 I think we are live everybody welcome to another episode. I got my friend Jimmy song on board We did an episode couple of weeks ago talking about you know crypto stuff, but I got him on the show quickly We're gonna have a quick short episode about 15-20 minutes, and we're gonna be talking about None other than the Bitcoin cash and what's been going on in the whole Bitcoin crypto verse So I'm kind of gonna leave it over to Jimmy and Jimmy. Why do you kind of fill us in on exactly what the hell's going on? Yeah, well first of all Amir, thanks for having me on Yeah, so Bitcoin cash is a hard fork of Bitcoin It's almost like a separate currency many people are calling it an altcoin You're I'm sure your viewers are familiar with the many different altcoins that are around and really that's kind of how they've marketed themselves It's it's a lot like Bitcoin except there's sort of what you would call an airdrop of of Or a distribution of funds that's based on the Bitcoin ledger as of 1220 ETC August 1st So if you had be Bitcoin before August 1st 1220 ETC Then you have the equivalent amount in Bitcoin and Bitcoin cash So for a lot of people it kind of looks like free money, but it's it's you know I mean there's sort of economic consequences and a lot of players that have had to like me That that have had to pay for the fact that this is a hard fork and you know have had to do that But basically if you had 10 Bitcoin before August 1st, you have 10 Bitcoin still and 10 10 Bitcoin cash tokens So yeah, there's been a lot of consequences to this and you know, I've been following it pretty closely You can check out, you know my Twitter feed and my medium post to catch up if you'd like But yeah, it's it's an all-coin that's basically Split off from Bitcoin. It has eight megabyte blocks. It doesn't have Segwit. It doesn't have replaced by fee It has a different difficulty Adjustment algorithm. These are all technical details. I can find out more about but essentially they're a hard fork of Bitcoin What was the main reasons why it forked? Yeah, it's good great question. So The Segwit Activation window, you know, I did there was a lot of controversy around Segwit and just Bitcoin scaling in general And what happened was after the New York agreement, there was something called bit 91 Which would sort of force everyone to signal Segwit and bring Segwit to the Bitcoin network But before that there was something called user-activated software which bit 91 front-run anyway that's all sort of a long story but Basically because of user-activated software, there were a bunch of miners that decided to make sort of a response to bit 148 Which is user-activated software and this was called the user-activated hard fork by the miners and this was Thought to be sort of a response in case user-activated software gained contraction gained traction What ended up happening was that because of bit 91 Segwit was going to be on the network So people thought hey, you know what? This isn't going to go anywhere. There isn't going to be a user-activated hard fork as called by the miners but You know some people really didn't like Segwit and sort of morphed that project into a Project where they would have big blocks in those Segwit and that's kind of what happened There's enough people behind this movement Especially with the support of BFTC which controls roughly 5% of the network hash power that it's it's become its own coin as of August 1st So what has been so far the I want to say consequences, but the repercussions of this hard fork with Bitcoin itself Yeah, so I I mean it's it's had a lot of repercussions for exchanges for example and Payment processors most of them just shut down for you know for a day or two based on you know What was happening? I work at an exchange I work for it bit and that's something that we definitely have to do So I like to kind of call it like socialized cost for launching an all-coin and it kind of is because Everybody that's running Bitcoin needs to now split the coins Bitcoin and Bitcoin cash and like figure out what to do with Bitcoin cash if you're in exchange You have to make sure that your customers are made whole and you know They they get the Bitcoin cash that they're entitled to but you know You obviously need to build out the infrastructure to do that You know other consequences are you know payment processors They just stopped accepting things for a few hours on August 1st Others are you know, I mean I think coin-based Biffen X a lot of these exchanges are you know We're facing lawsuits at at one point and they decided okay. Well, let's do things this other way so that we're making our customers whole Yeah, I we expected that if Bitcoin cash were popular that the hash rate of Bitcoin would go down a little bit that would mean that blocks would be slightly longer than 10 minutes Um, I don't think that's the case because it looks like enough mining power has come online that sort of 10-minute blocks continued to be the case on Bitcoin But yeah, obviously there's a whole market now for Bitcoin cash and it's been sort of pretty volatile the first week but yeah, that that that's obviously opened up a lot of you know cold wallets basically of People that want to just sell their Bitcoin cash and get more Bitcoin or something like that There are other people that are just sort of buying up Bitcoin cash It's sort of lower prices than they could get Bitcoin So that tremendous amount of consequences all over the ecosystem and it's not really something you can ignore and hope goes away Where do you see the future of Bitcoin cash or what do you what can you hypothesize yourself? Yeah, that's great question. I don't really know because it really depends on price price will dictate a lot of things Well, let me ask you this. Let me switch the question over What is the utility of it, right, right the main utility that they are you know sort of Purporting is is bigger blocks. So it has eight megabyte blocks So you can have a lot more transactions per block than Bitcoin does And they did mine a couple of four megabyte blocks. So, you know, I guess that's to their point But and no segue they think it's too complicated And they don't want it and there's no replaced by fee as well, which they felt like was I If you if your viewers don't know what replaced by fee is if you send the transaction With too low of a fee