 Hello my friends and welcome to the 88th episode of Patterson in Pursuit, another Bitcoin edition. This week I have the best interview on Bitcoin Cash you will find on the Internet. And I know I'm a little bit biased, but that is my honest evaluation. I've brought back Mr. Ryan X. Charles to talk about Bitcoin Cash. He was back on the show in August talking about the history of Bitcoin Cash. And this week we're covering all of the exciting developments that have happened since August, including what I consider to be the most important historical event in Bitcoin since its inception, which is the failure of the Segwit 2x Scaling Agreement back in November. That has permanently changed the crypto industry. And we go into some detail explaining exactly why that's the case. So for those of you who don't know who I am, my name is Steve Patterson. I'm a philosopher and author and longtime Bitcoiner. I wrote a book back in 2014 called What's the Big Deal About Bitcoin with the goal of explaining Bitcoin to your grandmother. It was pretty successful, was translated into French. I'm also one half of the Bitcoin brother team. The other half you may know is Sam Patterson who's working on the OpenBazaar project. My guest this week is also a longtime Bitcoiner. He's Mr. Ryan Charles. He is the CEO and co-founder of yours.org, which is also hosting a very cool event. For this entire week, this episode will be posted on yours.org. And Ryan and I will both be conducting a Q&A trying to answer all of your questions about Bitcoin and Bitcoin Cash. So if over the course of this conversation, some ideas or questions pop into your mind, head over to yours.org. You can ask us a question and we will try to answer it for you. Two more quick announcements before we start. So my work is currently funded by donations, mainly through Patreon, but also through PayPal and through Bitcoin donations. I've been accepting Bitcoin since the start of the show. And as of today, I am officially changing all of my Bitcoin donation addresses over to Bitcoin Cash. All of my public content, I want to change to Bitcoin Cash for reasons that are laid out pretty clearly in this interview. I don't really believe in the vision or the future of the BTC Bitcoin project anymore, which puts me in kind of an awkward position as a Bitcoin author because I've put a large part of my reputation as the crazy Bitcoin guy for so many years. Though I am still a Bitcoiner, I just have to transition now to the project as it was originally intended and makes economic sense, which is now on the BCH Bitcoin blockchain. So I cannot in good conscience support a project that I no longer believe in. That being said, a bigger announcement number two. What we really need in the Bitcoin Cash community and the crypto community is a book. We need a short, punchy, introductory book that will explain what the heck Bitcoin Cash is to people who just want to have a basic understanding. And so that is the project that I'm undertaking. My next project is going to be a book called The First Fork from Bitcoin to Bitcoin Cash. So just like this book, it's kind of part two of what's the big deal about Bitcoin. It's like what's the big deal about Bitcoin Cash? It's explaining some of the history, the technology behind the fork. Unfortunately, some of the politics, some of the nefarious nonsense that has happened. We just need one resource we can share with people. And so that's what I'm going to do. I'm going to try to get it done in a few months because it's rather urgent. It's very timely material. And if it's a project you want to support, you can always feel free to support with Bitcoin Cash or head over to my Patreon page. Patreon.com slash Steve Patterson. Also, if you've got some information that you think is really important and should be included in kind of the first book about Bitcoin Cash, head over to that yours.org page and leave some comments for me so that I can put them into my Evernote file. All right. So I hope you enjoy my conversation with Mr. Ryan Charles and to any of my friends or followers who have been listening to my crypto commentary for a while, watch out for Bitcoin Cash. All right. Mr. Ryan Charles, welcome back to Patterson in Pursuit. Yeah. Thanks for having me, Steve. Really excited to talk with you today. So you are on the show at the end of August. And at the time I was saying, I think it's probably the craziest time that has been in crypto history or in Bitcoin history, but that has been surpassed because I think right now we really are in an even crazier time, historically unprecedented. And we have a lot to talk about. I want to accomplish a couple of goals with this conversation. One is just to get people kind of up the speed with just the historical progression of events. Because back in August, we were still thinking Segwit 2x was a thing that was going to happen. That collapsed in November, which is a huge, huge deal. I also want to talk about some of the new tech and scaling solutions that are happening with Bitcoin Cash. And I want to kind of send out a bit of maybe a warning to people who are out there on the fence who aren't diving deep into their own research. You're invested in crypto right now. You need to be aware of some of the things we're going to talk about. Because there could be some big shifts, I think, taking place. And the last thing I want to make sure we talk about is general objections to Bitcoin Cash. There's a