going to have much better chances with this in BSV because they brag about it.

18:41They're like, if there is ever a court order, we actually have a feature. They had the fork specifically for making confiscation possible.

18:50Amaury SéchetYeah. But what if like some dodgy country that is, you know, with like a dodgy legal system says that no. Oh, you know, like all those UTXOs, they belong to that guy who owes us millions in taxes he didn't pay. Right. Like, no, the government has to get all those Bitcoins. Like, what did you do? That's that. Yeah. That doesn't strike me as a window you want to open or a door you want to open.

19:21Vlad CosteaWell, I think they've already done it. So if it's technically possible and they made steps towards it's only a matter of time. But I think they can also reject some countries and be like, we don't acknowledge the jurisdiction of this country or the authority of this court or whatever and say we're not going to.

19:43Amaury SéchetYes. So really who decides is not the court. Right. It's the people in the case of BSV from the BSV Association. Yeah.

19:56But, yeah, back. Back to something like Bitcoin or even BCH or eCash or whatever. That would be a very tough sell because it's not because it's technically not possible. You could write like a modified client that say like, let's take the example of the Mt. Gox coins. You could write the modified client that allow the Mt. Gox coins to be sent to you know, like whatever address for the trustee to to handle. It's not difficult code to write, but then you will have to have everybody to run that modified version of the code.

20:29And that seems to me a tough sell at best. Seems to me an impossible sell. Right. Like people are not going to voluntarily elect to run that code.

20:43Vlad CosteaYeah. I was going to ask you because this seems like a trolley problem where it's a matter of whether or not you press the lever, the lever, or you just leave it there. Then whatever was bound to happen. So you intervene or you choose to let it be. I think that if we're going to intervene and that's another moral issue and another can of worms, I would rather reissue the coins, like give them as transaction fees to miners as opposed to freezing them, like making them reenter the economy.

21:19Amaury SéchetThe solution is fairly easy to implement, but it's not really the problem. The problem is like once you have implemented a solution, you will have to have people run your code. Right. And you don't even know who those people are. So it doesn't seem to me like it's very doable in practice.

21:47Vlad CosteaWe have this very vague word in Bitcoin. It's like God or something. And we appeal to this God every time. We don't know about anything. And we're like, oh, this doesn't have consensus. That's the word. It's like, nobody knows exactly what consensus is. We even have like the rough consensus term, which means approximately there might be some consensus.

22:14Amaury SéchetIt's been a bit abused in Bitcoin. Right. But I would say like consensus is not something you can redefine in abstract. It's just like each people individually choosing to run that different code or not. And if enough of them do, then you have a new consensus. But there is no bigger picture. There's just like a thousand of individual decision there.

22:41Vlad CosteaBut no, according to Theymos on the Bitcoin forums on Reddit, which I think is r/Bitcoin, I think in 2015, he mentioned something like, as long as there is one of the core devs or one of my friends who disagrees, there is no consensus. So it's not just a number. It's not 51%. It's not 60%. It's not 70 or 90. As long as there is one smart person in the room, like a high priest or something who says, I don't like this. So if Adam Back or whatever is going to say, I don't like this, then it doesn't happen.

23:18Amaury SéchetThe people who do that, they are playing a political game, right? They are not playing a technical game or they're not even like really talking about consensus. What people want to avoid, and especially miner, is to put resources behind a block, you know, to mine it. And then that block is not going to be accepted by the network. Right. That's the number one problem that miner want to avoid. And if you create like enough doubt in their mind, you create a self-fulfilling prophecy that this stuff, like even if almost everybody wants it, you can create like enough doubt in their mind so that they're not going to go for it and they're not going to even be willing to try it.

24:16Vlad CosteaYeah, that's a possibility. But let me ask you, is eCash, XEC, also vulnerable to the same quantum attacks and how are you going to deal with it?

24:27Amaury SéchetSo that's an excellent question. I actually had a talk with various people in the eCash ecosystem about that recently. And so first, like the script system, and it's the case in BCH, it's the case in eCash as well. It's not the case in Bitcoin, as far as I know, but the script system is rich enough so that we can do hash-based signatures. This is a type of signature that is quantum resistant. It has some downside though. So it's not the solution that you ultimately want, but it's the solution that you can have today with like zero changes to the protocol.

25:09And I think it's good enough for now, I would say, like people that are worried about quantum, they can use this type of hash-based signature. And if the threat becomes more concrete, we can implement better schemes, like lattice-based and stuff like that. But those schemes, they have other downsides.

25:41For instance, lattice-based cryptography, which is like another mathematical tool different from elliptic curve, but that allows to do similar stuff. And that is quantum resistant. The problem is like the key, the public key for lattice-based cryptography is like two megabytes in size, something like that.

26:08Can you imagine if any transaction that needs to spend coins needs to publish the public key of the lattice-based signature? So now every transaction is two megabytes. You have a problem. So it's not like those, you know, we have quantum resistant cryptography today, but it has serious downside compared to the regular crypto. So just like shoving that down everybody's throat would not make sense at this time.

26:43Vlad CosteaYeah, I mean, I've heard conversations about this and I don't think, so to be honest, I go back to my original point about hard forking to fix the quantum threat. Like you would also need a block size increase if you're going to lower the scalability of the network because of higher transaction sizes. You also need more space for transactions, at least to maintain the current scaling level, the amount of transactions you can have in a block.

27:16Amaury SéchetYeah, but you got to realize like you would grow the transaction size by like two orders of magnitude.

27:23It's not like it's somewhat bigger. It's like incommensurably bigger. It's like 100 times bigger. And that's a bit of an issue.

27:41Vlad CosteaIt is. But there are also people out there who say that quantum is a scam. And whenever we get these research papers or announcements from companies that build quantum computers, they're just fundraising pitches.

27:55Amaury SéchetYeah, they are definitely overselling. They are definitely overselling how far and how dangerous the tech is. That being said, that doesn't necessarily mean that it's a scam. I'm confident to say I don't know. And I would be very skeptical of anyone who has a very strong position one way or the other. Because there is literally unsolved physics at the bottom of this. So anyone that is very confident one way or another probably has something to sell. Let's put it that way.

28:40Vlad CosteaThat's fair. But there's always this risk that you don't know. Like, you don't know until it actually happens.

28:51You can have two situations. You can either feel like an idiot when it happens and be like, oh, we actually got warnings, but we didn't do anything and now it's happening. And people are losing their coins and the price is going to zero and we should hard fork with the previous UTXO set to fix it. Or you can actually do something but feel like you could have waited longer, like a few more months to get better signatures that scale better.

29:18Amaury SéchetWell, this is why you need to think about it now. But it doesn't mean that you want to deploy everything now and shove that down everybody's throat. But if it materialized, you want to have a plan.

29:33Vlad CosteaI agree with this. Does Satoshi also have UTXOs in eCash? Yes. Untouched? Untouched. Okay, so if Satoshi comes back, he will have to move coins in Bitcoin and Bitcoin Cash, eCash and possibly BSV if they allow him. Yeah. Everyone made him richer. And because of you, I guess he's gonna have a lot more money to claim.

30:05Amaury SéchetYeah, I don't think money is his problem anymore. He has more money then. Isn't he the richest man in the world? He should not be far from it, right? He's probably in the top 10 at least.

30:22Vlad CosteaNo? Should be. But I don't know if it was a single person or a group or...

30:30Amaury SéchetNo, sure. Yeah, assuming that it's a single person. He has like 1 million Bitcoin, roughly, give or take. So that the price of Bitcoin times 1 million, what it is today is 70K, 75K, something like that. So no, he's not the richest man in the world. He's as, you know, 75 billion or so. But he's pretty up there, right? Maybe he's in the top 10, no? I don't know.

31:03Vlad CosteaShould be. I don't know anyone who has that much money.

31:09Amaury SéchetI mean, there are not that many people who have that much money, right? Even if you're a billionaire, you're poor in comparison. That's a completely insane amount of money.

31:21Yeah, I agree. You could spend a billion a year for the rest of your life and probably not run out of money unless there is serious health extension technology that comes out.

31:41Vlad CosteaMaybe with this emergence of AI and whatever, in 20 years, we're going to be able to upload our consciousness and be immortal or whatever on the internet. I don't know.

31:55Amaury SéchetSo if you want to go there, like one thing that I think is very interesting is like, you know that there is AI-related software that can solve protein folding? Well, you can run it the other way around, you know, just like we had image recognition around network and we turned them around to do image generation. You can do the same with protein generation, which means that we can create all kinds of protein to do all kinds of stuff.

32:28And that is quite something. There is a dude that did that recently to save his dog from some cancer. And I don't know, you probably saw the news on the internet.

32:40But that is, I mean, like the possibilities are endless. That is opening a new world of crazy there.

32:50Vlad CosteaI just want to remind the listeners at this point that one of the sponsors is Cake Wallet. And they should download Cake Wallet and get ready for a giveaway in 30 minutes when Amaury here will reveal his secret number. So stay tuned for that. Unfortunately, Cake Wallet does not support eCash, so it doesn't work. Oh, that sucks.

33:12Amaury SéchetCome on, Cake Wallet. You need to support eCash now. They do support BCH. So you have like, if you support BCH, you have no work to do, essentially, to support eCash. It's integration.

33:26Vlad CosteaI can get you in contact with their CEO if you want to manage the integration. But I think they surpassed like 1.75 million downloads. Cool. That's pretty good. And the best part is the swapping thing. Like you can swap between the coins that they support, including Monero and Zcash, shielded Zcash, which is what I'll be giving away today. And Bitcoin and Ethereum and a bunch of stable coins. I think it's really good. But one of the sponsors that does support eCash is SideShift.

34:07I guess you're friends with Andreas or something, or you know him in person at least.

34:13Amaury SéchetYeah, I know him in person. I wouldn't say we're a close friend, but we know each other.

34:17Vlad CosteaI think he's one of my favorite Bitcoiners in the sense that he did not have a clear stance on the whole block size wars. He tried both sides. He listed Lightning Network on SideShift, and I think he was the first major player to do it.

34:38Amaury SéchetYeah, he was very early on doing a lot of stuff with Lightning and running into a lot of the limitations as well pretty early on.

34:46Vlad CosteaHe was also on Bitcoin Cash Calls trying to figure out if this is going to work. Yeah, check out SideShift. Really cool. You can swap between coins. I don't think they support Zcash, but if you're going to win the prize today and you want to try Amaury's eCash, then you're going to have to swap the ZEC, which is Zcash for Bitcoin or Litecoin or whatever in Cake Wallet, and then go on SideShift and swap that for eCash. That's the way to go. If you want. I don't know. I'm not going to tell you what to do with your own money.

35:25We are way beyond financial advice or whatever. We're just trying to find the recipe for getting us rid of banks. I think that's the goal here.

35:38Amaury SéchetYeah, at least not necessarily get rid of them, but get rid of the necessity of them. If that makes sense.

35:47Vlad CosteaIt does, but it seems like it's only become worse over the last 10 years.

35:52Amaury SéchetYeah. Well, it does make sense in a way, right? Because banks have the monopoly on money creation, and because of that, they have the power to create all kinds of problems in the economy, and so governments regulate them more and more and more.

36:14Vlad CosteaAt the same time, I was thinking recently, if we're going to have what they call a Bitcoin standard with a fixed supply of everything and the prices get lower, what this means is that every time there's a crisis, we're going to rely on the charity of large holders. And if these people don't want to support the economy, or maybe that there is a hurricane or an earthquake or whatever, and how are you going to mobilize to get all the funds on time? That's a big issue. When you can print money and then...

36:48Amaury SéchetI mean, the problem is if you get any kind of scale usage in Bitcoin, you cannot do anything on chain, right? Oh, of course. And so you're going to be back to banks.

37:02Vlad CosteaBut presuming that we're going to scale and these problems don't exist, it's just the fixed supply. I've been trying to imagine lots of scenarios. But you can't.

37:15Amaury SéchetYou need either more throughput at the base layer or you need to go fractional. There is no other way.

37:25That's why fractional exists in the first place is because for historical money systems, like precious metal or whatnot, and especially before computers, there was just not enough throughput at the base layer because you have to physically move gold around. Right. It takes time and energy and it cannot be high throughput. And this is why we created fractional reserve, because if you tried IOUs on gold and you don't go fractional, you very quickly have like immense liquidity problems. And essentially, that was the idea behind Lightning, and Lightning has liquidity problems.

38:19It's not rocket science. The fact that the economic system is built the way it is not random, right? It's not like evil people twirling their moustache that decided that they would do that. It's just like they solved one problem one after the other, and they ended up where they are. And yeah, with crypto refusing to scale, we're just like speedrunning the same process. All the details are different, though, but like the problem are the same and the solution look the same.

38:56Vlad CosteaI was just making an assumption that maybe that this problem does not exist anymore and it's perfectly scalable and fungible.

39:04Amaury SéchetWhy would it not exist anymore? It's not a technical problem. It's a liquidity problem. It's an economical problem. And the economics works the same today than it did 500 years ago.

39:19Vlad CosteaOh, yes and no. The demand for liquidity is much higher right now. The velocity of money is higher. You need to make transactions instantly as opposed to 500 years ago when if it was not local, then you relied on multiple layers of trust.

39:37Amaury SéchetYeah, so the velocity is higher. This is the key. Like in all that you said, this is the key. This is the main stuff that is different that impact this liquidity problem. But once you decide, we're not going to increase velocity because we're going to put a cap on the throughput of the system. Then you have to rebuild all the stuff that the traditional system had built.

40:08The thing that technology brought us is the ability to have more throughput at the base layer, or more velocity, I guess would be the economic term. We can have money with much higher velocity than we could in the past because computers are so fast and we can talk stuff over the network very, very quickly. So we have the capability to go much higher velocity. But if you say like, we're going to cap the velocity at like seven transactions per second or whatnot, then you have to redeploy all the solution that the people before us deployed because they didn't have velocity at the base layer.

40:52Vlad CosteaI got to ask you, since we're on the topic of scaling, what do you think about drivechains by Paul Sztorc? Did you spend any time thinking about the idea?

41:02Amaury SéchetFirst, it's pretty interesting. One way or another, we're going to have to have a blockchain that can be extended in some way. Because you cannot bake everything in the consensus layer and get everybody to agree on everything. At some point, like this block. And this is a problem that is not quite solved at this time. It's like, oh, do you have like a base layer with a blockchain and then you create like extension protocol to it that add new features or new capabilities without changing the base layer.

41:41And drivechain is a solution to that problem? No, there are some limitations. I think the main limitation is the fact that it takes like literally it can take months to bring the coin, you know, if you have like locked coin into a drivechain to bring them back into the main chain. The process can take months, like quite literally. Because, so essentially, like you have two consensus system on the drivechain and on the main chain. And they have to agree with each other, which already takes some time, right?

42:19Because you need to mine several blocks to, you know, increase your confidence. And now you need to do that across the two system. And if the system internally takes, you know, makes a decision every hour, then you know, like for the two of them to agree sufficiently, it's going to take like an absurd amount of time. So maybe it will work because, you know, Bitcoin has sufficiently, you know, it has a sufficient scale so that it can become de facto standard. And even, you know, like if you could do better or something, sometimes, you know, it's not the better stuff that works.

42:59Sometimes it's the stuff that is good enough. So maybe like Bitcoin become the de facto standard and something like drivechain on top of it works, we can do better. But who knows, right? And at least it's promising.

43:15Vlad CosteaWell, the funds are locked in the sidechains for multiple months is part of the security model. It makes it harder for miners to steal. And it also makes it more trustworthy for users. And it's not like you can't have like a swapping service in between the various sidechains. Of course, there's like a middleman fee involved, but you can still swap.

43:41Amaury SéchetYeah. Yeah. And maybe, you know, like, maybe that's good enough.

43:50Vlad CosteaTo me, it makes sense to have like a galaxy of chains built on top of the base layer. I just don't know why this idea was not explored and why so many resources were put into it.

44:02Amaury SéchetThose ideas were explored quite a lot. Like in recent years, not that much, but in the early days of Bitcoin, very, very much so. You had like drivechain and sidechains and like all kind of proposal to do that because I guess like people have more or less given up with sidechains and drivechain. Most people have given up on that because it's really, really hard. That's the problem. It's really, really hard to do. But it's not because it's hard to do that, you know, the problem is solved or whatever.

44:37The problem is very much not solved. And in my opinion, that's one of the key problems that we need to solve. And I actually in eCash, we have a plan to address that. It's fairly, you know, it's fairly similar to drivechain and other sidechain ideas, except because we have another consensus layer that is much faster on top of the Nakamoto consensus. We can do the back, you know, bring the coin back operation much faster. There is a lot of implementation work that needs to go into this, right?

45:14Like in theory, we can do it, but in practice, there is not really a good stack of software that is able to do it today.

45:22Vlad CosteaOkay, I do want to get into more details about what you made different with XEC compared to BCH. But before that, let me plug a couple of sponsors and remind people that they should be picking a number from 1 to 100 in the chat. And the giveaway is going to happen in 15 minutes from now. So get ready for that. I've already mentioned SideShift, which supports XEC. I've mentioned Cake Wallet, which is doing the giveaway. I got to mention also Braiins Hashpower, which runs a service right now where you can rent hash power for whatever reason you might find. Is XEC also running SHA-256? Amaury? Excuse me? Is eCash also running on SHA-256? Yeah, yeah, yeah.

46:17Amaury SéchetSo it's a fork of BCH and Bitcoin by extension. So all the base protocol is very similar. There are details that change here and there, but for the most part, it's the same. On top of it, we've added another consensus layer that works with another algorithm that is called Avalanche. It's another consensus algorithm that has different property from Nakamoto Consensus. The good property is that it goes much faster. It can make decisions in seconds, typically less than two seconds. The downside of that is that there is no auditable record of the decision that was made.

47:05If today I start a Bitcoin node, I can download the blockchain, verify it. And because of the proof of work that accumulates in it, I can verify that that much work has been put in that specific chain. And it's something you cannot fake. And so I can be very confident that up to the top of the chain, maybe there is one or two blocks on top of the chain that are not the right one. But 99.9% of it I know is correct and good and never going to move.

47:39I have an auditable track record of the story of what happened, of the consensus decision that has been made. Avalanche does not produce such artifact. Which means that if you start a new node, you cannot download the history and verify that whoever you're downloading from is not bullshitting you. They could tell you whatever. They could make up like an alternative story and tell you, yeah, everybody agrees on that. Trust me, bro. And your node would have no way to know that it's not the case. Which is why we don't want to remove the Nakamoto consensus.

48:21This is absolutely key to have a properly decentralized system. But we can use this fast decision mechanism to speed up some operation or to increase the security in certain cases. Right. So, for instance, the priority type of attack are essentially impossible. Because when a miner finds a block, it propagates on the network. And then the different network participants are going to use the Avalanche consensus to talk with each other, to know that they all see the same tip of the chain. And once they do, you know that if there's some other block that is reorged that comes up later, you know that everybody saw the first one.

49:08So you know that the second one is some kind of attack and you can reject it right away. Whereas if you are just pure Nakamoto consensus, there is always the option that, hey, you know, you saw that other block. But maybe, you know, the one that you see later actually was published first. But you know, you didn't get the memos about. Right. You don't know what other nodes in the network have at the tip of the chain. There is no way for you to assess that.

49:37With Avalanche, we have a way to assess that. And so many of the 51 percent attacks and stuff like that are just not possible. A good chunk of selfish mining strategy also don't work anymore. So this is what we get in terms of security and in terms of improved user experience. The most notable improvement is the fact that we can finalize transactions in less than two seconds, typically, unless there is like high volume on the network. And this is something we're working on. But as long as the volume is reasonable, the transactions are going to settle very, very quickly.

50:12And beside that, we also rolled out something that we call Heartbeat, which is a way to reject blocks that come too fast, right? So something that happens when you are a minority chain, like BCH or eCash or whatever, right? Like we are a minority chain of Bitcoin that is using the same hashing algorithm, but it's much bigger. It's like when it becomes more profitable to mine on your chain, you can have like a bunch of hashrate that comes straight away, jacks up the difficulty and then leave, right?

50:47And so you get like some blocks that come very fast and then blocks that come very slow and then blocks that come very fast again and so on. That's a problem that has plagued every minority chain out there. We don't have that problem with Heartbeat because if we have blocks that come too fast, you know, the network can be like, actually, we're not in need of new blocks right now. There is no new transaction. It's coming too fast. So we can reject those blocks. And as a result, we don't get also the gaps, right?

51:18So we get like much more. We get about the same variance in terms of block time as we do on Bitcoin with that technology, even though we are like a fraction of the hashrate that Bitcoin has.