say you you sent the transaction with like 20 cents And it keeps not going into a block what replaced by fee does is you can replace that transaction with a higher fee So say like dollar or something and the other other transaction will sort of come out of the mempool They took that out. So if you send the transaction with too low a fee on Bitcoin cash and and it keeps not getting into a block You just have to sort of wait 72 hours for it to come out of the mempool and try sending again But yeah, I those are the main Sort of technical things that that they're claiming, but I mean, it's yeah, let's face it It's mostly like Bitcoin except for a few differences At least right now because Segwit isn't activated on Bitcoin yet But yeah, that's that's their main value proposition is that it has bigger blocks Whether or not that's found to be useful by the community is something only the market can decide now for Bitcoin they still have is the 2x still going on. Is that going forward Segwit 2x? It looks like it I mean, there's some speculation that there are people that That wanted big blocks would just move over to Bitcoin cash But that's that's really hard to know because Bitcoin the 2x part of Bitcoin 2x looks like it's scheduled for somewhere around November 20th or something like that and and you know, that's first of all pretty far away in Bitcoin terms That's like three years in Bitcoin And you know, the other the other reason is because we don't know how Bitcoin cash will do and we don't really even know whether Like Bitcoin cash doing well votes well for the 2x or not because you know There are arguments on both sides if it does well, then the 2x people might be like, hey, it's doing well Therefore we should increase it too But for the other side, they'd be like, well there you already have your big blocks go to the other chain But if it doesn't do well then the argument might be well We shouldn't do it because you know, there's clearly no market for it or you know The other argument might be well We we should we should do it because you know, otherwise there's gonna be a hard fork and all this mess again I mean, there's so many arguments. It's hard to know even like whether or not this will be good or bad for it We just have to watch the markets pretty closely and where where the prices end up Have you seen anything that was kind of surprised to you that it wasn't unexpected Well, the whole fork was unexpected for me I actually thought that this would just sort of go away because a bit, you know, like Yeah, did 91 was sort of agreed to everyone thought it was a it was a good way to go about it So like this, you know, when it happened, I think it was like not this past Saturday But the Saturday before it was it was a huge shocker to me And I you know, I was out like with my family and stuff and and when I saw the news I didn't really believe it and when I got back I knew this was something that I really need to need it to study and understand and the post that I put up there Was like by far the most popular post I've ever had on my medium block So I mean that kind of tells you like how much of an impact this has had in the ecosystem Do you fear any issues with like branding? For example, people are typing in Bitcoin and like newbies coming into space like okay You got Bitcoin being a Bitcoin cash like what the fuck's what? Yeah, yeah, I do worry about that and that's That's something I wrote in an article a while back what why a Bitcoin divorce will be very painful That said like I mean, yeah, I do worry about that a little bit But for the most part, I think the people that launch Bitcoin cash aren't pretending that this is Bitcoin, right? Like they're they're pretty clearly stating. Hey, this is a fork and we are the fork and we're not Bitcoin We're not Bitcoin core or whatever Um, so in that way I appreciate that because they are sort of separating themselves There are some people on Twitter that are complaining about the The fact that the name Bitcoin is in there in the name of their coin Bitcoin cash. I don't care too much about that I think people are smart enough to figure out which one's which they just have to you know I mean, there's nobody on like bitcoin.com that's saying this is the real bitcoin though. You never know, um, you know Like what people might say soon enough, uh, but yeah for now at least it seems like they They're fairly clear on the fact that they are the hard work and in many ways they are an all coin with an airdrop and That's okay. Um, that's that's been done before it's just I don't like to socialize the Cost of launching the coin that's like sort of being given to developers like me But you know, I mean, what can you do? They did what they did Do you think Well, let me ask you this question actually I was actually For what has happened and for all the chaos that ensued. I was actually quite surprised that bitcoin held held its value that high Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Yeah. Yeah, that that's been kind of a surprise to me too You would think that if there was a split then and it was sort of priced into the price of bitcoin That the sum of the two resulting coins would be Roughly what was before but that doesn't seem to be the case the sum is something like over 3 000 So in a way, I guess we've gone over 3 000 as a bitcoin, but I don't know if that's how you would count it But yeah, it didn't seem to have gotten priced in Uh, I I'm not really sure why People do see I mean this happens with any sort of all coin launch is that value is kind of created at a thin Areal so I don't know how long that can go on but that that seems to be what happened here Um, did you hear about the coin? You just mentioned earlier, but uh coinbase had to retract their statements before Yeah, yeah, they uh, I don't think they handled this very well But yeah, I mean they I I don't blame them because I I understand that uh, you know as an exchange It's very very difficult to You know list a new asset because you got to get all the wallets and all these procedures in price for Deposits and withdrawals you got to make sure it doesn't have like malware or anything You got to like sort of go over the code and stuff like that um, and it's not easy to launch a coin and we Pretty much every exchange has something like You know seven to ten days to prepare and that's not