lot of common arguments that people put out there and say, oh, Bitcoin Cash is a scam coin. And there's only one developer. And so I've got a list of some common objections I want to ask you about. Okay, sounds good. Okay, so let's start back where we were talking at the end of August. There was an agreement called Segwit 2x, which the vast majority of the companies and the miners in the Bitcoin space agreed to, say, we're going to agree to a two megabyte hard fork block size increase. Two megabytes, kind of a trivial amount. It was more of like a sign of keeping the community together. This is how we're going to be the first step to scaling Bitcoin. That fell apart. Catastrophically exploded in November. What the heck happened? Yeah, I mean, so much stuff happened that I guess I can start with a summary first and maybe we go into some details. But so many things happened. I mean, so first of all, let's explain what Segwit 2x was. The scaling debate, as we talked about in the last video or last the podcast with you, it had been going on for years. And eventually, basically, some companies got together and had a plan that became called Segwit 2x, which was we're both going to implement Segwit because this seemed like a good idea and it seemed like a way to resolve this dispute. But we're also going to increase the maximum block size by two, by a factor of two to double the maximum block size as well. And so this proposal became known as Segwit 2x. It was actually the exact same proposal as something that had been created earlier, which I think was called the Hong Kong Agreement. So it was like this minimalist path forward that we are going to move forward with Segwit but also increase the maximum block size. What then happened was so much stuff out because that was early 2017. Let's just skip forward to when Bitcoin Cash exists. So we now have this new blockchain, which is a fork of Bitcoin starting on August 1st that has the same blockchain up to August 1st and does not have Segwit because not everyone thinks that Segwit is a good idea. So this blockchain was created without it and Bitcoin Cash increased the maximum block size to eight megabytes. So we have this sort of parallel blockchain going on that is very much like Bitcoin with a larger maximum block size. Meanwhile, the industry is moving forward with Segwit 2x. At least it appeared that way. Many of the businesses in the industry were committed to following through with the Segwit 2x plan which included raising the maximum block size in November. Now what happened along the way was there was a, in my opinion, a very, very vocal minority of people became very outspoken about preventing Segwit 2x from happening. And actually, let me phrase that differently. They were very much in favor of Segwit happening. They were very much opposed to a increase in the maximum block size. So they were very, very vocal on social media. In fact, you even started to see some cases of DOS attacks against businesses and stuff like that. Any business that would support Segwit 2x, they were ridiculed on social media and some of them were actually attacked with computers, DOS attacks. And I remember too, some apps, for example, like in the Google Play Store or whatever, they would be swarmed from these individuals or this group of people saying, oh, this company supports Segwit 2x, it's a hack, it's a fraud, it's insecure, and they would suddenly get a bunch of one-star reviews, that type of thing. They're having their businesses kind of attacked for their supporting of Segwit 2x. Yeah, in fact, yes, so businesses, I think it's fair to say businesses were actually attacked and using these tactics. And so this movement is pretty anti-business. I mean, they really saw businesses as being the enemy. And I think that many of them would have actually said those words, that they regarded businesses as being the enemy. Yes, and to highlight that, they came up with a Bitcoin bad guy list, if I remember correctly, I forget exactly what it was called, but it was a list of all the evil people in Bitcoin, businesses, and individuals. My brother was on the list, these people supporting Segwit 2x, they suddenly became boogeymen. Yeah, and I don't know which list you're talking about. I do remember one of them, there was Bitcoin.org put together a list of companies and people that they denounced. Is that the one you're talking about? No, this was a different one, but I do remember that, yeah. There is one, because our company was on it, and so they denounced every business and person that supported Segwit 2x. And so Bitcoin.org actually had a list of people that were like the enemy, which was like 60% of the businesses and people in the industry were considered the enemy of Bitcoin. So this debate became very, very extreme. And what ended up happening was basically the people that were most involved in pushing Segwit 2x forward actually decided to not do it, because they were so worried about this vocal minority creating problems, because they were threatening to do all sorts of things, like basically they were going to go off on the run chain, they were going to do all sorts of things to force like a split. They were going to force this issue where Segwit 2x, it was unclear how much mining power it was going to have, it was unclear how much node support and stuff like that it was going to have. So these influential people that includes Mike Belshey and CEO of Bitco, people