51:33Vlad CosteaYeah, I was going to say that Braiins Hashpower can be used. So if SHA-256 is what you're using for mining for the proof of work side, then you can basically rent hashrate from BTC and deploy it on XEC for the purpose of discovering blocks and earning the rewards, which might be profitable for you. So check it out. It's basically a service where you can rent hashrate for whatever purpose that you want. If you want to try 51% attacks, you can do that too. Don't hold me legally liable for telling you this, but it's...

52:09Amaury SéchetI mean, people have tried to 51% attack eCash already. So it's not like just, it's not me telling you. In theory, it works. In practice, like we know that you can try to 51% attack, but it doesn't work.

52:24Vlad CosteaYou also need to have a large holding of XEC coins, right? Yes. Because you're using that Avalanche protocol and you need to have 51% of hashrate and 51% of coins, I think. Yeah. So that makes it more costly and difficult.

52:48Amaury SéchetI mean, like if you want to do that, I'm fine with it. You're going to have to make me absolutely rich, right? Like if you buy that much of the supply, you're going to jack the price quite a bit. So please do it.

53:01Vlad CosteaRight. Anyway, the service for this is Braiins, which is B-R-A-I-I-N-S. The first Bitcoin mining pool, it actually used to be called Slush Pool and their service is called Hashpower. Check it out. It's actually a fun story about Braiins or Slush Pool because they were the first mining pool to signal support for Bitcoin XT in 2014. Do you remember that? Yes. And they got DDoS attacked. Yeah.

53:37Amaury SéchetYeah, yeah, yeah. There was a time where anyone who announced support for XT would be DDoSed.

53:45Vlad CosteaAnd for people listening and being like, what's Bitcoin XT? That's, I think, a proposal from Gavin Andresen from early 2014. I think it was January or something when he proposed BIP 101, 101. And that was a proposal for increasing the block size. I think it was doubling the block size every few years, if I'm not mistaken. And the first client to support that was called Bitcoin XT.

54:17Yes. And then it was, I think, Unlimited, another proposal, and another one that was Classic.

54:26Amaury SéchetYeah, because Andresen essentially went away. XT was taken over by other people, but they kind of like did not do the right thing, let's put it that way. And then Unlimited started to gain more traction.

54:45But at the end, those people made a lot of strategic mistakes that made their stuff not work. So, for instance, at some point, they decided to trigger a fork of Testnet to activate bigger blocks on Testnet to prove that it would work. And now you have XT and Unlimited, except XT and Unlimited did not agree. So, it was like 10 years ago, so I may get some of the detail wrong, but I think they did not agree on the SIGOPS limit. So, it's like another limit in the block, like the amount of signature checks that you can have in the block.

55:32There's a limit of that as well. But they didn't agree on the SIGOPS limit. And as a result, someone was able to get blocks from XT and Unlimited client to get them to split on two chains. So, now there was like three Testnet instead of two. Two would have been a success, but three was a catastrophe. And this kind of stuff, the public perception of those efforts. Because if they are not able to deploy big block on Testnet without major issue, we cannot trust them on mainnet. It's a very reasonable reaction.

56:19Vlad CosteaRight. And I know that you are the maintainer of Bitcoin ABC. And ABC, was it XT or Classic or Unlimited? Which one was it?

56:35Amaury SéchetNo, it's its own client and it was a fork of core. We did not reuse the work from XT and Classic and all of that. Or Unlimited.

56:48Vlad CosteaI think Unlimited came second and it was saying that there should be no cap to the block size and let the market decide whatever it should be.

56:59Amaury SéchetYes. I mean, it was a bit more complicated than that. Essentially, they add a client that would reject block above a certain size. But if the block above the certain size would, you know, like the chain would continue sufficiently, then the client was like switch back up on that chain, like would reconsider the size of the block. But with that strategy, you get a chicken and egg issue, right? If you're mining a block and nobody accepts it, then the chain is never going to get longer. There is actually an economic paper that has been written on that. That showed that, like, the game theory of the whole thing is just unsound.

57:55Vlad CosteaYeah, it was quite interesting. People still refer to the scaling Bitcoin conferences where some of these ideas were being presented as like the peak of intellectual Bitcoin. Like when conferences actually mattered and there were some real talks, even if there was no outcome coming out of them.

58:19Amaury SéchetYeah, I think the average IQ in the room was much higher back then than it is right now. Let's put it that way.

58:28Vlad CosteaAnd also, some people say that Bitcoin is the money that's supposed to bring an end to all the fiat currencies. But at the same time, since the creation of Bitcoin, we have quite, you know, an emergence of fiat currencies. People creating their own forks and creating their own networks and giving them utility.

58:50Amaury SéchetHere is the deal though, like people don't have a very specific definition of fiat currency when they say that. And so obviously what people mean when they say that is a bit blurry because of it. But if you consider the fiat currencies like a currency by decree as opposed to something like gold, then I would say that Bitcoin fit into the fiat currency definition like Bitcoin is fiat currency, except the decree, instead of being written in legalese, it's written in C++. But at the end of the day, depending on how you define fiat currency exactly, it probably does qualify as a fiat currency.

59:37Vlad CosteaI'm not going to fight that. Of course, you can argue that it's fairly produced with proof of work and there is a cost to it. But that's like the Marxist labor theory.

59:51Amaury SéchetYeah, it's so bizarre, right? Like, oh, the Marxist theory of value is so prevalent in Bitcoin circles.

59:57Vlad CosteaIt was popularized, like even Saylor is going to go, well, but there's this, he's going to mention the amount of millions of dollars securing the network in electricity and ASIC miners and whatever. I was like, how is that relevant for the price? Like, it's only valuable because someone agrees to pay that price for it.

1:00:21Amaury SéchetIt's supply and demand, right? The fact that it costs this much to mine or not is completely irrelevant.

1:00:28Vlad CosteaBut we did establish sort of a norm sometimes, like we hit a point where the miners are no longer profitable and then there is like a price bump or something that prevents the miners from going broke.

1:00:49Amaury SéchetYeah, but it's not because something has often happened in the past that there's necessarily a law of nature that forces that to happen, right? And especially if it's just someone's will to pay a higher price. If everybody believe, or you know, like a large number of people believe that this is true. Then when the price get close to the cost of mining, a lot of people are going to buy because they are convinced that this is the bottom and in some way this is going to create the bottom. So in some way it's like a self-fulfilling prophecy.

1:01:28But if there is no real fundamental behind that self-fulfilling prophecy, the day it breaks it's absolutely catastrophic, because all the people would have expected the price to not go lower. So many of them are probably going to get liquidated or whatnot. People don't have like any dry powder to buy cheaper because this is where they were convinced the bottom is, right? So the day the assumption doesn't hold, it's, you know, it's 2008 but for crypto.

1:02:03Vlad CosteaYeah. Anyway, the time has come for the giveaway to happen. First of all, Amaury, you're going to be the first one to receive the giveaway from Cake Wallet. You get 1 Zcash, you have to download the wallet and show a QR.

1:02:18Amaury SéchetDo I need to do that now? Yeah. Okay, let me, okay, like maybe we can talk and we can do that like in a few minutes.

1:02:28Vlad CosteaNo, it's fine. You can download it. And if you have like a pen and paper, you can write your 12 words. And in the meantime, I will present the sponsors and I'll also ask you to reveal the number so I announce the winner.

1:02:40Amaury SéchetYeah, I have it there on my paper.

1:02:42Vlad CosteaI'll give them like two more minutes to pick a number if they haven't already. I see a bunch of numbers already in the chat.

1:02:53Amaury SéchetPick the right one.

1:02:54Vlad CosteaYeah, only the right one is going to win. And if you write more numbers, I will disqualify you. I'm sorry. Don't try to cheat. You get one number per person.

1:03:09Okay, so once again, the sponsors of the show, LayerTwo Labs, I mentioned the drivechains. You can try the software today at layer2labs.com slash download to see if you like the drivechains. Cake Wallet, which is doing the giveaway right now. And Amaury is downloading his wallet. You can actually swap into Cake Wallet. And that's one of like the most popular features and the reason why it's so hard to just fork Cake Wallet and create your own version of it.

1:03:39Amaury SéchetOh cake, like a cake. I mean like a dessert, right? Yes.

1:03:46Vlad CosteaBecause it's a fork of Breadwallet and they wanted to make it sweet. Ah, and it's better.

1:03:51Amaury SéchetIt's better than bread. So it's a cake. Alright.

1:03:54Vlad CosteaIt started out as a Monero wallet, but they added all sorts of other coins. And now they support quite a lot of coins to be honest, but not XEC or at least not yet.

1:04:11Amaury SéchetAlright. Do you want me to show the paper or?

1:04:15Vlad CosteaDo you want to do that or did you install cake yet?

1:04:19Amaury SéchetIt's installing. Okay. It's going to take like a minute or two, you know, not that long, but.

1:04:24Vlad CosteaOkay, drum roll. Go. 34. Let's see if there's a 34 in the chat. Someone just said 69.

1:04:35Amaury SéchetI'm sure no there is.

1:04:38Vlad CosteaYou know there is?

1:04:40Amaury SéchetNo, but I mean like once you show it, probably people-

1:04:42Vlad CosteaThere's a 32 from a minute ago. So that's the closest. I'm scrolling. 32 is the winner so far.

1:04:58People, there's another 32. So if this one wins, you're going to have to share it. I'm going to split the reward. Scrolling. There's a 39, but that's farther from 34. Scrolling.

1:05:19I think. Oh, there's a 33. So this is the new winner. Previously, we had 32. Let me keep scrolling. Maybe there's someone who got it right.

1:05:34I don't see any 34, but for the sake of it, I will go all the way to the top. Okay. 11. Not winner. Not winner. Not winner.

1:05:50I think 33 might be the winner of today's contest. And I also got to mention the name once I'm done scrolling. There are more than 100 messages in the chat. I want to thank you guys for participating in this. So the name of the winner is Silveira. Let me mention this. Congratulations, you won. So it's Silveira Alvino. Congratulations, you won. And I want to thank everyone who participated. Yeah, someone mentioned that there is a 33 at the top. There is.

1:06:41CryptFam says that he's always unlucky. I'm sorry. It's just I've asked Amaury to write a number before we started. I had no idea what it is. He finally revealed it. And we have a 33 who won. Did you also download Cake Wallet, Amaury?

1:07:01Amaury SéchetYeah, just did the setup. You want to try to scan it? I don't know if it's going to work through that.

1:07:14Vlad CosteaOkay, don't move. It worked. Okay. You get one Zcash, which right now is $356. Why, thank you.

1:07:29Well, thank Cake Wallet. Vik, the CEO, is very generous. And you got it. And Silvia or whatever the name was, I hope I get that right. I'm going to try to contact you. I'm going to look at your YouTube channel. And if you have any information there about email or social media accounts, I'll write to you. I know that some people set up impersonating accounts after these giveaways and they're like, hey, I'm the winner. Hey, that was me. I'm going to be careful with this.

1:08:01Yeah. And thanks to the other sponsors too. SideShift, which is probably where Amaury is going to swap into eCash after this. Bitcoin.com news. I forgot to mention Bitcoin.com news. They documented the block size wars. They were in the trenches of the block size wars. Now they rebranded. They're no longer the green website that tells you that Bitcoin Cash is faster and cheaper than Bitcoin. And right now they have both an orange logo and a new management. So check them out. But they do have a very nice archive, which includes I think they call it the Satoshi archive, which has all the emails, all the information about the early days of Bitcoin.

1:08:47And I think the point of this was to prove that Satoshi was a big blocker, which later when Martti Malmi revealed his emails, it was more evident, I think. So check them out.

1:09:01Amaury SéchetIt was a big blocker or that it was not? That he was. It's a bit difficult, right? Like there is you kind of have to read between the lines. It's never been very explicit, I think. And people like to pull quotes here and there, pro or against. But when you read the whole stuff, it seems to me that he was more of a big blocker, but it was never so explicit about it.

1:09:31Vlad CosteaI think there was a moment when Jeff Garzik proposed in 2010, if I'm not mistaken, a version of Bitcoin that had seven megabyte blocks and Satoshi told him, don't run that software, it's too early for this. And the small blockers are using that to say that Satoshi did not want big blocks.

1:09:55Amaury SéchetYeah. Yeah. When, when you read like all the quotes, like both sides have various quotes like that that they like to bring up, but usually those quotes, they are within a context.

1:10:07Like, like this one is a good example. It means that like Satoshi was opposed to run bigger blocks at that specific time in that specific way, but it doesn't really mean that he was opposed in general. On the other hand, when he added the limit, he said that it was a temporary measure, but never really explained like what the plan was to, you know, make it like what is, what is the final plan? Right? Like if it's a temporary measure, then what do we do next?

1:10:40And he really never really pronounced himself on that. So you could infer that maybe he wanted like a bigger block size, or maybe he wanted to eliminate the block size, or maybe he wanted to make the block size like a dynamic parameter that would adjust based on the need of the network.

1:10:59He could have had like many ideas, maybe he was not even very sure himself. Right. But at the end of the day, all those quotes, they inform us, but they don't really give us a definitive answer.

1:11:17Vlad CosteaI don't think there's a clear indication, but also the big blockers have used the first counter that Satoshi... So when he published to the Metzdowd cryptography mailing list, and this was in November of 2008, he got the first reply from James A. Donald who said, well, this is interesting, but it doesn't scale. And Satoshi basically said, well, now we have the internet that can download a CD in this amount of minutes. And basically with Moore's law, with faster internet and cheaper storage, it's only going to become easier to scale this. It's true.

1:11:57Amaury SéchetOn the other hand, Moore's law is not doing so good these days. Right. And it hasn't been for a few years now. Doesn't mean that computers don't get more powerful, but they don't get more powerful at the speed that they used to, if that makes sense. I don't know. I actually don't know how old you are, but you remember like in the nineties or even the early two thousands, like a computer that was three years old was barely runnable. Right. Because by that time the new computer was like five times faster.

1:12:34It was, it was really, really wild, like the speed at which computer did improve. Now, you know, if you use like a MacBook M1, for instance, it's not, you know, it's not as fast as the M5, but it's pretty fast. It's completely usable. It's maybe like twice as fast and the M5, I mean, and in how many years, like in, I don't know, like when was the M1, like it's been like at least five years, maybe seven years or something like that. So we get like a 2X in five or seven years or something.

1:13:10Whereas before we would get like four or 5X every two, three years, it was completely bonkers.

1:13:19Vlad CosteaI do remember in the late nineties that basically you would buy like a video card, let's say a GeForce 2 or a Voodoo. I think those were very popular. You bought a Voodoo 3 and then like a year later you got the 4 and the 5 and there were orders of magnitude better.

1:13:37Amaury SéchetAnd you couldn't run the latest games anymore.

1:13:37Vlad CosteaLike you had to upgrade so quickly, like every six months or something, and it was expensive. Now, if you want to play the latest games, I think you can do it with a video card from six, seven years ago without any issues.

1:13:54Amaury SéchetYeah, computers are still getting faster, but they're not getting faster at the speed that it was. So when Satoshi brings up Moore's law and stuff like that, you're going to have the small blocker that are going to tell you, well, you know, Satoshi said that it was possible based on those assumptions, but those assumptions, they have not really held true since then. Right. So maybe we need to reconsider that, but it's not like a dumb point to make. It's like, I kind of disagree with that point, but it's not, it's not stupid.

1:14:23Right. Like, and it's not like Satoshi explicitly said, well, you know, like even if Moore's law doesn't hold, then we're going to do it anyway. Right. Like it was like, well, you know, there is Moore's law and because of that, we can do this and that. And then, well, if there is no Moore's law now, what do we do? It's not like all those stuff are not super explicit.

1:14:46Vlad CosteaBut storage did become cheaper. I'm not sure if internet speeds, I mean, there is 5G right now, but I think there's like a plateau.

1:14:56Amaury SéchetInternet speed has gotten, they have gotten like way faster. Storage is a bit of a strange place. Like storage capacity has grown quite a bit, but storage speed has actually like almost not improved. Right. So the speed at which we're able to store and retrieve information has not improved very much.

1:15:24Vlad CosteaWell, it did, if you think about NVMe SSDs.

1:15:30Amaury SéchetYeah, but NVMe SSDs existed 10 years ago.

1:15:34Vlad CosteaI'm not sure if I heard about it in 2009 when Bitcoin launched. No, no.

1:15:41Amaury SéchetBut this is where all the, you know, this is where all the questions come from, right? Because in 2009, when Satoshi said that, the Moore's law is still doing strong, right? Like Moore's law is still doing as more predicted, but nowadays, not really. And maybe for the past 10 years or so, not really, right? But it was still the case in 2009. So now that Satoshi, you know, decided some stuff based on some projection, if the projection doesn't hold true anymore, would he revise his position or would he decide that we need to scale anyway, right?

1:16:25Like you cannot know because it's not saying anything anymore. But I think both sides are a bit too quick to put opinion in the mouth of Satoshi that you cannot really infer for sure from what he wrote.

1:16:45Vlad CosteaI agree with that. I also think that Hal Finney was used as a poster boy for not scaling Bitcoin on the base layer, especially with that comment about Bitcoin-backed banks. But people missed the point, like he was referring to something. He clearly says that these currencies issued by the banks would be redeemable for Bitcoin. So if anything, you can argue that they're altcoins, but they're not specifically the paper Bitcoin that we have today.

1:17:23Amaury SéchetI don't know. Something like, we're not going to be able to ask Hal Finney to clarify on that.

1:17:29Vlad CosteaNo, but the statement is already clear. You don't need to clarify. I don't know.

1:17:37Amaury SéchetLike this one, I remember this one as well, and I don't know that it's so clear.

1:17:42Vlad CosteaLet me look it up just for the sake of it. So Bitcoin-backed banks, Hal Finney. Let's see how good search engines are today. Oh, I think I found it from 2025 on BitcoinTalk. I think it's too late for this. Oh, I found the quote. So he says, and it's from December 30th, 2010. Actually, there is a very good reason for Bitcoin-backed banks to exist issuing their own digital cash currency redeemable for bitcoins. So this is the part that I was referring to redeemable for bitcoins.

1:18:26Bitcoin itself cannot scale to have every single financial transaction in the world be broadcast to everyone and included in the block chain. There needs to be a secondary level of payment systems, which is lighter weight and more efficient. Likewise, the time needed for Bitcoin transactions to finalize will be impractical for medium to large value purchases. Bitcoin-backed banks will solve these problems. They can work like banks did before nationalization of currency. Different banks can have different policies, some more aggressive, some more conservative. Some would be fractional reserve, while others may be 100 percent Bitcoin backed.

1:19:07Interest rates may vary. Cash from some banks may trade at a discount to that from others. George Selgin has worked out the theory of competitive free banking in detail, and he argues that such a system would be stable, inflation resistant and self-regulating. I believe this will be the ultimate fate of Bitcoin to be high power, high powered money that serves as reserve currency for banks that issue their own digital cash. Most Bitcoin transactions will occur between banks to settle net transfers. Bitcoin transactions by private individuals will be as rare as Bitcoin-based purchases are today.

1:19:52Amaury SéchetI mean, there is nothing in there that I would disagree with.

1:20:02Vlad CosteaAnd this comes from the guy who forked Bitcoin to create Bitcoin Cash.

1:20:08Amaury SéchetYeah. And yeah, you know, it's not clear. It might, it might be a small blocker when you say that, but it's not something you can infer for sure from that post, right? Like it's not, it's not conclusive in that way.

1:20:28Vlad CosteaIt's also interesting that the term small blocker actually means conservative blocker or something, or not wanting to increase the block size blocker. Because small blocks, like you can say that eight megabytes is still small. Yeah. Arguably, I think most people... Yeah, yeah, eight megabyte.

1:20:51Amaury SéchetI would argue it's fairly small. Yeah.

1:20:54Vlad CosteaMost people around the world would have enough time in 10 minutes to download eight megabytes. Yeah. I think small blocker can also mean something like, so there's this research by Nick Szabo and Elaine Ou, or Ou, I'm not sure how you pronounce her last name, which describes Bitcoin transmitted with short radio waves. And for that, you would need like 300 kilobyte blocks or something to successfully be able to pull it off.

1:21:29Amaury SéchetI mean, that would be a no for me. That's going to be a no for me.

1:21:37Vlad CosteaI think at some point, Luke Dashjr was in favor of it.

1:21:41Amaury SéchetNo, I know, I know. I've heard people being in favor of that over the years, but no, right? That would be a no for me.

1:21:54Vlad CosteaI see the appeal like, okay, it's going to be super censorship resistant.

1:22:17Amaury SéchetYou don't need internet to broadcast transactions, but still. Well, not really, right? Because are you going to download the history of it? Doesn't help. Like you can stream the blockchain. If you have an up to date copy of the blockchain, then you can use that system to get update. But as soon as you get disconnected from the network, for whatever reason, it cannot catch up anymore. So it's not even that useful in practice. Like, can you imagine a world that is so fucked up that people cannot have an internet connection anymore? I mean, there is that kind of world in North Korea or Iran right now. Yeah, but do you think those people are going to have reliable electricity?