nearly enough time And you know coinbase I think said when when they put out their statement It was kind of like hey, you know what I we're just going to ignore it And then they were faced they were going to face some lawsuits and legal liability and I think Some of the smarter lawyers on their staff said hey, you know We we should really make our customers whole and then they decided to put out another statement and pretty much every Every other exchange has done that right like gemini us and others You know like you know, we're going to make sure that the customers get what they're entitled to We're not going to take on this legal liability Um, and that's kind of the smart thing to do from a legal perspective You know you you you have to Do your fiduciary duty of you know holding your customers bitcoins. So Yeah, it's uh, it's kind of been chaos for the entire industry and you know I mean It kind of sucks for a lot of the developers because they have to deal with this thing that you know sort of came up But I I Yeah, it's it's not fun But even though we're going through this let's say interesting period Don't you think in the long run this might actually be better since let's say that camp got what they want And we're finding out getting segway and everyone can split their ways like let's this is what we want That's what you want. You do your thing and you know, that's it Yeah, I mean if it was the only split then then maybe it's worth it and uh, you you have maybe two coins with different sort of use cases one for You know micro transactions and another for more like a layer bottom layer of a multi-layer system Uh, but yeah, I mean like given how this has gone I I think it's entirely possible that more forks like this are coming If bitcoin cash continues to hold its value in which case it's gonna suck for developers like me But then maybe it's good because we have procedures For dealing with this sort of thing and we can codify it and not have to Panic every time like 10 days before when something is announced Well, we also have to talk about for example with bitcoin you have a massive amount of developers working on solutions Like bitcoin cash like who are the developers? Well, there's two as far as I can tell f trader and data links And I I don't know the reputations of either of them It looks like data links used to work on bitcoin unlimited or something like that But yeah, I mean you you need more than two eyes looking at it. It's my I mean like it's it's hard enough as like a developer to think of all the Adversarial cases of like, you know ways in which people will try to attack what you just coded If you only have two developers, you really need a wider perspective So you can just know ways in which your stuff can break And I'm not sure that they had that and maybe I mean to be fair They might have more people coming in to review their code and this is just the bitcoin abc client I I I've heard that there are other clients like bitcoin unlimited cash and bitcoin classic and a bunch of others but in general Like anything with security the more eyes that look at it the better and And you know, that's that's something for them to worry about frankly and You know, I'm not going to pass too much judgment on them because as far as I know a lot of all coins Operates similarly. So there you go Cool. So I know some people have a question as in for the segway 2x What does segway give once it's activated? What is the promise? Okay, so um, if you think of sort of bitcoin transactions like In the real world like as like checks, right? Like, uh, it's like writing a check if I give you a mirror like 10 $10 what the bank does is they don't take like a physical $10 bill from like a bin that represents me and put it into yours They just have a ledger right minus 10 jimmy Plus 10 a mirror And you could sort of think of bitcoin transactions in the same way, right like you you have Transaction you have to sign it and then if it's if the signature is valid then it goes on the network If you think of segway segway, uh, for whatever reason like when, uh, you know, a physical check It's like a small corner that contains your signature a digital check or a digital transaction The signature takes up about half and what segway does is it sort of like moves the The half that's the signature and sort of can you can fit more checks in a box if you will, right? And And it fixes a lot of other things, but it allows things like lightning But that's that's essentially what the promise is there There's sort of like another layer that's coming on top of bitcoin that we'll be able to utilize as a result of segway Um, including lightning network and a bunch of other things You know, I think eventually we're looking at shinor signatures for more efficiency and scale things like that But yeah, essentially we we have uh, you know promises of another layer That's coming as a result of segway that we can utilize instead of you know, just doing everything on chain And so with segway the micropayments is a possibility Yeah, yeah, um, you can if once you have lightning network micropayments are very much a possibility And now I mean not to say that it's perfect There's a there's a lot of concerns around lightning network that still have to be proven But you know, it's something that we can try and there's a lot of other ideas as well Very cool I think we'll wrap it up over there. Like I said, I want to keep this super short It's simple over like 15 minutes right in just want to give a quick overview on bitcoin cash And all the mayhem that has been going on If people want to find out more about you and the writings that you do best resource Yeah, uh, so I'm on twitter medium and github at jimmy song and uh, yeah Just look me up and you know go go take a look at uh, you know The articles that I've written the tweets that I've done and yeah, you can keep up to their date there Guys, I highly recommend you go check out jimmy's medium articles. There's a link below this video That's why I keep up to date like his medium like I don't I don't if you sleep bro Like it's like every couple of days a fucking article comes out I have been uh pretty obsessed with this stuff. Um, yeah, well, we need we need somebody to be so I'm glad it's you Thank you. Thank you. Awesome. Awesome. Jimmy. Well, I'll talk to you brother. Cheers. All right. Bye. Bye