like Winsus of Zappo, and just a number of other people that were involved, Jeff Garzik, they wrote a letter that said, we're not going to move forward with the hard fork because of this sort of heated debate, and debate is putting it mildly, but really it was a tax from this vocal minority of people. Now this is after Segwit had actually been included, because this time the Segwit software could actually happen. The only reason why the Segwit software could happen is that the industry, which includes the businesses and the miners and many prominent individuals, had agreed to Segwit 2x, which was going to be Segwit first 2x later, but they canceled Segwit 2x after Segwit, but before the 2x. Now if I remember correctly, there was, before we had Segwit 2x, we had proposals for a block size increase, we had proposals for Segwit itself, they couldn't meet, and if I remember, it was something like Segwit by itself never had more than I think 35% of the hash rate that said, yes, we're going to support the scaling plan of only Segwit, and it was once you had the Segwit 2x that then it went to like 90% or something like that. Yes, yes, exactly. Exactly, the miners, the miners had actually been publicly voting on various proposals by including, like in the coinbase transaction of their, of the blocks, what they wanted to do. So this, there was no support for Segwit only, or I shouldn't say none, there was maybe 25% support or something like that. So 75% of the miners were opposed to just doing Segwit, but that's actually exactly what ended up happening because of these tactics employed by this vocal minority that they just really were able to leverage social media and other sort of computer and internet tactics to manipulate sort of what businesses and people and whatnot did to actually make sure that even though most people did not simply want Segwit, that's actually what ended up happening. Okay, so we have the Segwit 2x failure, which to be honest, I was shocked. I thought, because it happened, and even like the week before they sent that letter saying, we're not going to do the Segwit 2x thing, everybody was still on board. All of the miners, all the, well I shouldn't say all, but most of the miners, most of the companies were still publicly saying, this is the game plan guys. And I was thinking, look, if the businesses and the miners, the two huge pieces of the pie here are both saying, this is how the network is going to upgrade, then that's how the network is going to upgrade. So when it fell through, I was just totally flabbergasted. I didn't think that so, I think we're seeing, this might be the first example of the power of social media greatly, greatly influencing the history of an industry, really. That's true. I mean, yeah, it is amazing to think about it that way. And it is interesting, it really is social media because it's not, when you meet these people in real life, no one's yelling at each other. They're not like, like physically assaulting one another, anything like that. It was predominantly social media. It was things like putting up these, like people would change their Twitter handles to include no 2x. Right. Which meant we're not going to hard fork. And so people were making these public stances and then being very mean to each other on social media, trolling each other. I talk about trolling a lot for other reasons, but this is why, because you could see how much they would troll one another on social media and how much they would troll me and people like us that are just talking about this stuff, we would get, every single thing that I would tweet would be followed with both actual people trolling me as well as a bunch of fake accounts and bots and shills and stuff like that where that someone was generating fake accounts just for the purpose of trolling. Right. So once this happened, once this segment 2x failed, this is literally what happened. For me, I was traveling, I forget I was driving somewhere. I was like on the interstate. And at the time, there was a futures market for, it was Segwit 1x versus Segwit 2x. So it was like the, after the hard fork, the relative price of the 2x chain versus the 1x chain. And there was, it was something like, it was something like the value of the 1x chain was like 90% more than the 2x chain or something like 80 or 90%. And I had a little bit of a BTC. I was thinking, okay, well, I'm going to bet on this because I think what's going to actually happen is Segwit 2x is going to go through and the industry is going to turn over and work, it's going to be fine. I'm going to make a little bit of money on the side. When that, when it fell through, I literally pulled over to the side of the road. I got on a rest stop. I sold all of my, my exchange units on, I think it was Bitfinex or whatever. And I immediately bought Bitcoin Cash. So it took all of that money. And then when I got home, I said, okay, this time, time to really put the finances where the, where the mouth is, I really believe that a hard block size increase is the best scaling path. I don't believe in Segwit 1x. I am going to sell almost all of my BTC and, you know, get a lot of BCH, get a lot of Bitcoin Cash because this is the vision that I saw with Bitcoin back in, when I've been in this community for several years, I thought, this is the one I believed in then. This is the one I'm going to believe in now and made that gamble. And I know I'm not alone in that. So what I want