1:22:47Vlad CosteaThat's a very good question. Like part of the reason why I think Iran is one of the best places in the world to mine Bitcoin right now. And it would be so cheap if only if it was reliable.

1:22:59Amaury SéchetBecause think about it, there are many places that it's actually easier to get wireless internet than it is to get electricity in many places in the world.

1:23:18Vlad CosteaOkay, but you do need electricity for wireless internet.

1:23:23Amaury SéchetYou need electricity for the tower, but my phone doesn't need to be plugged in all the time. Not like a mobile device that needs to be plugged in all the time. And there are many places in the world where not everybody has electricity, but they have like this one dude in the village that have electricity that's going to recharge your phone. And there is like a cell tower somewhere.

1:23:49Vlad CosteaOkay, makes sense. But you said Wi-Fi and what you're actually... I said wireless. Wireless, okay.

1:23:56Amaury SéchetYeah, because as soon as you need wired, then you need a lot more infrastructure, but it's actually easier to get wireless internet than to get electricity in many places in the world.

1:24:06Vlad CosteaI agree now. It makes sense.

1:24:10Amaury SéchetAnd so yeah, I don't think this thing really makes a lot of sense. Because as soon as your node runs out of electricity or goes down for whatever reason, you literally cannot catch up.

1:24:27Vlad CosteaWell, you can also take the other route and be like, well, if you're running your node on the Raspberry Pi, which can definitely validate, you know, Greg Maxwell's Raspberry Pi 2, then you can basically use a bicycle to produce the electricity to keep it running or whatever, or use solar.

1:24:47Amaury SéchetI'm pretty confident that a Raspberry Pi could handle eight megabyte blocks though. Like people underestimate how fast computers are, even small ones.

1:25:02Vlad CosteaDid you say a Raspberry Pi could or couldn't run eight megabyte blocks? Could. But I think even the BSV people run some stress testing and they were able to sync a node on a Raspberry Pi with a lot of storage.

1:25:19Amaury SéchetPossible. I would be surprised because they have some blocks that are stupidly large and they would need a lot of RAM to process those blocks.

1:25:28Vlad CosteaYeah, I don't know. It's just their claim. And also syncing can take place in lots of shapes and forms. Like you can just download the block headers or you can...

1:25:42Amaury SéchetIf you download the block header and a UTXO set snapshot or something like that, then you're good. You can do that in pretty much any device. Yeah. You need to trust whoever gives you the UTXO set snapshot though.

1:25:59Vlad CosteaCake Wallet does this to make you less reliant on somebody else's node. You download some block filters in the background. Yeah.

1:26:09Amaury SéchetYeah, yeah. A lot of... I mean, it's kind of a lost art somewhat to do it, but in the early days, like pretty much all the wallets were doing a variation of this. It's much better for privacy and whatnot, but it's been disappearing, unfortunately.

1:26:27Vlad CosteaI think also, I'm not sure if you're friends with Calin Culianu, who is also...

1:26:33Amaury SéchetOh, he loves me.

1:26:35Vlad CosteaHe does?

1:26:36Amaury SéchetNo, he hates me.

1:26:38Vlad CosteaHe's also working on Fulcrum, which I think is pretty good for privacy.

1:26:44Amaury SéchetYes. Yeah, the code is questionable, but the tech itself is pretty good.

1:26:54Vlad CosteaI hope I get to interview him also and ask him about his take on what's going on. But yeah, he's very hardcore. I don't ask him.

1:27:08Amaury SéchetWe don't have a good relation, so I could not tell you if you would want to do that a lot.

1:27:14Vlad CosteaYeah, but objectively speaking, if we remove ourselves from the conversation and our history and personal preference, both of you are pretty good engineers, regardless of other opinions.

1:27:30Amaury SéchetBut I know how to do that, because we actually have built an indexer in the Bitcoin ABC source code directly, and it's compatible with Fulcrum. I don't have anything against Fulcrum.

1:27:51It's pretty good design. I have no problem with that. People get way too egotistical about their stuff. If it's good, if it works, if it makes sense, then just adopt it.

1:28:07Vlad CosteaWhat's the difference between Fulcrum and Electrum? And maybe that he is more competent to answer this question, but I do see that the most popular one...

1:28:19Amaury SéchetElectrum node, and the Electrum node is going to talk to a Bitcoin node or a BCH node or an eCash node or whatever. And it's going to provide the wallet with the information that it needs to know what coins do you have and send the coins and receive and whatnot. And the important part is that Electrum is also the protocol that goes beyond the wallet and the node. And that protocol is not very well designed. Let's put it that way. If you want to go into all the details, there are a few people I can put you in touch with.

1:29:07But to put it shortly, it's not very well designed. It's clearly like it has been thrown together. The developer probably did whatever it took to get it to work, but did not really did a lot of design upfront. And it causes a lot of issues on the road. When you have reorg, when you have larger blocks and stuff like that, it has a number of issues. And so, Fulcrum is like a software, but it's also like a new protocol that you can use with Electrum wallets or at least updated Electrum wallets that have support for Fulcrum. That works much better.

1:29:48Vlad CosteaYeah. Which is why also Cake Wallet uses it. But I'm curious why the first wallet that every Bitcoin Fork uses is Electrum. The first wallet that was supported for Bitcoin Cash, I think was Electrum. The first one that is used for eCash is also Electrum. What is it about Electrum that makes it so popular?

1:30:14Amaury SéchetWhile it's open source, it has a fair amount of feature to do all kinds of stuff that you want, which is useful for a developer to test the network and stuff like that. That many more user-friendly wallets would not support those advanced features.

1:30:33So, I guess like between the fact that it's open source, the client is open source, but the server part as well is open source. And the fact that it has all kinds of advanced features that allows you to test stuff on the network makes it like a good candidate for a first client.

1:30:53Vlad CosteaOkay. Makes sense. Now, I can think of other wallets which are open source, but they're not this popular. So, there must be something there.

1:31:03Amaury SéchetI mean, it's also one of the oldest one, right? There is this as well.

1:31:10Vlad CosteaYeah. And I think it's written in Python or JavaScript.

1:31:14Amaury SéchetIt's written in Python.

1:31:15Vlad CosteaPython. I've met Thomas a few times, the creator. He's also French. Very nice guy. Very wacky in some ways.

1:31:23Amaury SéchetI don't know him actually. Really? Yeah. I'm not that integrated into the French crypto ecosystem. I don't think he is either. It's kind of funny.

1:31:37Vlad CosteaHe's a fun guy. He was on the show. I think it was season 12 or 13, which means like four years ago maybe. You can look up that episode if you really want to find it. And I'm talking to the listeners, not necessarily to you. What was I going to say? Yeah. I want to put this on the screen. It's the map of Bitcoin forks. And I'm not sure. I think I sent you the image so you can check it out. I think it's very interesting. It's outlined in a very comprehensive way how it all started from Bitcoin and all the soft forks and hard forks that happened over the years.

1:32:21For convenience, I think I'm going to check it on my phone because my laptop screen is small and I can't read. Or maybe I need glasses. I don't know.

1:32:33Amaury SéchetWell, it's very tall, right? So it gets resized if you kind of have to zoom it in a bit.

1:32:42Vlad CosteaI'm not even sure if people watching this on the stream can read this. It's I think rather tiny. Maybe I can put in the description like a link to the map. Anyway, 2010 in July, it was the first hard fork of Bitcoin that brought the addition of OP_NOP functions. 2010 August, there was the value overflow incident, which I think generated some billions of Bitcoins in inflation and Satoshi did a soft fork to fix it. 2010 in October, Satoshi set the block size limit to one megabyte with a soft fork.

1:33:302012 in April, there was the soft fork for Pay-to-Script-Hash. So this was post Satoshi, the first soft fork. 2013 in March, the block height in coinbase soft fork. 2013 in May, the migration from BerkeleyDB to LevelDB, which was an accidental hard fork, a mistake by Mike Hearn. Yes. It's sort of legendary and I wish I would get Mike Hearn.

1:34:05Amaury SéchetI'm pretty sure that was a mistake per se, but yeah, that was an involuntary hard fork. There was a limitation in BerkeleyDB that disallowed some blocks because of limitation internal to BerkeleyDB that nobody really had figured out that those existed. And yeah, so as a result, you changed BerkeleyDB and you removed those limitations.

1:34:29Vlad Costea2015 in July, there was another soft fork for strict DER encoding for signatures. I don't even know what this means.

1:34:40Amaury SéchetSo the signature used by Bitcoin, the signature is like a mathematical operation. And the result of this operation, you need to put it in ones and zeros that the computer is going to understand. And this is what is the encoding. And the way you decide which ones and which zeros correspond to what in the mathematical operation allows the other computer in the other end to verify the operation. And before the strict DER encoding was enforced, there were several ways to encode the same signature, which means that you could produce different transactions.

1:35:36Like byte for byte, like that would be the same transaction, but byte for byte, that would be a different transaction because you can modify the signature. And this caused all kinds of issues because you could not rely on transaction IDs and stuff like that because anyone could produce a variation of the transaction where the signature would be encoded in a slightly different way. That would be the same signature, so still valid, but it would be encoded in a slightly different way that would change the transaction ID.

1:36:07And yeah, this caused like an immense amount of complication, so you can just get rid of it.

1:36:17Vlad CosteaAlso in 2015, in December, there was the OP_CHECKLOCKTIMEVERIFY soft fork. And I think this is something that enables multisig, if I'm not mistaken.

1:36:29Amaury SéchetCheckLockTimeVerify and CheckSequenceVerify, it allows you to make coins that are unspendable for some amount of time.

1:36:42And this allows you to do all kinds of smart contract stuff. It seems very simple when you specify it that way, but it's actually like, it enables a ton of stuff. So for instance, you can create script that is like, well, if you have like this public key, you can spend the coin, but in like 30 days, you can also spend with that other public key. And that allows you, like, let's give, let's get an example, right? Like maybe you want to distribute, you know, papers, like, you know, Bitcoin wallet papers to people so that they can have some Bitcoins or whatever.

1:37:33If those people, they lose it or they destroy it, they throw it away or whatever, like the coins are lost. Right? Because now the private key associated to those coins that you gave them, it doesn't exist anymore. But it can be like, you know, all the people that have not collected those coins in like 30 days or whatever, I can get them back. It's also, that's a simple example to understand, but more complicated stuff. For instance, it's useful for the Lightning Network. Because in the Lightning Network, essentially you're going to exchange transaction with other people in the Lightning Network, but don't commit them on chain.

1:38:14Right? And you are going to be able to update your state with other people. As you go, you know, like you spend more money, you update the transaction that you do with those people. And the problem is because of that, people can try to commit on chain an old state. So for instance, let's say the two of us, we have a channel on the Lightning Network and I pay you one Bitcoin. And then later on you pay me one Bitcoin. So the channel, they are back to where they were, right?

1:38:49But there is a point in time in the past where you had one more Bitcoin and I had one less Bitcoin. And you may decide, you know what, I would like to keep that Bitcoin after all. So I'm going to commit this old state on chain where I have one more Bitcoin. So what do I do in that case? I can send a transaction on chain that essentially sends all the Bitcoin to me. It's called like a punishment transaction.

1:39:24The only way I can do that safely is if the transaction that we exchange that gives you the one more Bitcoin, I have some kind of lock time that gives me some amount of time to be able to broadcast my punishment transaction and be sure that it's going to go through before you can actually use those one more Bitcoin. So this mechanism is like, useful for all kind of smart contract or, you know, layer two systems that you want to build on top of Bitcoin.

1:39:58Vlad CosteaInteresting. Because OP_CHECKLOCKTIMEVERIFY and OP_CHECKSEQUENCEVERIFY were the last two soft forks while Bitcoin was just one large community. Yeah, from this point onwards, it became five different coins in different times. So in 2017, the first of August, you created Bitcoin Cash. Yeah. And then the same month on the 24th, SegWit was activated as a soft fork. Yes. So I'm going to continue down the line on the BTC chain because there are only two more upgrades that happened. And then we're going to go down.

1:40:43I think this is also interesting, the Bitcoin Gold soft fork, it only had like one change. And then we go down the rabbit hole for the large block version of Bitcoin. So you had SegWit that happened on the 24th of August of 2017. I gotta ask you, how come the large block versions of Bitcoin did not choose to use SegWit at all? Because it's much more than a block size increase, right? It's also like this large fix for the malleability issue.

1:41:26Amaury SéchetSo the thing is, you can fix the malleability issue as a hard fork as well, which is something we ended up doing. Actually, in the hard fork for Bitcoin Cash, we changed the signature format. We changed the transaction hashing algorithm in a way that is actually very similar to the SegWit one for the same reasons. They were like question of malleability. There was also an issue with the old way of quadratic hashing, which means that if you made a transaction that is twice as large, it would take four times as much compute to compute the transaction hash that you would need to use for the signature and so on and so forth.

1:42:18So for large transaction, it could get prohibitively expensive to hash. So that's another bug that this algorithm fix. And the third one is for offline wallets, like a Ledger or Trezor or stuff like that, because they have no access to the internet. They don't know how much coin there is in the UTXO that you're going to send, right? Because of that, they cannot sign a transaction that is like, send one coin to you, for instance.

1:42:57They know that I'm sending one coin to you, but they don't know how much coin I'm taking out of the wallet, right? So you could trick those devices to sign transaction that take like, you know, maybe three Bitcoin in my wallet and send one to you and send two in like transaction fee or something like that. So this change in the signature algorithm also ensured that those offline device, they have to know what amount there are in the UTXOs that they are spending. And so now they can tell you know, you're going to spend this much coin, you're going to pay this much in fee and it's going to go there and there.

1:43:34Now they can give you like all the amount and they can verify all the amount even if they are offline. Because if your wallet lie to the hardware wallet and give them the wrong amount, the signature is going to be incorrect. So this new signature format had like a number of improvements and we actually adopted it from day one in Bitcoin Cash.

1:43:56Vlad CosteaOkay. So there was SegWit in 2017 and then the only upgrade that we got in BTC was Taproot. That happened in, if I'm not mistaken, there's not a date here, but it's November of 2021. And that was it.

1:44:11Amaury SéchetI don't know the date, but I trust you. I know that Taproot activated, but I don't know exactly when.

1:44:20Vlad CosteaNow there was the Bitcoin Cash fork that you created in August, but around the same time in 20, no, it wasn't around the same time. So this was 2018 in July. There was the Bitcoin Gold hard fork. No, sorry. It was in October of 2017. I'm confused here. In October, there was the Bitcoin Gold snapshot that took place. And then they switched to the Equihash mining algorithm in 2018 because they wanted to mine with their GPUs. So the sole purpose of Bitcoin Gold was to get people to reuse their old GPUs to mine it.

1:45:02And as soon as it was not profitable anymore, they sort of killed it. I don't think Bitcoin Gold is being used anymore.

1:45:10Amaury SéchetI don't know if it's dead or not technically, but yeah, in practice, it's more or less dead today.

1:45:17Vlad CosteaBut now we have the Bitcoin Cash branch, which after being created in August, it went on to have a DAA change for the cw-144 algorithm. And this was in November.

1:45:36Amaury SéchetYeah. So what happened is that when we forked, there were a lot of the big blocker that did not quite realize at that point the degree to which they had fucked up. And so they were still operating under the impression that they would be able to activate larger block on Bitcoin itself. Right. And for BCH to work, you kind of needed to have those people on board. If you did not, then, you know, I mean, let's put it that way. It would be like much more difficult.

1:46:10Like the more people you can try to get on board, the better it is. But those people, they didn't want to change the difficulty algorithm because that would cement the position of BCH as a minority fork. Right. And not as Bitcoin. And so that was a problem for many of them. So the end result of that situation is that we were able to design a difficulty algorithm that would somewhat adjust when the chain would be a minority chain, but it would behave exactly the same way if the chain is a majority chain.

1:46:50Right. So it's like a de facto, a no-op change if BCH ended up being the majority chain. But if it's not, then it would behave differently. The problem with that is that the algorithm, given that constraint, it was almost impossible to make a good difficulty adjustment algorithm. Right. So the algorithm completely sucked. But it was possible to sell it, whereas a better algorithm, it was not possible to sell it at the time. And when it was obvious that BCH would be a minority chain and that the difficulty algorithm sucked, it was, you know, by that time it was possible to roll out a new one. Like people were willing to accept that.

1:47:35Vlad CosteaOkay. So this was in November of 2017. There's also something called Bitcoin Clashic. What was that?

1:47:45Amaury SéchetYeah, it was more or less of a troll fork, I guess. Yeah, it doesn't really matter. Like some people don't want the hard fork or kind of like wanted to degrade the hard fork to change the DAA. And so they created like an alternative chain, but that never really had any kind of real support. It was more of a troll stuff.

1:48:11Vlad CosteaThen the next year in 2018, in May, you had the Monolith hard fork that increased the block size to 32 megabytes. So just for the record, what was the initial size of Bitcoin Cash? 8 megabytes? 8, yeah. And then the next year you went from 8 to 32? Yes. And you added extra opcodes. What are these opcodes? Are they the Satoshi-era ones like OP_CAT, OP_MUL and whatever?

1:48:42Amaury SéchetYes, not exactly the same because there was a reason why they were initially disabled, right? Like the way Satoshi made them originally was unsafe. But yeah, those are opcodes that do essentially the same thing, but like in a slightly different way so that it's safe.

1:49:06Vlad CosteaOkay, so are they the same ones that are activated today or were they modified later?

1:49:12Amaury SéchetNo, they're the same one, but no, we have more. But yeah, they are the same ones that exist today.

1:49:21Vlad CosteaThen I'm not sure about the date here. I think it's November of 2018. You had the Magnetic Anomaly hard fork with OP_CHECKDATASIG and CTOR. Yeah. What's this?

1:49:37Amaury SéchetSo, OP_CHECKDATASIG is the capability to check a signature on arbitrary data in the transaction script in terms of like people have figured out that they could do all kinds of stuff with. With that one, it was like a big enabler on what we can do with scripts. CTOR is like a scalability technology. So in Bitcoin blocks, like on BTC, you need to put transaction in what we call topological order. So they can be like in any order whatsoever. But if I send money to you and then you send the money to someone else, the transaction where I send money to you needs to be before in the block, then the transaction where you send money to someone else.

1:50:28Okay. But outside of that constraint, we can put the transaction in the block in any order. And it turns out that these constraints suck for all kind of reason.

1:50:40But the two main reason is that, so the first one is that if you want to transmit a block over the network, the node you send the block to probably have most of the information that are in the block already, right? Because the transaction and so on. They are distributed between blocks. So mostly the two things that you want to send to that other node to, you know, tell it that you have a new block is like the block header and then some information about what transaction are in the block and what transaction are not in the block, right?

1:51:17You don't want to send all the transaction again because the node at the other end, they already have all those information. So you would lose a lot of time. And the time at which, you know, the time it takes to propagate the block over the network is key to scalability. You want that operation to be as fast as possible. The faster it is, the bigger you can scale.

1:51:43So the problem with that is that if you can put transaction in whatever order in the block, when you send the block to a node, not only you need to tell them which transaction are in the block or not, but you need to tell them in what order they are. And it turns out that the information about what order they are scales horribly, right? Like if you have twice as many transactions, telling them which are in the block and which are not in the block is like twice as much information.

1:52:14But the ordering, you know, like if you have like just to think about it, like in a small number, it's very easy to figure it. Like if you have just two, if you have just one transaction in the block, there's only one order that could be right. Like it's just that one. If there are two, there are two ordering possible, right? But as soon as you have three, then you have like three options for the first one and then two options for the second one. And then one option for the third one.

1:52:40So now you have like six ordering possible, right? So you went from one to two to six. And so like very quickly, you're going to realize that that number completely explodes. The number of ordering that you can have grows much faster than the number of transactions. That you have in the block. And therefore the amount of information that you need to send to another node to describe that ordering grows much faster than to describe what is in the block or not. So if instead of doing that, you put in the protocol, well, you know, like the transaction, they need to be put in the block in like a very specific order.

1:53:21If you do that, then you don't need to transmit ordering information, you just, you just need to transmit what is in the block and what is not. All that part about ordering, you can throw away. That means that you can much more efficiently propagate blocks on the network. So that's one aspect of it. The second aspect of it is to verify the block.

1:53:43To verify the block, if you're on Bitcoin, you need to verify that the block is in topological ordering. And topological ordering is like a difficult constraint to verify in parallel, right? And if you want to scale it, like, you know, on modern computer, for instance, your CPU is going to have several cores, right? If you want to validate fast, ideally you would want each core to be able to do something on its own. And then the work for each core of your CPU at the end is put together to decide if the block is valid or not.

1:54:21But the whole topological ordering make that almost impossible to do. So if you decide to get rid of that, which you do with CTOR, you can validate transaction in parallel. So that means that you can also verify the block is valid or not much faster than you could before. So all of that is like, a bit technical, maybe like for most users, it doesn't really change anything that they see or do or, you know, but it changed a lot how much you can scale the network and all the hook.

1:54:59Vlad CosteaI guess this is also about the unconfirmed transactions because Bitcoin Cash was or is still using zero conf as something which is quite popular. And as soon as the wallet gets information about the funds, the custom is that they don't wait for one confirmation. And maybe that they want to send part of that amount or the exact same amount to someone else before it gets mined, right?

1:55:26Amaury SéchetYeah, CTOR doesn't change anything about that. Okay. And yeah, I mean, I think the way the BCH ecosystem is handling zero-conf situations is a bit naive. It's not as secure as people think they are. And the only reason it works is that nobody tries to mess with it too much. But you should not really trust zero-conf on BCH.

1:55:56Vlad CosteaThat's good advice, I guess. So this one...

1:55:59Amaury SéchetI mean, it really depends, like if you buy some small stuff, it's okay, right? But if this is a really important transaction, you cannot really trust zero-conf.

1:56:10Vlad CosteaIt seems like there was a Satoshi Vision hard fork in November of 2018. I'm just moving on with the time. And this is what led to the creation of Bitcoin Cash SV, which eventually became BSV. Yeah. And from this point onwards, and this was November of 2018, in July of 2019, they had the Quasar hard fork that increased the block size from 128 megabytes to 512. The genesis... Yeah.

1:56:42Amaury SéchetSo, I mean, I'm not going to be nice with BSV, but essentially the whole reason for that fork is Craig is Satoshi. And so whatever Craig says is gospel. And so we need to do like whatever Craig says, right? And Craig Wright, by the way, like for people who don't follow, Craig Wright, he's like an Australian dude that pretends to be Satoshi, obviously he's not, but a lot of people believe that he is. And then, yeah, this led to a series of changes that are, I mean, like people take it seriously, but they're very hilarious in some way, right?

1:57:22Because they change stuff, but they don't really understand why the stuff are there because like Craig Wright is not, is not like a good engineer or anything, right? And so he cannot really like direct the project in any sensible way. So for instance, you mentioned that, yeah, they did like the Quasar upgrade where they increase the block size to hundreds of megabytes, if not gigabytes. At some point they went to gigabytes in size. The problem is changing the block size limit is the easy part, right?

1:57:55Like it's like, let's say I want to, I want to go from Paris to Bucharest faster, right? I could say, well, you know, like very, very easy solution, like let's, let's remove all the speed limits on the highway between Paris and Bucharest. And to some extent it's going to improve the speed, but it's not like I can buy a car that goes at Mach 3 that's going to really allow me to go to Bucharest that fast, right? Like at some point I need to have highway that are built differently, cars that are built differently or not even use cars anymore.

1:58:34Maybe I want a high speed rail, or maybe I want to use a plane or something, right? But at some point you need to redesign the engineering that is behind it because just changing the speed limit is not what's going to allow things to go faster. And this is exactly what they did. They like increased the block size to crazy high number, but did not really address the engineering issue that make that limit necessary in the first place, understand? And yeah, if you want to have more details about that, like various people running BSV nodes have written about this, but when they have those huge blocks that are tens of megabytes or gigabytes in size, like most of the time the node is just going to crash.

1:59:24Because the resources that it takes to propagate the block and validate it's just like completely humongous. And most nodes just like cannot handle it. So yeah, that's.

1:59:39Vlad CosteaYeah, it kept going because they had this 512 megabyte hard fork and then the next year in 2020 in February, they had what they call the Genesis hard fork that made it unlimited for block size. So they removed these and they put legacy time locks in place.

2:00:09Why would they do this? I mean, the block size is obvious. This was the point from the beginning, but why would they remove pay-to-script-hash and CLTV?

2:00:19Amaury SéchetYeah, but in practice, in practice, the block size is not that big, because there are also limits that are internal, it's like, you know, I mentioned earlier when we were discussing, there is a SIGOPS limit. There was also a limit at the network protocol level that's going to make it impossible to transmit blocks beyond a certain size. And I'm not sure that they fixed those, but yeah, so it's, it's more of like a PR stunt than anything else. It's also like a huge vulnerability. You can, you can bring down the BSV network by just publishing a giant block if you want.

2:00:55It's, it's, I mean, it's kind of stupid. But otherwise, yeah, what is the other stuff? Like I'm, I'm having problem to read it. It's very small.

2:01:07Vlad CosteaTry to open it from your computer or phone. I sent it to you on Telegram.

2:01:13Amaury SéchetYeah, maybe on my phone.

2:01:16Vlad CosteaThat's what I'm doing, because otherwise I would have to get very close to the screen. Yeah.

2:01:21Amaury SéchetCan you, can you, read it again before you open the thing?

2:01:30Vlad CosteaUh, the Genesis hard fork with block size, pay-to-script-hash, CLTV, CSV,

2:01:38Amaury SéchetThey removed pay-to-script-hash, right?

2:01:41Vlad CosteaWhich yeah, that's what I was asking you. Why would they do this?

2:01:46Amaury SéchetOh, because they have this whole stuff like Craig is Satoshi and Craig, you know, like if Satoshi, meaning Craig in that case would have wanted pay-to-script-hash, he would have put it in the protocol already. Right. And so that was, that wasn't acceptable that the evil Core developers introduced that technology when Craig was not okay with it. Right. Like they did not ask him.

2:02:13Essentially that was more or less the reason. This one as well created like a huge number of vulnerabilities because they are, I mean, the problem is like, if you have an address that is pay-to-script-hash on, you know, on Bitcoin or BCH, that predates the fork. No, this address, like if you spend it on, you know, on BTC or BCH, if you spend it there, no, you can, anyone can look at the transaction you used to spend it and use that transaction to construct like whatever transaction on BSV to spend your coins.

2:02:54So I've not looked at the followup of that, but like probably a huge number of coins were stolen when that happened. That's what I would expect in any way, like this created like a huge vulnerability problem, same for CLTV and CSV, which was, CLTV is CheckLockTimeVerify and CSV is CheckSequenceVerify. So that's the two soft fork we discussed before, they reverted all that stuff because those were, you know, the evil Core developers corrupting the brilliant idea that Craig had, because he obviously is Satoshi.

2:03:37So all those stuff, they needed to be removed from the protocol. They were, they were corruption of the protocol. It's, it's almost like religious in spirit, right? Like more than engineering. It's like, it was, it was not what it was meant to be. We need to, we need to undo all of that. It was corrupted.

2:04:02Vlad CosteaYeah. And they just became crazier, I think, because they added in November of 2021, a blacklist manager, which is a UTXO freezing feature. Yeah. It defeats the purpose of Bitcoin. Why would anyone do that?

2:04:20Amaury SéchetI mean, yeah, at this point, you just want to use a bank or Visa, Mastercard, whatever, right? Like if you can't do that, it's, it's why would they do that? So like, I can only speculate as to why would they do that, but for a while they started suing everybody, including me twice, but you know, not limited to me, they sued a lot of people. Some people way more than me. Twice is already pretty good, but some people managed to do more than that.

2:04:49And they sued everybody and they tried to define themselves as the Bitcoin that is compliant with regulation. And that is, you know, with the law and whatever. And, and the whole industry is like full of people that are scammers and they are all completely corrupt. And, but thankfully like Craig is there to sue them all. Right. And in order to foster that image that they were trying to create for themselves, they created that blacklist feature, you know, so that they can say, you know, jury, like, you know, if there is like some jurisdiction that wants to blacklist some coins, because it's like the proceeds of fraud or whatever, well, you know, they can do it.

2:05:37They just ask us and we do it. Whereas those other chains, it's just like they don't do that because they want to, they want to enable cartels and, you know, pedophiles and whatever, you know, terrorists, you know, whatever can come to mind. That was the way they were selling that, but obviously defeats the whole purpose of having a blockchain to begin with, right? Like if you have an entity that can blacklist and freeze coins, then why do you need a blockchain to begin with? You can just use a SQL database and do the transaction there.

2:06:13Vlad CosteaYeah. And the next year they went even further. So this was November of 2021. In November of 2022, they actually included what they call digital asset recovery, which is the UTXO confiscation feature, which goes even further before this, they could freeze. Now they can take away. Yeah, exactly. It's crazy.

2:06:38Like how can you actually believe that this is the real Bitcoin or that this guy is Satoshi when he endorses something which is stealing essentially?

2:06:47Amaury SéchetWell, what I can tell you why some people believe it, Craig is very confident and you know, like the con, the con in con man stands for confidence. So he's very confident and he's very good at producing like very complicated sounding explanation for pretty much anything. And the thing is like, if you're an engineer or if you're somewhat versed in the technology, you can understand that those complicated sounding phrase, they are just nonsense, right? But if you're not, it's difficult to decipher. And a lot of people are just like impressed by the confidence and yeah, they believe him, but I don't know, like any serious engineer that is convinced at this point, like in the early days, some of them, like were like, Oh, maybe, you know, like let's, let's be open to the opportunity, but as time went by and the amount of evidence about Craig Wright started to pile on, it was obvious to anyone.

2:08:04That has some technical knowledge that he had no idea what he was talking about.

2:08:11Vlad CosteaYeah, well, I'm happy that we ended with this chapter of Bitcoin forks, which is BSV. I'm not sure if they added anything recently since 2022, but if they did, I don't think it's that interesting. Anyway, the point is just to prove that they went. So at first they said they're going to have gigamegs, which is Calvin's term, his way of saying gigabyte blocks, which I think is interesting as an experiment. Like, why not? This has been a conversation.

2:08:42Amaury SéchetNo, but I think gigabyte blocks is actually a very interesting challenge, right? But like, you need to actually do it, right? If you go in the software and you change the limit being like, the limit is one gigabyte now, or one gigabyte now, like you have not done the work. It's like, well, you know, I went on the road and I changed the speed limit to 1000 kilometer per hour. No, people can drive 1000 kilometer per hour. No, they cannot like the car cannot do that. The road is absolutely not safe at that speed. It's just like, it just doesn't work. It doesn't work that way.

2:09:23Vlad CosteaThere was this presentation by Dan Kaminsky from 2011 or 2012 when he went to a hackers conference, and at the time Bitcoin was still new. And he sort of said in the slides of his presentation that in order for Bitcoin to have this. Same throughput as Visa at the time, then it would need to have like one gigabyte blocks and a lot of storage and a lot of CPU power. I think he mentioned something like a 20 core CPU or whatever.

2:09:58Amaury SéchetYeah, which amazingly is not that much. And one gigabyte block is, I mean, it's a lot. But to process the same volume of transaction as Visa, it's actually not that much as well. That's a fairly small amount of compute and bandwidth and all of that for a system that can do what Visa can.

2:10:22Vlad CosteaI think my cat is compromising the live stream right now. He wants something, but I don't know what. Would it be fine if we take two or three minutes so I can feed him so I can come back? I'm just going to put something on the screen and then give him food and then come back. I apologize for this. It's something I did not expect. Okay, let's go. I'll be back two or three minutes. You can grab a drink. Then we talk about BCH stuff.

2:10:56And I'm back. I hope that you enjoyed the break for the Spotify version of this interview. I will remove this break. Let's continue to discussing this diagram, which presents the upgrades of BCH. So in spite of the fork that happened with BSV, the Bitcoin Cash project went on. There was the Bitcoin Cash ABC moment when Bitcoin Cash became ABC with the Great Wall hard fork that added Schnorr signatures in May of 2019. Can you tell me more about this? Is it like the Taproot of BCH?

2:11:40Amaury SéchetNot really, though. I think Schnorr signatures are a part of Taproot, but Schnorr signature is an alternative to the ECDSA signature that were used before by Bitcoin. And they have a number of advantages over ECDSA. First, they are much simpler and much simpler means less security problems or implementation errors and stuff like that. But they allow you to do various tricks that you can't do with ECDSA signatures. For instance, you can batch validate the signature. So you can run an algorithm that's not going to verify just one signature, but that's going to verify, you know, like two, four, ten, a thousand, like whatever number of signature faster than verifying, you know, all of them one by one.

2:12:35Of course, the downside of doing that is that if the algorithm tells you that it doesn't check, then you don't know what signature is wrong and what signature is right. But you can validate a great number of signature all at once, much faster than you could validate them individually. So if you want to validate a block, for instance, that's an advantage. And as we mentioned, propagation time on the network is what limits scalability in the end of the day. So if you can validate signature faster, it's better.

2:13:11And for users, they can also like you can do multisig that doesn't look like multisig with Schnorr. You can do like all kinds of crazy tricks that you cannot do with ECDSA. So it's a superior signature algorithm. It totally existed at the time of Bitcoin. It's like, I think it's older than ECDSA, but there used to be a patent on it. And so, you know, ECDSA became the de facto standard. People started using ECDSA rather than Schnorr because of the patent. But by that time, the patent had expired. And so we could use that signature algorithm rather than ECDSA.

2:13:52Vlad CosteaYeah. I do remember that 2017, 2018, 2019, there was this propaganda in Bitcoin that we should replace ECDSA with Schnorr signatures as quickly as possible because they're more efficient. And I don't think we ever got that into BTC, but BCH, like, is this like a full integration of Schnorr signatures, a complete replacement of ECDSA? Yeah. Is there a difference in quantum resistance for Schnorr as opposed to ECDSA?

2:14:26Amaury SéchetNo, for quantum resistance is the same. Okay. If one is broken, the other is broken.

2:14:37Vlad CosteaAlso in 2019, so we spoke about the Great Wall hard fork in 2019 in May. You had the Graviton hard fork that did Schnorr for multisig in November of the same year.

2:14:55Amaury SéchetI'm not quite sure what people mean by that because you can do multisig, you can do Schnorr multisig. It doesn't depend on the protocol. So I'm not sure.

2:15:15I don't remember what was in the hard fork, but the description here is not correct.

2:15:23Vlad CosteaYeah. Anyway, it was the second hard fork of 2019. And then the next year in May, there was the Phonon hard fork that added SigChecks and OP_REVERSEBYTES. What is OP_REVERSEBYTES?

2:15:37Amaury SéchetIt's in the name. It's reverse the bytes of some buffer. When you can do that, essentially like those are tools to build various smart contracts.

2:15:52Vlad CosteaOkay. It seems like this is where the hard fork happened in 2020 in November. Yeah. There's something about November and May that seems to always be eventful. It was in November.

2:16:10Amaury SéchetBut November is typically when the hard forks happen for BCH and now eCash. So if something is going to explode, it's typically going to be in November.

2:16:23Vlad CosteaIn 2018 in November, there was the BSV fork and in 2020 in November, there was the XEC, the eCash fork. I got to ask you, why did you choose the name eCash?

2:16:36Amaury SéchetI don't know. I think it's a fantastic name now. I think it's electronic cash.

2:16:43Vlad CosteaIt carries a historic weight because David Chaum designed eCash and then he created the company.

2:16:52Amaury SéchetYeah. So that was a question. But at the same time, that project has been dead for more than 20 years. So we cannot lock up that name in the dead project for generations.

2:17:09Vlad CosteaBut it's also the fact that the first version of the white paper that Satoshi was circulating was called ecash.pdf. Is this why you called it eCash because it's like the name that Satoshi was using before Bitcoin?

2:17:22Amaury SéchetI mean, it's a confluence of stuff. The fact that it's a great name, the fact that, yeah, it was mentioned in the past by Satoshi. There was also the opportunity to get the e.cash domain, which matters as well. There was just a confluence of stuff that made it so that we could use that name and it's just a great name.

2:17:47Vlad CosteaI wonder who owns ecash.com.

2:17:53Amaury SéchetNot sure at this time. We got in touch back then, but they wanted an absurd amount of money for it. So we passed on that. Maybe it's David Chaum. I don't know.

2:18:00Vlad CosteaSo there was this hard fork. Should we continue with the Bitcoin Cash fork?

2:18:17Amaury SéchetSure. Like you want. Yeah.

2:18:18Vlad CosteaAnd then we can end this analysis with eCash, which is what you're working on right now. So there was the Axion hard fork, which added aserti3-2d to the DAA.

2:18:32Amaury SéchetSo it's like a different difficulty adjustment algorithm.

2:18:35Vlad CosteaOh, okay. How is this different from the previous one?

2:18:45Amaury SéchetI mean, so the whole question of difficulty adjustment is you want to estimate the amount of hashrate you have on the chain, right? And then you want to make the difficulty of finding the next blocks, such as it takes on average 10 minutes to find the next block. And the thing is like, you cannot know how much hashrate there is on the chain, right? Because the miners are not going to tell you. And so you can only guess it based on how many blocks were found in the past and what difficulty they had.

2:19:27And based on that, there is a different way to estimate how much hashrate you have on the chain. And the previous algorithm weighted equally. So was it 144 blocks, I think. So it weighted like the past 144 block equally to estimate how much hashrate there is on the chain. Whereas the new one weighed the more recent block, you know, heavier than the older ones. And at the end of the day, that gives you like a more correct result of the difficulty that you need to use.

2:20:12Vlad CosteaOkay, I'm happy with the explanation. There was also…

2:20:17Amaury SéchetI mean, there are a lot of math behind it. Like if I get into that, I think we're going to lose everybody. Plus it's not fresh in my mind, so I might get it wrong.

2:20:27Vlad CosteaThere was also the Upgrade 8 hard fork, which added introspection opcodes and OP_MUL, which is for multiplication. And it says here bigger integers. Is that how you say it?

2:20:41Amaury SéchetYeah, integers. So introspection is essentially opcodes that allows you to query information about the transaction that you're making. And so you can write script that are like, well, if the transaction is like this or like that, then, you know, do this or do that.

2:21:06So that's one thing. OP_MUL is like multiplication and bigger integer is, you know, exactly what the name says. So in the script, you're going to have to manipulate number. And number, well, not, you know, when there is not like a comma or like, you know, it's not like 2.5 or whatever in computing. If it's like a round number, we call that an integer in computing. So one, two, three, 25. I don't know. Sorry, four, I guess.

2:21:40All of those are integer numbers, right? And when you manipulate information in the computer, there is like always a limit on how big the information can get. So for the integer, there is like a biggest integer that the script can manipulate. And so they, like, when they say they support bigger integer, this is exactly what the name says. Now they can support numbers that are way bigger than the script could support before. And that allows you to do some tricks that you could not do before.

2:22:19Vlad CosteaThere's someone in the chat named Toby, Tobias Ruck. And he said that he's the one who wrote OP_REVERSEBYTES. And BTC has Schnorr signatures in Taproot scripts. I guess this was a conversation that we had like 20 minutes ago. And he also says we are so back. Hi Tobias.

2:22:44Yeah, it's good to have smart people in the chat. Thank you for joining. The last hard fork, at least in this chart, because there might be more that happened in the meantime, I think this one is from 2023. But I love it because it's so comprehensive has so much information. CashTokens, it enabled native tokens, pay-to-script-hash 32. And this was in May of 2023.

2:23:12Amaury SéchetYeah, so the CashTokens stuff is what the name says, it's like a tool to do like various tokens on chain that are validated by the consensus. So I don't know that there's much to add there. But the pay-to-script-hash 32. This one is interesting, because when pay-to-script-hash was introduced on chain, it used a hash that is not very big. And the problem is, with computer becoming more and more powerful every year, we are actually close to the limit as to whether it's secure or not.

2:24:00Right? It would still be considered secure today, but there is not a lot of margin. Right? And, and so what they did is like, pay-to-script-hash, but with a bigger hash, so that there's a lot of margin. It's simple as this different hashing algorithm so that, yeah, so that you get a lot of more margin for security.

2:24:26Vlad CosteaI just want to comment that there were a lot more upgrades in Bitcoin Cash compared to Bitcoin. And the irony of this situation is that Bitcoin Cash started out with this philosophy of scaling on chain. But now they're talking about creating a ZK rollup, which they can do in a much more trust-minimized way because of these opcodes compared to Bitcoin and also have better onboarding because they have more on chain capacity for not having to trust custodians and third parties to perform the onboarding.

2:25:00So the irony of the situation is that right now, Bitcoin Cash is in a better position to have scalable layer twos than Bitcoin.

2:25:16Amaury SéchetYes, and no, I think malleability is not completely fixed on BCH. So that would be an issue for stuff like Lightning Network, but for everything else, yeah, it's actually better than Bitcoin on every other dimension.

2:25:31Vlad CosteaNo, but I did not mean Lightning specifically, it can be a ZK rollup, it can be sidechains or whatever.

2:25:39Amaury SéchetYeah, but a lot of layer twos are going to rely on transaction being like, you know, made in a specific way. So if you can change the transaction, it's not good. It's not just Lightning Network, like most of the most of the layer two system are just not going to like transaction malleability. But in every other dimension, it's better.