to talk to you about is, first of all, is that what you did as well? And have we not seen of a immediate coalescing of, let's say the old Bitcoin community around Bitcoin Cash? Like this is the thing we all signed up for. Yeah. Absolutely. So, yeah. First of all, I too was surprised. I did not expect to receive that email. In fact, I had, the people that decided, these prominent figures that decided to not move forward with Segwit 2x sent an email to one of these mailing lists. I think there was a mailing list dedicated to Segwit 2x. They emailed everyone and basically said, we're not moving forward with this. That was surprising to me. Now, I had actually made a video the day before, or maybe it was the day before, but maybe a couple of days before on, basically the vitriol that was occurring in these attacks and stuff. And I was like, you know what? I had thought before that a hard fork would go down smoothly. I no longer think that's the case. I think this is going to be terrible because these people seem to be serious that they're employing every tactic available to them to prevent this from occurring. So I thought, well, it's going to, it's actually going to be a disaster. So I was nonetheless, I didn't conceive that actually the industry would not move forward with it. I thought it was going to happen anyway, but they decided not to. They being just these prominent people in businesses. So I was surprised. What I did then was it immediately, Bitcoin Cash existed at that time. And so everyone that had been around for a while and believed as you do and as I do that, well, the right path forward for right now is let's just raise the maximum block size. We're like, well, we have Bitcoin Cash. I mean, we have this whole other blockchain that actually shares the history of the blockchain all the way up through August 1st. This is our backup plan. We have a whole other blockchain now. Maybe the right path forward is actually to just switch to Bitcoin Cash. And so what then happened over the following few days were a number of businesses and individuals publicly stated basically that they're switching in every way, either like in terms of their business or in terms of selling BTC and buying BCH. And that included me. In fact, I announced two days after I thought about it for two days before making a decision, but I decided to sell all of my BTC and both for fiat currency as well as to buy Bitcoin Cash and basically switch over because BTC was something that I no longer believed in. A BTC with a strictly limited block size, I don't, it simply isn't at all what I'm interested in. It can only, just to give an example of that. I mean, I care about people actually using this thing. I mean, if people can't use it, I'm not interested. So the number of daily active users with a strictly limited block size is about 500,000. Well, 500,000 people, that's several orders of magnitude smaller than the world. I mean, I'm just not even interested in that at all. So I switched and people like Gavin Endresen, who was the lead developer of Bitcoin that got handed the reins of development of Bitcoin directly from Satoshi Nakamoto, he stated that Bitcoin Cash is the blockchain that he's interested in because he's interested in both the store value and a medium exchange and many other people. Probably the most public one would be Roger Ver, who had kind of waited. He was very favorable to Bitcoin Cash, but then he kind of stated, oh, okay, well, yeah, we're switching over now because BTC just isn't what we're interested in. And quite a number of other people in businesses did the same thing. And you know what I thought was, I guess sad in the short run, but okay in the long run, is when all of this was taking place and there are people like myself, people like you, who are stating, look, Bitcoin as we understood it has fundamentally changed. The Bitcoin that we understood, we early adopters understood is no longer BTC, that it's something different. What was sad is we would be mocked by people for saying, oh, they would put in quotes, oh yes, the Satoshi's vision, that's what you guys are like, you're part of a religion. Oh, just because the vision's changed, so what? It's still Bitcoin. And I was thinking, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait. The whole beauty of Bitcoin is the vision that was decentralized peer-to-peer electronic cash. Like the vision is Bitcoin. And there seemed to be this large group of people who thought a vision, that's for, maybe like the philosophy or whatever, we're more interested in the technicals, we're more interested in a store of value. And can you maybe comment on that? What do you think the importance is of vision in these cryptos? Yeah, I mean, just a bit of background on that. So Satoshi Nakamoto invented Bitcoin and nobody knows who Satoshi Nakamoto is, is it a person, is it a team? We don't have an answer to that. And Satoshi was around in the community from 2009 to 2010, and then he has no public communication after late 2010. But you can read stuff that Satoshi Nakamoto wrote. He wrote stuff on the form and the mailing list and there are a number of emails that have been released. And if you go back and read what he wrote, and it's actually not that much stuff, you can easily read everything that Satoshi Nakamoto wrote in one day. There just isn't that much material. And I'd recommend anybody interested in this, you should do that. I mean, it's, if you're