2:26:10Vlad CosteaNow we get to the branch of XEC, which is your eCash. And it says here that it has 8% IFP, a Coinbase rule. What's this?

2:26:25Amaury SéchetIt's a funding mechanism. And it really like the core, the core of the split was really around the funding, because what was happening, you know, like BCH, there was several implementation.

2:26:36And like many implementations had like much more funding than ABC. And we were constantly running out of money. We could not do our job properly. Plus on top of that, people were like, well, we gave like this much for development. So why is this and that and that not happening? But if you give money to someone else, that doesn't help us, you know, improve the development. And outside of that, there were like a lot of a lot of politicking things were very inefficient. So the resources could not be used efficiently as well.

2:27:17So, you know, at the end of the day, that was just not good. So we needed like a self-funding mechanism. And actually, like this is what you saw in BCH, like many of the people that were politicking with us and getting the funding and whatnot. Usually it's because they had that one stuff that they wanted to get in. And what happened, like when you look at those hard forks, like, for instance, CashTokens, it was like Unlimited's idea, essentially, like Bitcoin Unlimited wanted to do that.

2:27:48There are reasons that you would not want to do that at the consensus layer. But essentially, like, you know, they pushed through it, they made it and then they got the fuck out. Like, no, they are working on some other coin that is called Nexa or something. Like those people, they are because if you are not paid by money, then you are paid by ego. Right. And so now your goal becomes I want to have like my mark on that consensus layer. That's my motivation to work on it.

2:28:22And that's a very bad motivation because now, like everybody wants to tag something on the protocol in some way. And that gives you very poorly designed protocol at the end of the day.

2:28:35Vlad CosteaYeah. So isn't Nexa the project of Peter Rizun?

2:28:43Amaury SéchetYeah, but I think like Andrew Stone and a few other people from BU are working on it now. I lost the picture.

2:28:52Vlad CosteaYeah, Nexa is not on this graph.

2:28:55Amaury SéchetNo, because it's not a fork. Maybe it is, but I don't think so. I don't think it's a fork. It's like it's a new coin. The Bitcoin Unlimited people, they were like, fuck this old Bitcoin stuff, right? Essentially, we want to do like whatever we want on our own coin.

2:29:16Vlad CosteaWhen I had Peter Rizun on the podcast, he told me that his strategy during the block size wars and after that was to keep both coins. So he hasn't sold his BTC for BCH. He hasn't sold his BCH for BTC. He just kept both. He was able to fund his work and development just by holding both and seeing what the market is going to think. What was your strategy? Did you keep your BTC?

2:29:45Amaury SéchetI kept some of it, but not all.

2:29:49Vlad CosteaThe one that you did not keep. Did you sell it for dollars or did you exchange it for BCH?

2:29:56Amaury SéchetBCH for the most part.

2:30:00Vlad CosteaDo you have any regrets or would you do anything different? Not about that, no.

2:30:09Amaury SéchetSo yeah, I ask myself that question often. I don't think I would have done...

2:30:14I mean, there are a lot of stuff that went wrong with BCH. But it's not clear that there was another path.

2:30:24So like, you know, like looking back, even knowing like the full sequence of events and everything, if I were to go back in the past, it's not clear to me what I could have done differently to significantly change the course of events.

2:30:42Vlad CosteaThat's fair. You acted on the information that you had and the conviction and ideology and the skills that you could bring. So in hindsight, you know, everyone's a genius. But yeah. Yeah.

2:30:57Amaury SéchetBut even knowing that, like the reason BCH had a problem, they were there from the start. They were there because you had people that have erroneous ideas about how this whole Bitcoin stuff works. Right. And they brought that with them within BCH, which makes BCH very dysfunctional in many, many ways.

2:31:23Vlad CosteaBut you get that in BTC also with these people who think they can add filters to stop people from transacting in ways they don't like.

2:31:31Amaury SéchetYeah. But like, look, on the other end, if you were to not bring those people, you wouldn't have the whole thing being so dysfunctional. But you probably also wouldn't have the network effect required for it to have the success that it had.

2:31:55And so you could be like, well, you know, like helping those people getting in was probably a mistake, they created a lot of chaos down the road. And they ended up like not bringing that much value. But just for the fact that they were there, you get some critical mass. And so it's not clear that you would get a better outcome, not having them. Right. And this is what we see with eCash. Like today, for instance, it's much harder. Even though eCash is, like you said, I'm not objective, but eCash is superior to BCH in like every conceivable way.

2:32:34But despite that, if you don't have like the same critical mass, it's still difficult. And the environment is also a bit different today. So it's difficult to get it to have the same traction as BCH.

2:32:52So it's not clear to me that there is another path that exists at all.

2:33:00Vlad CosteaI do have to ask you, and this is a very personal question, but I remember that night very fondly, because I was so confused about what's going on. It was in November of 2017, and SegWit2x was not happening anymore, and Coinbase added BCH, and BCH went on to become the second biggest coin in terms of market cap. And Vitalik put out a tweet...

2:33:28Amaury SéchetNot the second, but it was always in the top four.

2:33:30Vlad CosteaHow did that feel that night? I'm just curious to know, like, did you feel like a genius? Was it like…

2:33:36Amaury SéchetIt was great, but also a bit scary because it was like the whole… you know that the whole stuff is held together with sticks and some glue, right? So it was a bit scary, but it was also pretty great.

2:34:02Vlad CosteaWas it euphoric? Do you remember yourself being very happy? Or were you concerned? Yeah, I was very happy.

2:34:10Amaury SéchetI was very happy, but at the same time I was like, it's probably going to not hold those level of prices. And so then what comes next? I don't even remember what was the price at the time. Like more than a thousand at the peak. It was like 1100 or 1200 or something like that at the peak of it.

2:34:37Vlad CosteaOh, come on, CoinGecko. Scrolling. Where is it? The all-time high was $3785. Oh wow, this much? Crazy. Close to Christmas. I don't remember it being close to Christmas. I remember it being November or something. But I guess November

2:35:06Amaury SéchetIs not too far away from Christmas. But yeah, I'm pretty bad with dates, so I don't know if it was Christmas or November or whatnot. 3000? Man, it's way higher than I remember.

2:35:22Vlad CosteaThere's Tobias in the chat who says $4355, so I don't know. I guess it depends on the exchange.

2:35:29Amaury SéchetIt depends on the exchange and whatnot, yeah.

2:35:32Vlad CosteaThose days were still very wild.

2:35:36Amaury SéchetYeah, what I remember is that there were a wide discrepancy of price between exchanges and they did a fair amount of arbitrage during that time. Like, you know, selling on exchanges where the price was higher and buying on the one where the price was lower.

2:35:54Vlad CosteaI also remember around the time that Kraken just shut down for like a week or whatever because of high demand and they needed to improve their infrastructure. And Coinbase, basically, I think it was also Binance that people were selling accounts to be able to access these exchanges. Because they were so overwhelmed with demand, with people creating new accounts to trade, that it was hard to get and you had to wait for days until you could. And if you wanted to cut the line, you could buy an account from someone. It was really wild. I don't think we've seen anything like this since then.

2:36:38Amaury SéchetNo, things are much more streamlined nowadays.

2:36:42Vlad CosteaMaybe that the exchanges became better and that's why. Yes. Oh yeah, for sure.

2:36:50Amaury SéchetThey're way better today than they were back then, that's for sure.

2:36:54Vlad CosteaThey were not ready to handle that much demand.

2:36:57Amaury SéchetNo, it was really challenging time.

2:37:01Vlad CosteaWhat about SegWit2x? Because I remember very clearly that this was the big talk and all the institutions and the exchanges were going to support it. And then it just didn't happen. And the people who wanted to have SegWit2x, they joined Bitcoin Cash.

2:37:20Amaury SéchetYeah, it was a strategic mistake. You cannot be like, okay, I'm going to give you this and then you're going to give me that maybe later.

2:37:33That just doesn't work if there is not enough trust between the parties. Especially since the part, one part was a soft fork and one part was a hard fork and the hard fork is much more risky to activate. So if you don't want it to activate both at the same time, you wouldn't want to do the hard fork first.

2:37:58Like the way it was built, it was doomed for failure. It was doomed to turn into a bait and switch.

2:38:06Vlad CosteaYeah, I think the metaphor that you used when you were on the previous interview was that the soft fork side accelerated towards the other car and removed the steering wheel and showed it signaled that it's going full speed ahead.

2:38:24Amaury SéchetExactly. Yes. And then those are part just that you either accept a fork or cave. And so if a fork is going to happen, then you might as well do it.

2:38:40Vlad CosteaIn this chart, so we discussed that XEC was created in November of 2020. But in 2022, you also had this Avalanche post-consensus hard fork.

2:38:52Amaury SéchetYeah, and we have a few upgrades that are not on the graph. Let me find the graph again. I lost it for a second. Okay, I have it there. So we enabled Avalanche post-consensus. Avalanche post-consensus is not a hard fork. I don't know why it's written as a hard fork. Post-consensus, essentially you use the, so Avalanche is a consensus algorithm where nodes can talk to each other and agree on like yes or no question. And so the question that they are going to agree on with post-consensus is like, is this block part of your chain that you consider as valid?

2:39:35Right. And once all the node agree, then one block is part of the chain that they consider valid, you mark this block as finalized. And when you do that, you are not going to reorg that block. So that protects you against 51% attacks. And yeah, all kind of trickery.

2:40:01Vlad CosteaThat was always the Fear in BCH, right?

2:40:05Amaury SéchetWell, honestly, I think the BCH ecosystem is like a bit too confident about their level of security, because BCH is what, $400 versus 75K. So it's, it's not just that.

2:40:25Vlad CosteaIt's also the hashrate. Like one small mining pool from BTC can attack BCH if they want.

2:40:34Amaury SéchetYeah, exactly. But like the price ratio is important for that, right? Because people are going to mine the chain in proportion of the hash ratio of the price ratio. Right now, it's like below 1% of BTC. And so because of that, like even if you have like 1% of the hash from BTC that decide to mine on BCH, they can do like whatever the fuck they want on BCH. It's not a number high enough so that I'm confident for BCH.

2:41:10Vlad CosteaOkay, but I gotta ask you, why did you choose Avalanche of all the protocols that you could use to increase the security and the finality?

2:41:22Amaury SéchetBecause it's fast and it's simple. And it's actually correct, because many of the alternatives that are out there are unsound.

2:41:31Vlad CosteaIt's not the most popular choice. I can tell that how many blockchains out there are using Avalanche. I don't think there are too many.

2:41:39Amaury SéchetI think there is eCash and Avax and that's pretty much it. Avalanche is also much more recent, right? So people that try to do instant finality and stuff like that, like Dash, for instance. When Dash did instant finality, Avalanche did not exist. So they could not use that. The flip side of that is that they need to rely on a system of masternode that is baked into the consensus layer. So it's much harder to change, much harder to upgrade than anything with Avalanche.

2:42:17Vlad CosteaYou also mentioned on the website of eCash, which is e.cash, that you don't require forks anymore for upgrades.

2:42:29Amaury SéchetYeah, because of Avalanche. How does that work? It depends on the upgrade, but for most upgrade, like anything that we do with Avalanche, we don't require a fork anymore.

2:42:43Because Avalanche, the node can accept it. So let's take a concrete example. I want to change the block size, for instance.

2:42:57Here is the deal. You can have nodes that make subjective decisions about things. For instance, I consider that 2MB block is the biggest block that I want to accept. So if I receive a block that is more than 2MB, I'm going to park it. It's not invalid. It's just like I don't want that block for whatever reason on my node. No, I can run Avalanche with the other node. And if the majority of the nodes are going to be like, well, you know, I don't want that block either, then you just don't take that block.

2:43:32But if the majority of the avalanche people are like actually, you know, I consider that block to be a valid block that is part of my chain, then you can revisit that decision and unpark the block and connect it to your chain. And so if you want to change some parameter, like not all the nodes now have to agree on every single parameter like you would do at the consensus level, which makes it much easier for us to change various parameters. In ways that we want. Or like for someone else as well, actually, like if someone disagree with us and want to fork our client and change the parameters of the consensus layer, they could do that.

2:44:16And if enough people run their node rather than ours, then those are going to be the parameters of the consensus now.

2:44:27Vlad CosteaOkay, it's definitely interesting, because it's not, as I said, a popular choice.

2:44:37Amaury SéchetBut you cannot do better by doing the same thing as everybody else can. You cannot do something better by doing the same thing.

2:44:49Vlad CosteaOh, of course not. Yeah, of course not. For some reason this industry tends to develop standards, like Bitcoin Cash did the CashTokens protocol. And actually, I think there was a question in the chat about this, and I'm going to ask it, but still, it's not as popular as the EVM stuff, because for some reason, Ethereum became the industry standard. And even rollups on Bitcoin today are trying to bring the EVM to Bitcoin, even though, for example, Blockstream invented a much better way that's called Simplicity, that you can use for programming smart contracts and doing tokens and whatever, but nobody cares about that. Yes, like 90 something percent of the industry is using EVM.

2:45:36Amaury SéchetThis is one of the reasons I was not too… The CashTokens stuff, I think, is a dead end, because the industry standard is ERC-20. This is the industry standard for token. If you bake something in the protocol layer that is not ERC-20, you're just adding garbage in your protocol layer, in your consensus layer. It's not the industry standard, so it's not going to get the traction that you think it's going to get.

2:46:00Vlad CosteaAnd maybe it sounds silly, but there are so many contracts and applications that were written for Ethereum that it's just easier to take that and modify it, as opposed to rewriting everything from scratch. Yeah, exactly. Exactly, yes. It's also the reason why all of these Ethereum killers did not really succeed, like EOS or whatever. They had some good ideas or they started with some good principles, like let's allow people to write in better scripting languages or whatever. But unless they have a lot of applications and a lot of developers, it's not going to happen. And yeah, CashTokens, not very successful.

2:46:50Amaury SéchetIt's also one of the reasons, as a fork of Bitcoin, we have not changed the base layer. We have added Avalanche on top of it, but everything else that is still there are the same. So any tool and services and whatnot that support Bitcoin or BCH is going to be able to support eCash with little to no modification.

2:47:19The thing is, they are not going to see the instant finality. If your wallet is a wallet that was made for Bitcoin and you want to use it on eCash, very easy. People can do it very easily, at least the people that developed the wallet. But they are not going to get information about instant finality and stuff like that. They're going to have to add some code to make that work or to make that visible to the user. But outside of that, it's just like you get the basic level of service that a Bitcoin-like blockchain would provide you. You get that.

2:48:00Vlad CosteaYeah, there's a question about this in the chat from Tobias Rock, who, by the way, clarified that the price of $4,355 for BCH was taken from Gemini. But he wants me to ask you, what do you think about CashTokens? And he put like a crying emoji.

2:48:22Amaury SéchetI mean, so first, as we mentioned, there is the ERC-20 that is kind of the standard. If you want to replace the standard, you need to have studied the ERC-20 standard like very deeply and really something that is better. Like, for instance, for the NFT, there is a new, I don't remember the ERC number, but it's not the ERC-20.

2:48:46Vlad Costea721, I think.

2:48:48Amaury SéchetI don't remember the number, possibly. But it's another one. Why? Because there was a limitation in ERC-20. They needed something else. There you go. But CashTokens is not able to do something that ERC-20 cannot do. And actually, it's quite the opposite. There are a lot of stuff that ERC-20 can do that CashTokens cannot do. And so now you have a problem because you have something baked into the protocol layer. There is not really a good reason for anyone to develop on that.

2:49:25And if tomorrow you have an idea to do something that ERC-20 could not do, well, no, it's in the consensus layer. So you cannot change it very easily. It's going to be a hard fork or something to change it. And so... It's going to be very, very difficult to change. And so in terms of like speed, velocity of development and whatnot, you're probably not going to be able to beat the alternative, right? Because now it's much harder for you to modify your system than for some EVM blockchain, for instance, to do another ERC, whatever, you know, for this new feature that everybody is excited about. They don't need to change the protocol. They don't need to change the consensus layer to do that. But you do. So you will be late releasing your new feature on your system. There is not really any success condition for that feature.

2:50:19Vlad CosteaYeah, makes sense. You also have a bunch of other questions in the chat. But first, let's...

2:50:27Amaury SéchetI'm going to be a bit Harsh, but when I left BCH, it was a top four coin and they focused on all this bullshit instead of like, you know, making it the best cash in the world. I know it's like 20 or whatever. I mean, it's still pretty good, right? But it clearly showed that the focus was not in the right place.

2:50:51Vlad CosteaOkay, but there is also the CashFusion element of Bitcoin Cash that I think you also ported.

2:50:58Amaury SéchetWe have CashFusion as well.

2:50:59Vlad CosteaYeah, you ported to eCash. And this is like a coin join that's baked into the protocol level, if I'm not mistaken.

2:51:07Amaury SéchetBut it's not baked in the consensus layer. That's what is good about it. And that's, you know, that should have been a lesson for CashTokens, right? Because before there was something else. I don't remember, like the name doesn't come back. But there was already like a mixing protocol and CashFusion is like a new protocol that is much better than the previous one. And because none of those protocols are baked into the consensus layer, it's easy to make a new one and deploy it, right? Because you don't need to change the consensus layer.

2:51:45So that's, you know, that's a great example of what you can do when you make sure, you know, you make sure that you have the small bits and pieces, like the right hooks, let's say in the consensus layer, so that you can build stuff on top of it. But you don't build stuff in the consensus layer because it's way too slow. It can do one deployment every six months, everything that you do in there, it needs to be supported forever. So any mistake that you make is eternal now, right?

2:52:14You cannot do like consensus layer 2.0 that fix the problem of the 1.0, you can do like 2.0 plus 1.0, but the 1.0, it's always going to be there, it can never go away. So that's, that's not where you want to be developing feature. CashFusion is like a brilliant example of that, but yeah, so CashFusion works on BCH, works on eCash as well, and allows you to have privacy features via rounds and rounds of mixing.

2:52:47Vlad CosteaSo how does it work more exactly? Like, do you need participants to also enable CashFusion and you're going to have...

2:52:54Amaury SéchetYeah, so it's a protocol, it's a protocol. Also, technically you can have it in like any wallet, but I'm not sure of the list of wallets that implemented it. I know that Electron Cash for BCH and for eCash implement it, but it's just like a button, you click on it and you wait. And the longer you wait, the more privacy you have from the user's perspective. This is what it looks like. And what it does behind the hood is that, you know, there are like several people with the feature enabled.

2:53:25Their wallet are going to talk to each other, put coins together. The coins are redistributed, you know, to the different wallet in the ways that make it like pretty much impossible to track which coin is from where. But also in a way so that different participants cannot cheat and, you know, like don't put the coin that they promised into the pot or whatever, right? Like they cannot steal each other's coins and whatnot. There is a way to do that is secured. And, and yeah, and at each round of this that you do makes your coins like a bit more private than the round before.

2:54:08So just one round of that is not too, is not too secure, but if you let it run a bunch, you know, you very quickly become impenetrable. You get like, essentially you get like a level of anonymity that is similar to Monero before they made the amount private, you know, like know the amount that are in the different UTXO in Monero. They have been obfuscated, but previously it was not right. And, and you would get, you would get a level, similar level of privacy than this, you know, older version of Monero.

2:54:49Vlad CosteaThat's how you know that someone is OG when they remember the first version of Monero, which was called BitMonero, if I'm not mistaken, and it was just doing a coin join without confidential transactions. I think the research for that came later and I think Greg Maxwell actually helped with that in a time when it was less of a toxic environment and not as controversial to work on altcoins. And I think to this day, Monero is like the place where they deploy the research of Blockstream because they also use Bulletproofs.

2:55:23They also use, what else, Dandelion for network level privacy and the ring signatures and confidential transactions are also part of Blockstream's research. Yeah.

2:55:39Amaury SéchetSo you would get the level of privacy that is, if you leave that stuff running for a while, you would get the level that is similar to what you get with the ring signature, but before the amount were obfuscated. Like roughly that would be the level of obfuscation that you get.

2:55:58Vlad CosteaYou can still make the horrible mistake of basically spending the same amount that you put into the coin join. Yeah.

2:56:08Amaury SéchetThis is why CashFusion is, like CashFusion is better about that because it's gonna give you like several outputs that are like difficult to link with the, with the input, right? Because there is like a combinatorial explosion and this is what Monero used to do. This is why I'm, I'm, I'm mentioning that level. This is what Monero used to do before the amount were obfuscated before the amount were obfuscated, you know, each time you paid. You would do like several UTXO with standardized amounts.

2:56:41And because the amount were standardized, you had like so many UTXO that had the same amount that you could not like figure out what the fuck was going on. No, it's not necessarily anymore because they obfuscate the amount, but before that, this is what they were doing. And, and CashFusion gives you a similar level of privacy.

2:57:03Vlad CosteaYeah, I think the right term for this in the absence of being able to hide the amounts. You can still consolidate all of your UTXOs into the one that you had before starting the CashFusion.

2:57:14Amaury SéchetYeah, if you do that, then.

2:57:17Vlad CosteaYeah, I know you're hopeless. It's like the worst mistake ever, but it's more like deniability because it's hard to prove that it was actually in fact you who joined this round. Yeah, sure.

2:57:31Amaury SéchetBut if you don't let, you know, if you don't do this kind of mistake, it's going to be like pretty much impossible. We actually had a company that did chain analysis to look at the result of CashFusion and they could not see through it.

2:57:49Vlad CosteaI think it's worth testing again in the era of AI. I think now it's easier than ever to track using the software and part of the justification for the renaissance of privacy in the last few months of last year. And I think the effects are still being felt is that AI has become so advanced that you can actually track transactions without being sophisticated, without being a blockchain analysis firm.

2:58:23Amaury SéchetUh, I don't think AI will really like, you know, it will help like an individual to get closer to the level of a professional in term of like the obfuscating transaction or chain analytics. But I don't think, I don't think it's going to be able to crack transaction that professional cannot crack today because it's not professional. It's already algorithmic, right? And so it's a bit of a different kind of artificial intelligence at the end of the day.

2:58:56Vlad CosteaAre you considering adding any privacy improvements to the already existing CashFusion to be able to hide the amounts or something, or do you think it's bad for exchange listing?

2:59:11Amaury SéchetSo, yeah, it would make exchange listing harder than it is already, but outside of that, you give up auditability when you do that. So it's actually something that I would want, but we need a good way to isolate the part of the system that is auditable from the part of the system that is obfuscated kind of like Zcash is doing. Because look, Monero, and I may or may not have some Monero, so, you know, it's great, but maybe it's been a while since the cryptography has been broken and someone is just like printing money every day since then, and we don't know about it.

2:59:59Right. And we have no way to know about it. Right. Which, like in some ways, is a testament of the quality of the system. But you will understand that for someone that is more concerned about sound money than about privacy, it's a negative tradeoff. And so I think there is a need for a way to isolate the two. Also, like outside of Fusion and stuff like that, there is a lot of stuff that could be done to improve the privacy of existing blockchain that are not being done.

3:00:40It's bonkers. And it's at the level of the payment protocol. So right now, like the payment protocol is completely retarded, right? If I want to do, like if I want to send money to you in Bitcoin, in BCH, in eCash, in Litecoin, whatever, right, like, or even like any blockchain, essentially, like the way it happens is that you give me an address, right? And it's like me writing a check, you know, like with your address, and I'm writing an amount and stuff like that, and throwing that into a giant bucket where everybody throws their check as well.

3:01:18And then you, not literally you, your computer, but you, or a server that you're connected to, has to go through this huge amount of everybody throwing their check in the same box to find the one that is for you. And, you know, telling you know, like the payment is good. This is an incredibly stupid way. To do things, first, because like, it's not very scalable, right? Like you have to scan, like, yeah, like you have to look at all the payment that everybody's doing to find your own, like intuitively, you would understand that it's probably easier for me to give you a check directly and you have it and you know, it's good, but we don't have like, we would need like a payment protocol, like a protocol that most wallet and most payment process will accept to do that.

3:02:12And once you have that, I don't need to make one check. Right. And it can do like, we do for coins and bills. I can have like amounts that are more or less standardized. And I give you like, you know, if I pay you like, I don't know, like $12, I can give you like a bill of 10 and two bill of one. And there you go. Like you have $12, but there is no link between this 10 and this one. Right. And, and what is leaking so much privacy is that it's like right now we put like the 10 and the two ones into some kind of shredder and it somehow comes out at the other end as like a $12 bill that I'm giving you.

3:02:51Right. And this create like a bunch of connection between the coins that exist that no need to exist. And it's, it leaks like tremendous amount of information about what everybody's doing on there that don't need to be linked. The only reason we are leaking it is because we have not agreed on the protocol for me to give you the coins directly. Right. Like we are, going through this stupid system where I have to write the check and dump it in the giant box, and then you have to trawl the box to find the check.

3:03:25So I would like to see that improve because like maybe we can reach actually a level of privacy that is acceptable for most people. Right. I could put like a dot on my coins and track them if I wanted right through the economy. But in practice, I couldn't get like very much out of it because it's just like completely intractable in practice. Right. Like there are way too many coins, way too many people, they circulate way too much. So in that way, you know, like the coins that we use, like the coins and the banknotes that we use, they are not fungible in the way Monero is.

3:04:04And we consider that level of privacy acceptable. So we, if we can reach that level of privacy, I think it's going to be okay for most people. And it's not even something where we need a protocol change, right? Like we need a payment protocol, but like the blockchain that we have, it could do that. So it's a bit unfortunate the way we're doing things here.

3:04:25Vlad CosteaYeah. I think the other challenge for privacy is that in the case of Monero, it bloats very much over time. It doesn't scale very well. Transactions are, yes, they're going to get much larger once they implement their full chain membership proofs. And the community sort of takes that trade off for granted because they understand that in order to have that degree of privacy, they do need to have some sort of trade off. And they accepted that they have dynamic block size, which means it's just going to be a different.

3:04:55It's going to be as big as there's demand for it. And syncing a node is much slower than syncing a Bitcoin node right now in Monero. Yeah. Yeah.

3:05:04Amaury SéchetYou have a fundamental problem that you don't know which coin are spent or not. Right. Because privacy. Yeah. And because you don't know what coins are spent or not, your UTXO set is effectively a TXO set. Like all the UTXOs that ever existed are potentially live. You don't know which one are spent or which one are not spent. And so your UTXO set grows. First, it grows all the time. Right. Because you cannot spend the coin. But also, yeah, it gets much bigger and bigger and bigger.

3:05:39So that's a scalability problem. And it's essentially untractable. Like Zcash has the same problem, for instance. Well, the details of it are a bit different because the system is different. But they also have this ever growing data structure because you don't know what has been spent and what has not been spent.

3:06:02Vlad CosteaThey're working on it with something that's called Tachyon, which is going to make some sort of client side validation structure where you don't have to sync everybody else's shielded transactions. And I think it's very smart math. They're going to ship it hopefully later this year. But that's basically one of the first moments when privacy becomes scalable. There's also the MimbleWimble stuff, which Litecoin has done with the extension block. I'm not sure if it's as good as the Zcash and the Monero in terms of privacy.

3:06:35Amaury SéchetYeah. MimbleWimble is good about hiding the amounts. But I don't think it's that good with privacy. So what MimbleWimble is doing is you can essentially aggregate transaction together. Right. And so at the end of the day, each block is like one giant transaction. Right. And it's also able to hide the amounts. It's pretty smart. But if I'm monitoring the network live, I can see the transaction before they've been aggregated.

3:07:17And so I cannot like ex-post facto, like, no, I cannot go like to the transaction that were made a year ago on MimbleWimble and be able to unglue them. Right. But the transaction that I made right now, I could monitor the network and see them unglued and remember that. Right. So there are probably people that have been monitoring the network for a while that keep that data. And they can deanonymize essentially everything. So MimbleWimble is not that private.

3:07:47Vlad CosteaI think they did add some more stuff to it. So it's not pure MimbleWimble. It's like a modification of Grin. But the industry at large is not too focused on it. I think MimbleWimble has sort of fallen out of grace for a while. It was very popular in the beginning.

3:08:11Amaury SéchetSo here's the MimbleWimble is very attractive to an engineer because the design is more simple and clever. And like, it's very interesting. But it's not clear to me that it solved an important problem that user need to be solved.

3:08:36It's like car enthusiasts. They're going to like some type of car that are clearly not the best car to go from A to B that most people are going to want. Right. Like most people, they want, I don't know, like a Toyota Corolla or something like that. Right. They want like a simple car that is reliable, that is going to be cheap to maintain. And that's going to bring them from A to B. But the car enthusiast is going to want, it depends on many kind of car enthusiasts.

3:09:04Right. But some like sports cars, some like, I don't know, like Jeeps and stuff like that, you know, but there are many different kind of car enthusiasts. But at the end of the day, they're going to want something very specific because this is what they like. And MimbleWimble is a bit of that for like software engineer and cryptographers. I appreciate, you know.

3:09:26Vlad CosteaThere is something else about eCash that I want to mention. And I should have done this earlier. But I suppose that the people listening to this up to this point are enthusiasts and want to learn more from you about eCash. There's a writing contest that is organized by one of the community members from XEC. And he has a bounty of I think 1 million XEC tokens for the best article. I'm searching through my messages because I have a lot of them. Yeah, it's Cain.

3:10:03Amaury SéchetYeah, so it's Cain and he effectively has like a bounty. He runs the site proofofwriting.com.

3:10:15Vlad CosteaOh, yeah, it's 100 million XEC. So I'm not even sure how much that is.

3:10:21Amaury SéchetWell, I mean, it depends on the exchange rate. But yeah, he has a prize of 100 million XEC. You can like submit articles. What he wants is people's crypto genesis story, essentially like, oh, they got into crypto, what got them interested and so on. And yeah, he wants people to write about that. And it's going to, you know, award a prize to the best story, I guess, according to his standard of what is a good story. But yeah, go to proofofwriting.com. Also, what is his Twitter?

3:11:01Vlad CosteaLet me let me it's C-A-I-N for Cain, like the Bible character. And it's caincurrency.

3:11:12Amaury SéchetYeah, caincurrency. So you can go to caincurrency on Twitter or proofofwriting.com. Submit your genesis story, your, you know, your crypto. Or how-did-you-get-into-crypto story, and the best one is going to get a prize.

3:11:32Vlad CosteaOh, it seems like he's writing a book about this. So that's the He's

3:11:38Amaury SéchetBeen writing a lot of article and I think he's writing a book now. I'm not sure what the book is going to be about. I don't have I don't have more than you do on that front. But I know that he's writing a book.

3:11:52Vlad CosteaOkay, on the topic of XEC. So we mentioned the fact that you upgrade without forks, CashFusion.

3:12:01Amaury SéchetYeah, so we have we have, in my opinion, two important upgrades that are not on the graph that you shared that happened since then. Like, you know, there's the post-consensus for blocks, but we have pre-consensus now, which is the same thing but for transactions. So when you submit a transaction on the eCash network, it's going to be finalized. Like it's very, very quick. It's very uncommon that it takes more than two seconds to validate and very often it takes like one second or something like it's very quick.

3:12:39So there is that. So instant transactions are like something real on eCash, and it's quite funny because it's all on Avalanche. So it's a layer on top, actually, any any Bitcoin style blockchain could implement it, but somehow only eCash is doing it. No fork required, no hard fork or anything required. So there is that. And the second thing is heartbeat. Heartbeat is I mentioned it quickly earlier. It's it's a way for nodes to reject blocks that come too quickly. Right. So when you have hashrate variation, especially on minority chain, sometimes you have like very fast block and then very slow block and it create poor user experience because you know when is my transaction going to be mined.

3:13:29Heartbeat, as its name indicates, you know, try to have like more regular heartbeat on the network. Heartbeat is like a block. Right. And and so it's going to penalize block that comes too quick. And because of that, it's not going to create spiking difficulty. So you are not going to get very slow block either.

3:13:52Vlad CosteaOK. I also want to ask you. So there is a section on the website about builders and it seems like you have like a toolkit for people building applications on XEC. How does that work and how easy is it today with vibe coding and stuff?

3:14:16Amaury SéchetI mean, we were talking about Cain and Proof of Writing. So I think he did like a fair amount of work with like vibe coding on that. So clearly, you know, it's possible. Personally, I'm always a bit worried about vibe coding because like if you don't know the code, it's not that it's not valuable, right? Like the fact that we have machine that can write code is actually pretty great. It's a great help. But if you don't understand the code yourself, you don't know when you should trust the machine and when you should not.

3:14:50So I'm always a bit worried about that. But yeah, it's just like set of libraries that allows you to interact with the basic feature of the network. I think most blockchains are going to have something similar. So there's nothing very special there. It's always made in such a way that it's as similar as possible to what BTC and BCH are doing. So that if you have an application that work from one of them, use like the BCH equivalent of the library and you're going to get, you know, you're going to get something that works very quickly.

3:15:28Vlad CosteaWhat's the block size? Because I still don't understand. Did you modify the block size or the block times for XEC?

3:15:37Amaury SéchetWe did not modify neither the block size nor the block time. The block size right now is 32 meg. Ideally, what we want to do is like an adaptive block size. BCH has done that, so that's good for them. We probably want the same thing, but because we're nowhere close to 32 meg, it's not really an issue that have been prioritized. In terms of block time, it's 10 minutes, but we're much more regular than other blockchains. You're going to find like very, like much fewer, very fast blocks compared to other blockchains and much fewer, very long block as well.

3:16:17The block are going to be more regular. But other than that, it doesn't really matter that much that the block are 10 minutes because you're going to get, you know, one or two second finality with Avalanche anyway.

3:16:31Vlad CosteaIf you get someone porting the ordinal protocol onto XEC and then inscribing a 32 megabyte JPEG or putting music videos or whatever, encoding them into the blockchain, how are you going to react? Is that a legitimate use case or is that spam that you need to stop?

3:16:52Amaury SéchetFirst, you cannot do a transaction that's going to be 32 meg, right? The transaction size is smaller than 32 meg. I don't have the number in my mind, but I think it's 200 kilobytes or something like that per transaction. If I remember correctly, I might be wrong. Don't quote me on that, but there is like a size limit for the transaction themselves, so you're not going to be able to do a giant transaction. Now, what is good with the whole Avalanche stuff is that we can implement truly in Avalanche what we want and what we don't want, and I don't have to be involved in that.

3:17:31Like anyone, you know, you can decide, well, I don't like ordinals, so my node is not going to accept ordinals, and you're going to Avalanche with the other guys. And if the other guys accept the ordinals, your nodes can be like, well, you know what, actually, you know, those other guys, they consider that transaction valid, so I'm going to consider it valid as well. But if enough of you decide that, no, you don't want to accept ordinals, then the ones that do accept them are going to be like, you know what, those guys, they don't want that transaction, so we're not going to include it. And I don't need to make an authoritative decision on that or anyone else.

3:18:04Vlad CosteaSomething else that I've been meaning to ask you is, why do you think that since you forked Bitcoin, nobody else forked Bitcoin? Or at least not in the same way with the same degree of success, because there was Bitcoin Diamond, there was a SegWit2x in the end that was different from the original project. So there were minority forks, but this

3:18:29Amaury SéchetWas the last big one. Yes. So what I think, you know, it's always a bit speculative, but what I think happened is that BCH was forked and it was somewhat successful for a while, but very chaotic and did not do as well as BTC. Right. And I don't think it's because what was done was bad, especially, but there was like so many technical mistakes done on the BCH side. It's, you know, in a way, it's not even funny. But people have registered that as, well, you know, like Bitcoin forks, they just don't work.

3:19:21Like if you talk to most people in the industry. This is the impression that you have, like people have tried that, it doesn't work.

3:19:33Vlad CosteaOkay. I mean, a lot of these ETFs that enabled Bitcoin, institutional Bitcoin, whatever, they do have clauses about what's going to happen in the event that there's a fork.

3:19:47Amaury SéchetAnd usually the clause is like super vague and, essentially, they're able to do whatever the fuck they want.

3:19:52Vlad CosteaOf course, but there was speculation that BlackRock might be interested in creating their own hard fork for institutional Bitcoin. And then if they do that, and they have so much capital that's flowing into their ETF, they're going to force the rest of us to follow.

3:20:06Amaury SéchetUnless, yes, but why would they do that? Bitcoin as it is right now is perfect for BlackRock.

3:20:14Vlad CosteaWhy would you say it's perfect for BlackRock? Because it is perfect.

3:20:17Amaury SéchetBecause it doesn't scale. And because it doesn't scale, you have to use it through custodians, or at least like the vast majority of users do have to use it through custodians. And who is the custodian? It's BlackRock.

3:20:30Vlad CosteaOkay, fair.

3:20:31Amaury SéchetI mean, it's also good for other custodians, right? But it's generally good for BlackRock. Like, BlackRock is not going to fork a Bitcoin that is more scalable, for instance, just make no sense for them whatsoever.

3:20:47Vlad CosteaYeah, same for MicroStrategy and all the others, like their business model is... Being the Uncle Jim, right? For others.

3:20:56Amaury SéchetTheir business model is amassing all those coins. And then because you cannot do the stuff with the coin themselves, you're going to do the stuff through the financial product that they offer you.

3:21:09Vlad CosteaBut before BlackRock...

3:21:11Amaury SéchetActually, I made... So it's a bit unfortunate because it's in French, so people have not, you know, it's not that well known. But I did a conference about that in like, yeah, I don't know, 2016, 2017, explaining that if Bitcoin did not scale, this is exactly what would happen. So it was like more than 10 years ago now. And it's exactly what I said would happen.

3:21:36Vlad CosteaNow, I was looking at the chat, there are people still writing numbers in there. I guess they are very much behind with the stream because we announced two hours ago. It was number 34, right?

3:21:54Amaury SéchetYep, I still have the paper there.

3:21:58Vlad CosteaIt's there, 34. So if you missed it, come back next time. There's going to be another giveaway in the next episode.

3:22:08There was also a comment from your friend, just a second, Tobias. He said that for blocks, it's one megabyte consensus, 100 kilobytes consensus. Policy. Oh, transactions. For transactions, yeah.

3:22:25Amaury SéchetI was kind of in between with my 200 kilobytes, but yeah, I got it wrong. But I told you that I was not sure about the numbers.

3:22:34Vlad CosteaAnd there's also something to be said about the proof of stake side of eCash because the users can naturally earn rewards. And I was going to ask you, how did you balance the rewards for the miners with the rewards for the node staking?

3:22:53Amaury SéchetSo it's a funny thing because we are a minority chain, we don't really need to balance that at all because the profitability for the miners are always going to equilibrate in between chains. It's always roughly as profitable to mine BTC than it is to mine BCH than it is to mine eCash because of the difficulty adjustment. If it's more profitable to mine BTC, for instance, well, people are going to remove hash from BCH and eCash and mine BTC instead, which is going to make BCH and eCash easier to mine.

3:23:42And so, very quickly, the difficulty adjusts in such a way so that the profitability is the same. So you could say tomorrow 99% of the block reward goes to staking and 1% goes to miner. Well, no, the difficulty adjustment would get 100% easier and the miner would make the same. Okay, I get the appeal. Oh, you asked me a question?

3:23:59No, I was just explaining that we don't need to be very, you know, super careful about how you balance that because at the end of the day, the difficulty adjustment does the work for us.

3:24:29Vlad CosteaYeah, it's very different from what we're accustomed to in Bitcoin designs. I was going to ask you, what else do you want to add to this project? And if you ever plan to step down, because right now you're like the Vitalik of the project, like the benevolent dictator.

3:24:55Amaury SéchetYeah, but it's not even me doing the majority of the development these days. So, you know, some people have a lot of influence as well in that way. That being said, like what we've done over the years is remove as much stuff we can from the consensus layer and move that into the Avalanche layer. And the reason we do that is so that anyone would disagree with what we're doing can put different rules there. And the good thing is that if you have different rules there, you don't need like a new fork or whatever.

3:25:36If you convince enough people, I mean, if you convince enough people in terms of amount that is staked, then you're good. The new rule is in place.

3:25:50Vlad CosteaOkay. And what about adding stuff? In what way? Any upgrade that you think is useful?

3:26:00Amaury SéchetYes. Well, we talked about it earlier in the stream when we were talking about drivechain. I think extensibility is the thing that we need to nail. And because of Avalanche, we can do the reverse peg much faster than anything else out there.

3:26:18Vlad CosteaSo you would do BIP 300 for drivechains?

3:26:21Amaury SéchetNot drivechain as is, because as I was explaining, we can do the reverse peg much faster. Like we can do the reverse peg in a different way that drivechain is doing, but essentially something that looks like drivechain that can do the reverse peg much faster. If we can do that, then I think it's a big thing, but I think this is what people need, to break extensibility. Because man, like changing stuff at the consensus layer, it's such a pain in the ass, right? So we need systems to float that elsewhere.

3:27:07Vlad CosteaI want to say something at this point, because we have been talking for three and a half hours. And my perception of you is that you're this nerd who's obsessed with technology and always wanted to find a better way to do peer to peer electronic cash. But the perception from the Bitcoin Cash community is very different. And I have a question from Nostr. And before I read it, I want to say that I've also met over the years people who told me that they were hopeful about BCH until you decided to create eCash.

3:27:43And when you left the project, that's also when they realized that BCH is not going anywhere. So they went to Ethereum or whatever.

3:27:51Amaury SéchetYeah, I know a lot of people did that.

3:27:54Vlad CosteaThey found their home somewhere else. And this person on Nostr, of all places, just said, will you ask him about his alleged ties to secret agencies? Why was he so down for a dev tax in BCH that would benefit largely himself?