spending a lot of time on the subject, well, go back to Satoshi because Satoshi is obviously the most influential person in the entire industry. And Satoshi's vision, in my opinion, is clear. I mean, I was interested in Satoshi's vision because I read what he wrote. And the stuff that he said is incredibly influential to me about why I'm interested in this. And, you know, Satoshi's vision was for, and I don't mean to speak for Satoshi again, I'd recommend anybody actually read Satoshi's writings. But in my opinion, in a nutshell, involves things like sound digital money that's, you know, you can send and receive. Anybody in the world can send it and receive it. And the way to scale, and Satoshi makes this really clear in a number of statements he writes, is, well, the only reason why there's a maximum block size is there to prevent DOS attacks. But obviously in the future, as the number of transactions increase, the blocks are gonna get really big. I mean, that was just, that was just the plan. And that's what everyone believed in the community for several years in a row until this new sort of, you know, mythology developed that there's something good about strictly limiting the block size. But many of us, you know, I read Satoshi's writings and I agree with what he said. It strikes me as the right path forward. Now, I think that there are two aspects of this because I think it's important to look at this from like a scientific point of view and it's possible Satoshi's wrong. You know, I mean, even if that's his vision or whatever, well, what is the right answer? What's the right path forward? Well, personally, I have a whole bunch of other reasons for why I actually think Satoshi was right, that actually that is the right path forward. So that's another subject, but it is in my opinion, true that Satoshi's vision was for scaling on chain. It didn't even used to be called on chain scale. It was just scaling. We're just going to have more transactions and therefore blocks are going to be bigger and that's how it's going to be. Right. And there's kind of two parts of that. One is Satoshi's vision as it relates to how Bitcoin can scale. The other I think is even more fundamental, which is what is the purpose of Bitcoin? So there's this other new argument is that Bitcoin is only a store of value and it doesn't have to be a medium of exchange. It doesn't have to be used in commerce. That is a fundamental shift in the philosophy of what Bitcoin is. And if you were to propose BTC Bitcoin to me in 2018, the way that the Bitcoin Core supporters conceive of it, it's a store of value only, all these future technologies might be developed that could make it more usable, I would say get out of here. I think it's kind of a scam or like talk to me again in a few years once these other texts are actually developed and you can use the damn thing. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. Yeah. Yeah. Absolutely. I mean, the reason why so many people became interested in Bitcoin early on was really based on the vision because the utility was not there yet, at least in terms of the apps and businesses and stuff like that. You could send and receive it as digital cash but it was all based on this sort of vision for what was going to occur. If people had pitched it as this is a store of value that cannot be used as a medium of exchange, no one would have gotten involved. It would be absurd. It's a terrible pitch. I mean, that's not going to work. You did a video. But then actually just saw they're pitching it today. You did an excellent video, one of my favorites on this topic. It's called Maybe High Fee Coin is actually a stupid idea. And I'd highly recommend people YouTubing that because that's when I played, when the Segwit 2x thing failed. I don't know exactly when you released it but I watched that a couple of times and I was like, all right, there are still people out there who get what Bitcoin is, who get the utility of it and who realize it's actually not crazy to want significant block size increases. But I want to continue down this historical path here. So we've got Segwit 2x failed. Wow, a lot of early adopters may be changed over to the, they like the vision of Bitcoin cash. What about merchant adoption? So Bitcoin cash is a currency that's existed for seven months. It's very new. What has happened? Has there been significant businesses and industries that have now said, okay, yeah, we're on board and we're accepting it? Or is it still this thing? Is it like a litecoin where it's not really accepted anywhere? Yeah, so it's a good question. So I would say that there has been a lot of progress in increasing merchant acceptance of Bitcoin cash in a lot of ways. So you see a lot of, first of all, there were just independent businesses of various sorts that decided to start accepting Bitcoin cash. Some of them accept Bitcoin cash exclusively. You've also seen companies like Coinbase and Bitpay that have added support for Bitcoin cash. So just the way they used to support Bitcoin, you can now do Bitcoin cash with those services, such as if you're a merchant, actually Bitpay rolled out sort of dual support for Bitcoin and Bitcoin cash at the same time. So actually every Bitpay merchant now automatically accepts Bitcoin cash. Unfortunately, I don't think it's fair to say yet that the acceptance of Bitcoin cash has surpassed what Bitcoin used to be, because what happened is actually in 2017, for the