3:28:11Amaury SéchetI mean, I have no tie to secret agency. That being said, if I had some tie with secret agency, I would probably assert the same thing. So I don't know. I don't know what I can say, but I'm not even aware of those rumors. I have not seen those rumors about me that I'm a secret agent or something. This is cool, though, like being a secret agent is pretty cool. So I'm happy that some people believe that.

3:28:46Also, why was I so adamant on the developer fund? First, you know that person is a bit retarded because they call it a tax. They don't have to pay it because they don't have to use the system. It's not like some weaponized people are going to come to their home and force them to pay if they don't pay. So, I mean, that shows some difficulty to conceptualize things. But why I was so adamant on the funding is because, you know, developing and maintaining software. It requires resources.

3:29:25And we were in an environment where we was the one of the least funded team, and we were pulling all the development work. And the other team that were in there, they had more funding than us. And they use most of that to try to push for bullshit that made no sense whatsoever. And that was not only, you know, not only that did not help us developing what was required, but it would force us to deal with all the bullshit that they were pushing our way. In a way that would get us to squander a lot of our resources because we had to deal with, you know, the endless stream of bullshit to deal with rather than actually develop what we needed to do.

3:30:06Right. And look at what came out of it. Like when we went away, we were able to develop technology to secure against 51% attacks, to make instant transaction, to make the block more regular. And to make the whole blockchain less dependent on us. Which are the super stated goal of BCH, right? Like this is what BCH was created for, to be digital cash, which meant like fast transaction, scalability, all of that. And we were able to do 10x more than BCH in the time before. On those specific front, right?

3:30:42Like BCH did also stuff, but on the specific front, we are able to do, you know, 10x more.

3:30:52With a fraction of the ecosystem and resources. So, you know, it's like a good demonstration, you know, by the example, it's a good practical demonstration that it was actually a better model. And, you know, I actually believe that BCH would still be a top four coin if we were able to move on that road map on BCH. Like the fact that it decided to do like, you know, fuck all stuff that have nothing to do with digital cash. It kind of lost its way, you know, like there is no road map, there is no one line.

3:31:29So people, they don't know what to expect next. Most of the developers, they went away, you know, like Kelly and Jason, by now, like BU is not there. Classic is not there anymore. XT is not there. Like the most brainpower went away. Because, because they have no resources to do this stuff. Like some of them had a lot of resources. But many did not have resources. And so they wanted to brand the protocol with their pet idea. And so they branded the protocol with their pet idea. And then they went away.

3:32:08Vlad CosteaI think of all the big block developers, Peter Rizun is still active.

3:32:14Amaury SéchetBut it's not really a developer. Like there's no code from Peter Rizun in those stuff.

3:32:23Vlad CosteaOh, he designed the chip that helps you sync the blockchain much faster.

3:32:30Amaury SéchetI mean, I'm not saying that he did nothing, but it's not writing the node software and the consensus code, and all of that. That's, that's not what he does.

3:32:39Vlad CosteaI think Jeff Garzik is doing bridges nowadays. He moved on from any conversation about scaling. Mike Hearn has famously rage quit. Gavin is not around anymore. He doesn't seem interested in any of this. Oh, he's Actively uninterested.

3:32:58Amaury SéchetLike if you want to reach out to Gavin, for instance, for your podcast and you're like, Oh, I would like to have you as a host or whatever. He's going to tell you no, if he ever answers.

3:33:10Vlad CosteaNo, he never answered to any. Yeah.

3:33:13Amaury SéchetIt's just like he doesn't want to have anything to do with Bitcoin anymore. At least not publicly. I don't know in private, but.

3:33:21Vlad CosteaWhich is a shame because he's been around for so long and he's seen so much and he knows a lot.

3:33:28Amaury SéchetThere is something you don't realize because I was essentially in Gavin's position with BCH. And he was in it with BTC, which is even much, you know, even bigger, the amount of shit that you have to plow through when you are in that position is something like people don't understand. That's like, if you imagine something you have to at least multiply by 10. It's like, it's, it's so ridiculously bad. And when you are in the position like Vitalik and whatnot, where it's like somewhat established that you should be the boss, you can pull rank.

3:34:14But when you are in the position that I was or in the position that Gavin was, you cannot do that. So, so there is an endless amount of shit that is thrown your way. And there's no thing you can do to do anything about it. And it's like something people don't want to deal with forever because you don't even get paid. Like, you know, if you were to be paid millions of dollars to, you know, just have this torrent of shit thrown at you and you're like, maybe you would do it.

3:34:42Right. But it's, it's not even well-paid. Right. So, so I completely understand his position.

3:34:54Vlad CosteaI remember the same argument being presented by Wladimir van der Laan.

3:35:02Amaury SéchetYeah, I can believe that.

3:35:04Vlad CosteaHe was like, I don't get paid enough for this bullshit.

3:35:08Amaury SéchetBut I would say, you know, Wladimir, contrary to Gavin or myself, was in a much better position to pull rank because he had support from like almost the entire dev team and industry. I did not have that. And Gavin did not have that.

3:35:30So, so take whatever van der Laan told you and multiply it by 10 and you get like what Gavin went through.

3:35:40Vlad CosteaYeah. But I was going to tell you that we presented five different versions of the Bitcoin software that emerged since 2017 and you're responsible for two out of five. How does it feel? What do you mean? Oh, you mean like the Bitcoin forks? Yeah. Gold, Bitcoin Cash, Bitcoin SV. Yeah. You're responsible for two out of five. I don't know. Feels good, man. Like the Pepe meme.

3:36:21Amaury SéchetI don't know. It's what it is. I don't know. I don't know that I feel good or bad about it. It's what it is.

3:36:32Vlad CosteaDo you think that the big block movement, I've had this conversation with Peter Rizun when he was on the podcast last year. Do you think that big blockers were sabotaged or self-sabotaged by forking and dividing the community to the point where they-

3:36:49Amaury SéchetOh, big blocker was Self-sabotaging, but constantly. They were not like many of them. They believe in those conspiracy theory. And I guess like the fact that I'm a secret agent or something is one of them, but the reality is like big blocker. They were right on the need for scaling, but they kept doing dumb shit that lost them the trust of the industry. I explained, for instance, when big block were deployed on Testnet for the first time, there was XT and Unlimited. And they managed to split between the two because they didn't implement the same rules for SIGOPS.

3:37:29This is retarded. Don't do that. You cannot split the chain in three when you plan to split it in two. People are going to see that and they're not going to run your software. But I've seen even worse, and this is something that is private still to this day. I don't think there is any recording or whatever, but at some point, there was a meeting with many very important industry people to activate larger block on Bitcoin. It was before SegWit was activated and all of that or BCH or whatnot.

3:38:05It's actually one of the events where I was like, actually, those people are beyond saving. I need to work on Plan B, which was BCH.

3:38:17Vlad CosteaWhen was this event? Can you give more details?

3:38:21Amaury SéchetI'm super bad with dates, but it was 2016, I guess, but I couldn't tell you the exact date. This is online. This is not an in-person meeting, but this is online. There's this chat room and there's a ton of people in there. For instance, there is more than 50% of the hashrate in there. There is like various other industry leaders in there. There are people that work on larger block implementation of Bitcoin in there. The goal of that chat room is to discuss how we are going to activate large block on Bitcoin.

3:39:03Everybody agrees this is the way forward. We just need to have like a specific plan on how to do it. We all agree on so that we can go through with it. It goes nice and fine and everything is good.

3:39:20This is the state and at the beginning, BU is not there for some reason. They were invited, but they don't show up right away. Right. And everybody is talking about like, you know, the roadmap and what are the rules exactly. You know, stuff like SIGOPS and whatnot. So that the split in three of the testnet doesn't happen again, and so on. And it moves along nicely. And then you have like a few people from BU that join the stuff. And Andrew Stone is like, no, but like, we cannot do that because this is collusion.

3:39:55Wait, who says that? Andrew Stone, the lead dev of BU. Okay. It's like this all, everybody agree on the stuff. We need to use emergent consensus or whatever the stuff, you know, the way BU wanted to activate this. Except emergent consensus is unsound from a game theory perspective. There is like even an economic paper that have been written about it. So it's like, proven in like a scientific way, if you wish. But at the time there was not that paper, but it was obvious to people who understood the economics and game theory of Bitcoin, that it was a broken way to do it.

3:40:35And Andrew Stone was like, well, we cannot do this. This is collusion. And at this point, you know, it became clear to everybody that this meeting is not going to pan out because BU is not on board. And so we are fucking stuck. And we are like, what do we do next? Right. And it's just like the whole stuff is precluded from there. And I mean, like, imagine the situation, like, imagine the degree of retardation that, I mean, you've won the game. You've won the game. You have all the people that matters at the table for you to win the game.

3:41:18You just have to agree on the details of how you win the game. Right. And you're like, I don't want to win the game. Well, like, if you're going to behave in that way, you're never going to win any game. Right. Like, it's, it's guaranteed.

3:41:33So I, so I don't know, man. Like, I wish there was a recording of that chat room. Maybe someone has it. I don't have it. But.

3:41:39Vlad CosteaWas it just text or were you doing voice talk?

3:41:43Amaury SéchetYeah, it was just text. It was text.

3:41:45Vlad CosteaI'm pretty sure someone might have the logs.

3:41:48Amaury SéchetSomeone probably has the logs somewhere. I don't have it.

3:41:51Vlad CosteaSo did you know who else was in there or is it safe to disclose?

3:41:55Amaury SéchetI mean, I prefer not to say. I don't know if people want to be associated with that or not.

3:42:04Vlad CosteaDid you also have people from Bitcoin Core in the room?

3:42:08Amaury SéchetWe didn't have people from Bitcoin Core. It was like, really? It was like for the industry, like, all the way proceed to ditch Bitcoin Core and activate bigger blocks. That was what it was about.

3:42:27Okay. And if you negotiate properly, like, if you negotiate properly, you'd have won the game.

3:42:35Vlad CosteaIt's. So are you saying that the creator of Bitcoin Unlimited sabotaged the big block movement from the beginning?

3:42:46Amaury SéchetI don't even think he sabotaged it. I think he was retarded. He wanted his activation mechanism to be the thing. And his activation mechanism wasn't sound. And so it could not be the thing.

3:43:10Vlad CosteaAnd you're saying that from this conversation onwards, it went downhill? And that's what motivated you to create Bitcoin Cash?

3:43:17Amaury SéchetBecause imagine, like, you're a big miner or an exchange or something. You invest millions and millions in your infrastructure to mine this currency. Are you going to bet your millions and millions of infrastructure on some dude that tells you that agreeing on something is collusion and so you cannot agree on anything?

3:43:43No, you conclude that this guy is not serious. I cannot work with those guys. It's going to be an endless stream of problems. I can predict nothing about this. I can predict nothing about my business.

3:43:56That if you have millions on infrastructure on the table, you cannot be like, you need a plan, right? Like, because you probably have a loan to pay for a part of that stuff. And you need to pay back the like, you know what I mean? Like you need visibility on what your business is going to look like over the next few months or few years. You cannot operate a business that have millions of dollars in infrastructure with people that decide to agree on something is collusion.

3:44:29Vlad CosteaNow, if I was to assume that maybe something you said before makes you sound like an agent that disrupted. Now, you're like the frustrated nerd who's like, how the hell did they do this? If anything, that guy is the agent that sort of led to the destruction.

3:44:45Amaury SéchetYeah, you could say that, but I don't think he's an agent or anything. He was enamored with his idea of emergent consensus.

3:45:00Vlad CosteaSo it wasn't even about the block size or whatever. It was about how to activate that. And he was not. Yeah.

3:45:10Amaury SéchetAt this point, at this point in time, majority of the actors in the industry agreed that bigger block was the way.

3:45:25Vlad CosteaAnd the consequence of this not happening is that most of them went to Ethereum. That's the reality. That's the winner of the block size wars.

3:45:37It's not nice or popular to say it because every camp tries to claim victory or say, well, we did this and we did that. But that's when a lot of the industry became fragmented. And Ethereum, which started out as something which was not taken very seriously in the beginning. They also had that major issue with the DAO hack and the fact that they had to roll back the block chain to bail out their investors. It was just a bad look. But a year later, they got very big.

3:46:11And it wasn't on their own merits or not only that, but it was also the fact that Bitcoin could not agree about how to scale. Oh, yeah.

3:46:24Amaury SéchetYeah. Those people that were on the bigger block stuff before me, they could have agreed on something. I'm fairly confident Bitcoin would have big blocks today. They kept disagreeing on bullshit. Between XT and Unlimited, there was this issue with the SIGOPS limit. Nobody even knows what the SIGOPS limit is, except like a few engineers that worked on the protocol like me. Like most people, even like many people that do video explaining Bitcoin or whatever, like how many knows that there is a SIGOPS limit and what is the SIGOPS limit?

3:47:11None of them. None of them do. It's a fucking parameter that is there for technical reasons that just don't matter to users. And they managed to not agree on that and throw away a huge amount of trust that the industry was putting into them because they could not agree on some parameter that most people don't even know exists. It's pure retardation.

3:47:47Vlad CosteaIt's also a good example of the fact that Bitcoin was fragmented before any fork. And even if you try to get people to agree, there would still be like a small parameter that made some of them unhappy. Maybe if you did not create Bitcoin Cash, there would have been more forks. I don't know. I mean, SegWit2x was definitely going to happen.

3:48:19Amaury SéchetNo, SegWit2x was definitely not going to happen, I think.

3:48:24Vlad CosteaReally? Because I know that a lot of supporters gave up on SegWit2x after they saw that Bitcoin Cash exists. And they said, well, this is the large block version. So why should we bother supporting something else?

3:48:40Amaury SéchetWell, to some extent, but also like many big actors like Roger Ver, for instance, joined BCH only after SegWit2x failed.

3:48:50Vlad CosteaYeah, that's exactly what I'm saying that if there was no BCH, there would be definitely a SegWit2x.

3:48:59Amaury SéchetI don't think so. He didn't join. Like what I'm saying is like he didn't join BCH right away. He joined BCH like two months later when SegWit2x failed, something like that.

3:49:10Vlad CosteaYeah, but the question is why did it fail? And I think that BCH is part of like a big part of the reason.

3:49:16Amaury SéchetBecause when comes the time to activate the larger block on SegWit2x? So you have two factions and those two factions, they don't trust each other. They are in violent opposition with each other.

3:49:33But they kind of want to stay in the same system because they understand that the more people there is in the system, the more valuable it is. Right? So you have those two groups. They don't agree with each other, but you know, somehow if we can trade them, you know, into like giving a little bit of what one wants, a little bit of what the other wants, you can keep them on the same chain. Okay. You know that one of those things is relatively easy to activate.

3:50:05And one of those things is harder to activate. Right? Because it's easier to do a soft fork than to do a hard fork. Right? Because to do a soft fork, you need enough people to be on board. To do a hard fork, you need like almost everybody to be on board. Right? Like the bar is higher.

3:50:27So once you do the soft fork, you gave one group what they wanted. So at this point, they lose their incentive to support like, you know, the other leg of the deal. And the other leg of the deal is the one that is much higher to activate that has a much higher bar to pass for activation. And you try to pass the much higher bar once you remove the incentive for one of the group to play nice with the other. It's obviously not going to work.

3:51:09Vlad CosteaYeah, makes sense. I've also heard this argument from Eric Lombrozo, who was saying that there was a time in 2016 when it was unclear if Bitcoin is going to survive for another year.

3:51:25Amaury SéchetI think it's a bit dramatic here. But maybe you believe that but I don't think most people believe that.

3:51:37Vlad CosteaI did listen to a lot of the podcasts and the conversations from the time. It did seem for a long time that the big blockers had the advantage and this was gonna go away. Even the small blockers of today were big blockers at some point in 2015.

3:51:52Amaury SéchetYes, this is what I'm telling you. This is what I'm telling you. Like there was a time where activating big blocks was a matter of demonstrating you have your shit together and agreeing on the plan to activate it. And for some reason, big blockers managed to fuck up both of those things. And this is why there is no big block on Bitcoin today. The chat room one is private stuff, so you cannot have to trust me on that. But the testnet fork, for instance, is very public. There is a bunch of other stuff like that that demonstrates that the big blockers, they just didn't have their shit together.

3:52:33Vlad CosteaWell, to be honest, I mean, of course, in Bitcoin, we had the soft fork for SegWit and then nothing much, to be honest. There was Taproot, which is like for less than 1% of the users. I don't think anyone else will find it useful or interesting. And right now we can't agree on anything. And I predicted that by the end of the year, I think we're gonna have two more hard forks in Bitcoin because there are some factions that are so disconnected from the... Yeah.

3:53:08There's gonna be definitely something with the people who want to filter everything because they have their own node implementation.

3:53:16Amaury SéchetI mean, but isn't it obvious that it would happen at some point, because if you limit the block size, you just don't have enough space for everybody.

3:53:28Vlad CosteaThat's a good argument, but it only makes the security of BTC much worse. There's gonna be fewer transactions and the rewards are gonna be halving anyway, in spite of this. So the users are gonna go somewhere else. Maybe this is how it's gonna die or maybe that the price will go up indefinitely because Saylor's gonna pump it or whatever. Probably not. But I predict that there's gonna be a fork for these guys who will want to have their own space of

3:54:26Amaury SéchetPurity and whatever, because they seem to be very opposed to Bitcoin being permissionless. And there's gonna be maybe another fork for builders because I see so much frustration with the CTV people, with the OP_CAT people and they're like, man, I just want to prove my tech. I don't have the rest of my life to wait for this. And I think someone's just gonna... And it's exactly what went wrong with BCH. Bitcoin is not the place to prove your tech.

3:54:34It's simply not. It's just an ego stuff. You could do another blockchain or whatever to try your tech. If it's great, then maybe you can convince Bitcoin to adopt it and whatnot. But you don't need your tech into Bitcoin other than for ego reasons. There is no technical reason.

3:54:52Vlad CosteaMaybe that you're much more experienced with this and you went through this before, but these guys would not deploy on Litecoin or BCH or whatever. They just want it on Bitcoin. And if it's not gonna happen, and some of them, I think, raised funding or whatever, like StarkWare or whatever, I think they're gonna want to show it somewhere. So they need like a live network for it. And they said they're gonna do it on Bitcoin. So maybe, who knows, they're gonna make their own version of Bitcoin. So these are my predictions.

3:55:27Take them as you want. Don't bet on prediction markets or whatever that this is gonna happen based on my intuition. I might be wrong. But it seems like there are some factions inside of Bitcoin that don't get along anymore. And they just hate each other at some point. And they're even begging each other like, just please fork away. I don't want to deal with this shit anymore. Just create it. Yeah, I've seen that.

3:55:55Amaury SéchetI've seen that. But like you forced a group of people to be on this tiny, to have to share this tiny amount of space.

3:56:07Vlad CosteaYou mean you said tiny amounts of space?

3:56:10Amaury SéchetYeah, there is a tiny amount of space, right? So obviously, all the space is going to be used, now that it's a very scarce resource. You kind of have to, you know.

3:56:23Vlad CosteaAnd then you also have the Nostr people who are their own island. And they use Lightning Network custodially, mostly. I don't think this is gonna end up in a good way.

3:56:36Amaury SéchetI mean, I think Lightning Network, it's a bit sad because it's very interesting tech, but it's mostly a failure at this point. Like people think it's very successful because everybody use custodial services to use it. To be fair, the people that build those custodial services, they're pretty smart. Like it's very transparent. You never really know if you use the custodial stuff or if you use the real Lightning Network. It's the same, you know, like what's the name, but like it's the same invoices and stuff like that system.

3:57:05It works transparently between the two. But what happens in practice is that the vast majority of it is custodial.

3:57:13Vlad CosteaI do use Lightning non-custodially. There is Phoenix wallet and there is Electrum that has something very cool with trampoline routing and a lot of magic in the background. But most people I see using Lightning just are using something custodial. And even the Lightning whitepaper says that you need 133 megabyte blocks for this to work at scale.

3:57:45Amaury SéchetThe Lightning, no it's even more than that in the Lightning paper if I remember properly. But yeah, the Lightning Network paper says that even with Lightning Network you need blocks that are way bigger than what the fuck we have now.

3:58:04Vlad CosteaI think the math is that if every Bitcoin user is going to open and close a channel every year, and this is going to scale at Visa level, then you're going to need more than 100 megabyte blocks.

3:58:18Amaury SéchetYeah, if I remember correctly, but I haven't read it in a while, but if I remember correctly, it was 300 megabytes that the paper estimated is required, but I'm not...

3:58:30Vlad CosteaI don't know why the number in my mind is 133, but this is...

3:58:35Amaury SéchetIt's oddly specific.

3:58:36Vlad CosteaThis is a sort of scientific kind of podcast or at least one aiming for accuracy. So let me, I've just opened. Yeah, I was right. So it's page 55. It says if all transactions using Bitcoin were conducted inside the network of micropayment channels to enable 7 billion people to make two channels per year with unlimited transactions inside the channel, it would require 133 megabyte blocks, presuming 500 bytes per transaction and 52,560 blocks per year. You sent me a message. Do you have to go?

3:59:19Amaury SéchetNo, I mean, kind of yes, but not like urgently. This is not what the message is for. I sent you the message with the paper that showed that emergent consensus as Bitcoin Unlimited envisions it, and so on. Because I mentioned that paper a few times.

3:59:35Vlad CosteaCan you send it on Telegram? Because if I open here in Google Meet, I'm going to mess up the layout for the screen.

3:59:41Amaury SéchetSure, sure. Where is it? It's there. All right. Just sent it to you on Telegram. Nice.

3:59:52But yeah, they are looking at the game theory and economics behind the emergent consensus proposal by Bitcoin Unlimited. And they show that, essentially, the game theory said that if you do that, it's never going to be used. Because nobody has a, like everybody gets punished to do the first step, essentially. If you do this first step, you get punished. So nobody takes the first step. It's irrational to do.

4:00:18Vlad CosteaYou mean for the activation? Yeah. Oh, this is quite well researched when you look at it. Lots of references, math.

4:00:29Amaury SéchetYeah, it's an actual research paper. They did things very correctly. Obviously, this paper did not exist at the time of where those discussions took place. Right. But we kind of, I mean, I say we kind of knew that, but clearly some people did not. But if you understood Bitcoin, you would understand what is in that paper. Or maybe not with the level of details with which it is described in the paper. Right. But on an intuitive level, you know that it doesn't work.

4:01:09Vlad CosteaYeah. So in hindsight, maybe that it was good for that guy to hesitate. Or maybe he could just say, let's use XT instead of Unlimited. I don't know.

4:01:24Amaury SéchetYeah, but see, when you have XT and Unlimited and Classic disagree on stuff, and on stuff that don't really matter, like SIGOPS, it's not a matter of who's right or who's wrong or which group I'm going to support. It's a matter of those people don't have the level of professionalism required to steward a billion dollar project.

4:02:03Right. Like if they were aware of the importance of that project and the kind of money that is behind it, they would have figured out this SIGOPS issue one way or another. Right. The specific answer they give does not matter. The fact that they did not even consider that it was important to agree on the answer shows that they are not trustworthy. They don't operate at the level required to make that work.

4:02:41Vlad CosteaYeah. It's really interesting, this piece of history about this meeting, because also what happened post fork is that you ended up with a lot of people who only agreed that the block size should be increased, but had all sorts of different opinions. And that's why BSV emerged a year later. You had these guys who, first of all, you had a guy who was claiming he's Satoshi. And some people found it convenient. You're like, oh, we have this guy who says he's Satoshi and he's on our side.

4:03:14Amaury SéchetTo be more complete, there were also a lot of people that knew he wasn't Satoshi. But that found it very convenient that the fake Satoshi was going at us. And so it was convenient as an ally of circumstance, if you know what I mean. Yeah, I know exactly. So it's bigger than just the people who somehow believed that he was Satoshi.

4:03:44Vlad CosteaAnd then this guy who claims to be Satoshi forked off and created his own version and took some developers with him. I'm not even sure if he took the best of developers, but he did have some developers that left to work on BSV. And I know that, for example, ElectrumX or some other projects became BSV projects.

4:04:07Amaury SéchetYeah, the dude that was maintaining the Electrum fork for BCH was a BSV dude. So he went with BSV. I don't know what happened of him.

4:04:21Vlad CosteaThere was some fragmentation. And I think that in spite of the fact that it was convenient to have this guy who claims to be Satoshi on your team, on the long term, it led to a damaged reputation. Yes. It was better off to just find a way to tell him to fuck off or whatever, or not let him speak publicly for the project. I still remember a famous tweet from him where he said, I'm going to the gym, call me when BCH hits 9000 or something. And people were still joking that he got stuck in the gym and he never left.

4:04:57He used to be quite funny on Twitter. I don't know what happened. Maybe the lawsuits changed him.

4:05:10It was an interesting time. It felt exciting. Something was happening every day. Now you just get fights with no actual stake.

4:05:21Amaury SéchetWell, no, it looks like nothing can happen, right? So there is fight and fight and fight, but there's no resolution in the end. Doesn't look like the filtering stuff is going to pan out. Maybe you think it's going to lead to a fork, but I don't know. It doesn't look like to me it's going to pan out. There was no stuff. I don't know.

4:05:39Vlad CosteaThey have a mining pool. They have their own node implementation. They have their own community. It's like the perfect storm to create a fork.

4:05:49Amaury SéchetYeah, the problem that they're going to have is like it's a soft fork. And so they're going to always reorg onto the main chain. They need to make it hard fork if they want to leave.

4:06:07Vlad CosteaYeah, but they're not going to get their way with the soft fork. So maybe that they will say, you know, screw you guys. We're just going to build somewhere else because you're like the pedophile chain or whatever.

4:06:21Amaury SéchetI mean, that's that's an argument. But the problem is you cannot really prevent that. I mean, the Epstein

4:06:28Vlad CosteaFiles, I'm not sure if you paid attention, but they also led to more fragmentation because you had names from Blockstream being featured. Oh, yeah.

4:06:39Amaury SéchetI don't know why it came back like recently because the tie between the MIT Media Lab or whatever the name that was and the Epstein stuff is known for like at least seven or eight years.

4:06:57Vlad CosteaNo, but it wasn't MIT. It was Blockstream as a company.

4:07:03Amaury SéchetBut the MIT Media Lab did hire many of the Core developers.

4:07:07Vlad CosteaOh, yeah. I think it was Gavin who went there after the Bitcoin Foundation shut down. Gavin went there and he took with him Wladimir van der Laan and Cory Fields.

4:07:21Amaury SéchetYeah. And that was in part financed by Epstein. So we kind of knew for quite some time that they were linked between Epstein and Bitcoin development. But I don't know. I mean, like, what do you do with that?

4:07:35Vlad CosteaIt doesn't prove anything in principle just because the money comes from him. Like MIT Media Lab also financed Lightning Labs, if I'm not mistaken.

4:07:45But to be honest, if they use that money for something good or even if they scammed Epstein, I have no problem with that.

4:07:57Amaury SéchetI mean, I would not take money from Epstein. Actually, like many times in the past refused money for a project that came from other dodgy sources or sources that were not aligned. Because once you've taken the money, you don't know what the fuck you're getting yourself into.

4:08:19But even though I would not have taken the money, it's not clear to me that this had a lot of influence on the course of events.

4:08:33Vlad CosteaI really like the way that you say money, like "monnaie".

4:08:38Amaury SéchetIt's "monnaie" in French. I'm influenced there.

4:08:47Vlad CosteaHave you been keeping in touch with anyone from Bitcoin Core? I think two years ago you said that you got a recent email from Greg Maxwell.

4:08:58Amaury SéchetYeah, but mostly for stuff about lawsuits with Craig Wright and stuff like that. We've both been sued by those guys a couple of times each. So we've been exchanging information about that, but not really discussing Bitcoin development.

4:09:22Vlad CosteaHave you received any feedback from anyone that you were working with when it was just one Bitcoin? About eCash?

4:09:35Amaury SéchetA few about eCash, but not so many, a lot about BCH. Not as many about eCash, because I guess like a lot of, as you mentioned, like a lot of those people that were looking at the different projects and whatnot, they went to Ethereum or Solana or whatever, like all sort of ecosystem for the most part. The Bitcoin ecosystem is too dysfunctional for those people.

4:10:00Vlad CosteaI'm surprised always to find out how many people actually build on Solana these days. Even Mark Karpelès, like you associate this guy with the largest Bitcoin exchange. And I interviewed him.

4:10:11Amaury SéchetOr the Smallest, you know, it depends.

4:10:15Vlad CosteaHe said he's building something on Solana and I'm like, huh, interesting. But I don't, you know, Bitcoin sort of ruined his life, so I don't blame him for trying to find some other tribe.

4:10:29Amaury SéchetI mean, well, yes and no, like, you know, Mark Karpelès, it's mostly negligence more than malice, but he's a guy that has a history of cutting corners. So it's kind of like also his way of doing things would end up leading him to, you know, that he was in Japan to begin with because he had trouble in France because he did not respect like various privacy law. You know, he was working at, what's the name, like we would say a cloud provider today, but it's not what it was called back then, like a hosting, you know, hosting company.

4:11:12Right. And he did access some user data. It doesn't even look like it was malicious per se, but, you know, he didn't do stuff by the book with client data and it ended up leading him into legal troubles. So it was not like super duper serious, but it's sort of why he went to Japan to begin with, left France, went to Japan after that. And so he's a dude that was not necessarily super malicious, but he was cutting corners a bit too much. Right. And when you do that, you might find yourself in a very bad position.

4:11:56It backfired spectacularly for him. But even if it didn't with Mt. Gox, I'm pretty confident that the way he was going at things would have backfired in some other way, maybe smaller, but still.

4:12:11Vlad CosteaI mean, I was not aware of this, but the whole Mt. Gox story sounds like this legend of the devil at the crossroads, right? Where you sell your soul because you want something very badly. And he got the Mt. Gox website basically for free. Yeah, very cheap at least.

4:12:30He was supposed to just pay like a percentage of the business to Jed McCaleb. And he just was like, okay, I'll take your website. I'll grow it.

4:12:44Amaury SéchetI mean, Jed also seems to be a pretty dodgy character.

4:12:48Vlad CosteaHe is dodgy when it comes to accepting podcast invites. Like, answer my emails, Jed. He doesn't?

4:12:57Amaury SéchetLike you try to contact him and he doesn't answer? Well, I don't know if he's malicious or not per se, but I don't quite know. I don't know enough about him to know. But I know that he is, you know, cutting quite a bit of corners as well, at least.

4:13:15Vlad CosteaI know that a lot of people associate the creation of Bitcoin Cash to Roger Ver for some reason, but you're actually the creator. And I was going to ask you, have you communicated with Roger lately? Are you still in touch?

4:13:29Amaury SéchetNot in a long time. Roger, you know, Roger was, you know, like the best of the worst things to happen to BCH at once. On one hand, obviously, he is like a huge promoter, huge person, huge presence, everything, right? And so on that front, it was fantastic to have him. But on the other hand, he always wanted stuff for yesterday without funding. And worse than that, he funded essentially like all of the worst people in the ecosystem. He is very like, you know, noise-driven, if I would say, in what he was paying attention to and providing, you know, providing at like directing the spotlight to, created like a ton of problem internally, the way he was behaving.

4:14:24Also, he antagonized everybody. I mean, not everybody, right? But he antagonized a lot of people. And then, you know, you have to fix it up. It's just unnecessary trouble. So, you know, it's a strange person. Pro and cons, but, you know.

4:14:46Vlad CosteaTen years from now, what do you think is going to happen to Bitcoin, to Bitcoin Cash and to eCash? What's your prediction?

4:14:53Amaury SéchetOK, to Bitcoin, it probably becomes some kind of reserve asset. The price is probably going to go up still, but it's not going to deliver on any of the original promise, right? It's going to be more and more financialized, going to be completely absorbed by the existing financial system. You're going to have to KYC everything if you want to do anything with it. And, you know, it's just going to be like another asset that didn't bring any freedom. BCH, more difficult to know. I think it's in a pretty good spot.

4:15:35Not because of what is being done in terms of work on it, especially, but because of like the level of integration it has with all kind of things, you know, in the ecosystem. So it's a pretty good spot on that front. They're probably going to have a BCH ETF at some point. It's going to happen.

4:15:54Vlad CosteaI think there might be one. There is a Litecoin one. So there's a Solana one. Yeah, exactly.

4:16:01Amaury SéchetRight.

4:16:01Vlad CosteaSo there is definitely the Grayscale stuff.

4:16:06Amaury SéchetI would say also, if you don't know Jason Dreyzehner, he may be a good person to get on your podcast. He's still in the BCH ecosystem. He's like one of the people that are doing good stuff for the BCH ecosystem. Recently released solution for, you know, the doing hash based signature that are quantum resistant on BCH without requiring a fork or anything. Actually, we can do that with the existing script format. So I think like, you know, actually what he did on quantum resistance there actually make quite a bit of noise and it's probably not unrelated to the fact that BCH has been doing good lately.

4:16:50I think like it's an actual concern that user have regardless whether it is real or not. We can debate that, but it's clear that a lot of people care about it. And, you know, you do well when you care about users. So Jason, good guy.

4:17:07Vlad CosteaYou think you can put me in contact with him? Yeah, sure. And I'll put you in contact with the CEO of Cake Wallet if you want to list eCash on it. Yeah, sure. That's our trade.

4:17:18Amaury SéchetSure. Fair. I accept that trade. And eCash is really going to be dependent on how the mood evolves in the ecosystem, I guess. Like as long as it stays in that nihilistic kind of, you know, kind of spirit, I'm not sure to explain, you know, but like there is a mood that is pretty nihilistic in the crypto ecosystem these days. And as long as the mood is like that, it's very difficult for eCash. But I think we're probably going to see a renaissance. But whether we see it like next year or in five years or something, it's a bit difficult.

4:18:10But at some point, like all this nonsense crap is going to die. Like that's pretty much a guarantee. And, you know, it's always what happened. Like the crap stuff dies and then you go back to the fundamental stuff and then there is a card to play for eCash.

4:18:27Vlad CosteaDo you think there will be any coins that will die in 10 years or even less of the famous ones?

4:18:35Amaury SéchetIt depends what you mean by die, right? Because those coins, they never really die. Like I'm sure like even Peercoin or whatever, like some of the early stuff, they are still like there's still someone running a node somewhere. Right. So I don't think those coins die per se. But let me look at the...

4:18:57Vlad CosteaOh, yeah. Let's look at CoinMarketCap.

4:19:00Amaury SéchetLet me look at CMC and see what is in there. I mean, USDT could or could not die. It's a project that has been on the verge of explosion for many years, but it's never exploded. So, you know, otherwise, I don't know. I guess like the top 10 is probably still going to be around. But what is below that? I don't know. Bitcoin Cash is probably going to be around. Chainlink, I don't know. Monero is going to be around. But there is a fair amount of those that are going to be around. Like Canton CC. What is that? It's not going to be around, I think. Or is it like 17 on CMC? It makes no sense. World Liberty Financial? I don't know.

4:20:01Vlad CosteaWhat about Avalanche? Do you think it's going to be around?

4:20:05Amaury SéchetI really don't know.

4:20:08Vlad CosteaIt's like your sibling coin.

4:20:12Amaury SéchetWell, yes and no, because they cannot really be trustless in the way that we are. Because they use only Avalanche. They don't use Nakamoto Consensus. They use only Avalanche, which prevents... Because Avalanche doesn't leave an auditable trace of what happened in Consensus. You need a trusted process to be bootstrapped on the network.

4:20:40Vlad CosteaDo you pay attention to any of these new altcoins? Because I've had someone in the previous episode from something that's called Quai Network. And it's this large sharded... It's sort of like what Peter Todd was describing with tree chains. Like blockchains on top of each other with sharding and they get generated according to demand. It scales very well and has its own trade-offs. And there's also Kaspa,

4:21:17Amaury SéchetWhich uses a DAG. It's very different. Yeah. I'm not convinced about those types of technologies. The first one you mentioned, I have not looked into detail. Kaspa, I'm not sure. I don't think that DAG stuff is bringing enough to the table. Because at the end of the day, if you have a contradiction between the branch of the DAG, you have to choose a path in the DAG. And the other paths, they are there for block reward and whatnot, but they are not used. So you don't get that much more throughput through the system.

4:22:00Vlad CosteaIt's just that this is like the avant-garde of scaling proof of work. And in many ways, I'm happy that this exists. I'm just not sure if maybe that they launched too late or I don't know, maybe it's early and we're going to get mass adoption. Who knows?

4:22:17Amaury SéchetI don't know, but I think it's a bit of the same problem that Litecoin has. Because Litecoin was like, we're going to provide a better user experience than Bitcoin by having faster block time. It's not the only change, but that's one of the changes. And that was one of the changes that is there since the beginning. The problem with that is that yes, two and a half minutes is better than 10 minutes. But it's not transformationally better. So it's not better enough to switch. What you want is confirmation in seconds.

4:23:00If you look at the research on payment, the barrier that you want to break is like three to five seconds. You want to be below that. That's really what it makes. It's not the quantitative difference. No, it's not a quantitative difference. It's a qualitative difference. It's a different product. If you go from 10 minutes to two and a half minutes, it's the same product, slightly better. If you go from 10 minutes to two seconds, it's a different product. It's instant payment. The problem is you cannot go into territory where it's a different product with those tweaking the block time, making a DAG and whatnot.

4:23:43All of that, it just doesn't get you low enough to be in that territory where this is instant payment. You might as well keep 10 minutes. If you keep 10 minute block time, all those problems that the DAG solves, whatnot, they don't really exist anymore.

4:24:03Those problems are there because you have too many blocks coming and you're going to get an orphaning rate. You cannot propagate them on the network fast enough. You're going to get a crazy orphaning rate. Another way to solve those problems is making the block time longer. If you have a way to do instant transaction that is not that, if you want to scale really big, you could do a block every hour if you want and do instant transaction on top of it. That would be a better product for most people than doing a DAG or whatnot so that you can get 20 second blocks or whatever.

4:24:43Because 20 second block is not a different product still. It's still too slow to be considered an instant payment.

4:24:51Vlad CosteaThey have 10 blocks per second or something.

4:24:56Amaury SéchetYeah, but how fast do you converge with that? Because then you're like, I'm in a block. Yeah, but there's 10 people that found a block at the same time, which one is going to be selected. So now I have to wait for 10 blocks or whatever. Because if you have 10 blocks per second, you said?

4:25:16Vlad CosteaYeah, and they want to get to 100. That's their goal.

4:25:19Amaury SéchetOkay, you cannot propagate block on the network that fast. And there is no technology that you can do that can do that. Because just to send an information, just because of the speed of light, if you want to send an information through the network, from France to Japan to the US or something, and I need to come back, you're going to need like 150, 200 milliseconds.

4:25:48So if you do like 10 block per seconds, there is like people who find block have no idea what the 10 previous blocks are at best, if they have like magnificent connectivity.

4:26:02So you just create like a bunch of branches in your DAG, but what value do they bring to the user? Like your network is not converging any faster.

4:26:16Vlad CosteaOh, I don't know. I wish I had good answers for this. I'm also a bit tired. You can't really debate. I was just wondering if you pay attention to these projects, or if you find anything interesting.

4:26:27Amaury SéchetSo yeah, as mentioned, Kaspa is the other one now. I always keep a look on those stuff, because I'm kind of hoping that something is going to come on that front. You know, something that is like really brings things to the next level. But so far, I've not seen it. They all have downside that people neglect.

4:26:49Vlad CosteaAnd it's really unfortunate that there's not much research in proof of work. There's a lot of it in proof of stake. But with proof of work projects, there hasn't been much happening. But take a look at Quai. Maybe you're gonna discover that it's interesting. It's Q-U-A-I. Q-U-A-I? Yeah.

4:27:22They just got listed on Kraken and that's sort of their biggest achievement so far in terms of adoption.

4:27:35Amaury SéchetWell, I'm gonna look. I don't know what to tell you. I don't know the project, so I don't know.

4:27:42Vlad CosteaYou can also listen to the podcast, like the previous episode, which is season 17, episode 18. If you have the time for that, you can check it out. I put timestamps so you can skip to subjects.

4:27:57Amaury SéchetOkay. Should we call it a day? We've been at it for like almost four hours.

4:28:02Vlad CosteaFour hours, 31 minutes.

4:28:04Amaury SéchetYeah. Oh, yeah. More than four hours then. Yeah. I think we should call it a day. It's super late and I've not eaten yet.

4:28:12Vlad CosteaYeah. It's almost midnight here. Thank you very much, Amaury. How can people follow you and learn what's new with the eCash project?

4:28:20Amaury SéchetI mean, for eCash project, e.cash, there is always the eCashOfficial account on Twitter. And for me personally, deadalnix. You tag me on all the posts so people should already be aware. And, you know, on GitHub, on Twitter, on like whatever, it's the same.

4:28:41Vlad CosteaThank you very much for your time. Thank you for sharing your stories and your knowledge and I wish you all the best with XEC. I hope you flip BCH and you prove everyone wrong that you have a better design.

4:28:55Amaury SéchetIt's going to be difficult, right? As I mentioned, BCH still has ETFs and like huge penetration everywhere. So, but, you know, we'll see.

4:29:04Vlad CosteaOkay. Thank you very much to everyone else. Goodbye. Subscribe, like the video and whatever. And I'll see you in the next one.