first year ever, the merchant adoption of Bitcoin declined because fees were absurd. It got so extreme that actually it started to seem silly to accept Bitcoin. And some of those merchants have not switched to Bitcoin cash. What they did instead was to just stop accepting cryptocurrency full stop. So unfortunately, we still have more progress to make to actually get back up to where Bitcoin used to be. So certainly Bitcoin cash, I think it's fair to say, is ahead of Bitcoin. You'd be crazy to use. In fact, I'm tempted to call Bitcoin Bitcoin Core rather than Bitcoin, because I think the name is still a bit in play here. But I'll just call it Bitcoin, BTC. I think that we still have a way to go to actually get back up there. But I see that the growth has happened. So I think that I'm optimistic that actually we'll get back up to that probably this year, especially now that Bitcoin and Coinbase both supported. I mean, basically, if you start accepting cryptocurrency today, you're going to definitely accept Bitcoin cash. Right. And I think the acceptance of an integration of Bitcoin cash into BitPay's system is huge, substantive. I mean, there's two currencies right now, to my knowledge, that BitPay allows you to accept at Bitcoin and Bitcoin cash. I consider that a massive success. It puts Bitcoin cash on the level of legitimacy that literally no other cryptocurrency has. Yeah, absolutely. And I think, especially coming from BitPay, because first of all, they're a large business that a lot of people use for this service, but also because they're also the oldest lasting Bitcoin business. And they were so exclusively pro Bitcoin. They did not add support for other cryptocurrencies as they came along. They really believed in this vision of Bitcoin as this sort of global internet money that anybody anywhere can send and receive and have access to sound digital money. The fact that they have added support for Bitcoin cash first over any other altcoins is a really strong signal that basically this is really the path forward for digital currency. I agree. And it was a shame when the fees were so astronomical of all the companies that were being harmed by this. BitPay was a big one because it wasn't just the fees that were killing people. Some of these fees, at the peak, it was like $50 a transaction fee, which is utterly ludicrous. But even $5 fees, it wasn't even just the fees. It was the transaction delays. And then it was payment failures. So BitPay is a company that has relationships with businesses as a payment processor. And then the businesses that's accepting Bitcoin on behalf of, they now are having customers contacting them saying, hey, I'm trying to buy a product. I'm trying to pay with Bitcoin. It cost me $5 extra. My confirmation's not gone through. I'm mad. I want to refund. And now BitPay's got all these support tickets where it's like the whole payment system has just totally failed on them. Yeah, absolutely. BitPay is, they felt this problem more strongly than anyone. And BitPay tried, they did everything they could to continue using Bitcoin throughout all of this. But eventually, it just got so absurd. They, like many of the other businesses and individuals, felt like we have no alternative. They were paying huge amounts of money just to send their own internal Bitcoin transactions. Right? So, yeah. So last thing I want to talk about before we talk about some of the tech of Bitcoin cash is the price. So there are Bitcoin, crypto in general, is known for doing 10x booms in the 90% busts. That's kind of standard fare in crypto. But in the short history of Bitcoin cash, we've had a few just spikes like I've never seen before. I think, I don't know if it was, it was a few days after the second 2x failure, Bitcoin cash went from something like, I think it was about the exchange ratio from Bitcoin cash to Bitcoin was something like 10 to 1. And then it spiked up to something like, I think it was 2 to 1. So it was like, in a period of 24 hours, it jumped, I don't know, to 200%, 300% from the actual nominal price that it was. So that's happened a few times. So can you talk a bit about what has happened, the booms and busts, and then where we are right now? Sure. So Bitcoin cash has been probably more volatile than certainly most of the other top cryptocurrencies. It's been more volatile than Bitcoin, just because of these, the spikes were just more extreme on Bitcoin cash than they were on Bitcoin. A number of things happened, like for instance, I still don't have a sound explanation for this, but for some reason, Korea had by far the highest volume of trades for Bitcoin cash, more so than other cryptocurrencies. And so a huge amount of volume was taking place in Korea. That's interesting because the price was kind of driven there. It would go up and down first in Korea and then followed everywhere else. So that's one thing that happened. I think that for those of us that don't speak Korean and so I can't ask them directly and stuff like that, except for the people that can also speak English. But there was also a sense of this possibility that Bitcoin cash would actually replace Bitcoin. So there were a number of predictions being made about this. I stated this publicly that I took that possibility seriously. I wrote down a number of possible outcomes for all this stuff that included, well, one thing that could happen is actually the price of Bitcoin cash could surpass Bitcoin. And if that happened, that would cause miners in businesses to switch. And then we would suddenly realize that actually the main chain is actually Bitcoin cash. That didn't happen, but it did actually get kind of close. As the price increased, as you said, to something like 50% of Bitcoin, that was pretty close. I mean, it could have happened. So I'll make one other comment on this, which is that the other trend I see is that actually the cryptocurrency market as a whole has actually moved together pretty well. And I think that's actually probably a bad thing because it's a sign that actually the people buying and selling cryptocurrency do not understand the difference between the different cryptocurrencies. And so they just see it as like an asset class that they get into and get out of together. So it's just a sign that the speculators have no idea what they're buying and selling. They're just putting money in and going long and short, like they're gambling or something irrespective of the completely different technology underneath. Right. So let's talk a bit about the technology. We've already had a hard fork in, well, I suppose, you had one hard fork to create Bitcoin cash and you had another hard fork in, I think, November, which tweaked some variables. And we've got another hard fork that's coming up in just about a month away from now. And it has been incredible to see in the past six months all of the new proposals for scaling Bitcoin cash. I mean, it's like so much innovation has been totally bottled up behind this block size debate that there's been all of these brilliant incredible ideas for making Bitcoin or Bitcoin cash a superior medium of exchange. And I've heard nothing of them until we finally had the block size increase. So there's a lot of things I want to talk about. The irrelevant stuff is that maybe what happened, like the difficulty adjustment algorithm, that's not particularly important, it's just a historical fact. But there was recently a conference in Tokyo about, it was called Satoshi's Vision, about ways like the future of Bitcoin cash and a lot of the talks that were given were about scaling Bitcoin cash. So can you talk about what the landscape looks like for future tech that's coming to Bitcoin cash in the short run and in maybe over the next year or so? Yeah. So first of all, it is true that there was a lot of a sort of bottled up research because what had happened in the history of Bitcoin leading up to this block size debate, the hard fork in Bitcoin cash and all this stuff, the people that were favorable to small blocks sort of really tried to curate the conversation around every alternative to on-chain scaling. So throughout the year, there was like all this effort put into looking into every conceivable way to scale that involved limiting the block size to one megabyte. So meanwhile, the people that were trying to work on this idea of scaling on-chain were kind of like ridiculed and excluded from the conferences and stuff like that. And so there wasn't enough research done on how to scale on-chain. I think that the right question to ask is basically something to the effect of how do we allow a greater transaction volume? And that's going to include, first and foremost, just raising the maximum block size. And then this produces new challenges. How do we solve those problems as we raise the maximum block size to allow the network to continue to operate as we expect? So first of all, in the near term, there's not a whole lot to do because we can actually scale on-chain safely a lot without making any fundamental changes at all. So for instance, when Bitcoin Cash was launched, it increased the maximum block size to eight megabytes, which was fine. Nothing bad happened. There is nothing to do. You just raise the number and it works. There is nothing bad happened at all. We can actually go all the way up to 32 megabytes with no changes at all. And this is safe for two reasons. First of all, at a protocol level, we can go to 32 megabytes because the peer-to-peer protocol... So there are a number of different protocols that actually make the entire Bitcoin protocol. So there's sort of the consensus protocol, which is what constitutes valid transactions and blocks. But there's also just like the particular messages and stuff that the nodes use to communicate with one another. And that's called the peer-to-peer protocol. The peer-to-peer protocol is very flexible. We can change that without needing necessarily everyone to update the software or whatever. It's not a part of the consensus mechanism. It's just like the language that the nodes use to communicate with one another. They have a maximum message size of 32 megabytes. So we can raise the maximum block size all the way up to 32 megabytes without changing the peer-to-peer protocol. So at a protocol level, that's safe to do. We can just easily raise the maximum block size to 32 megabytes. The second part of this is that... Can I stop you there? So I just want to get some context for this. So there's been so much debate and talking about BTC technology. Well, there's going to be the Lightning Network and then we're going to get MAST and Schnorr signatures and all these other things. We're talking about, let's be generous, not talking about the Lightning Network. Let's talk about the other optimizations like Schnorr and whatever. Let's say that's 50% increase in transaction throughput, something like that. I've seen estimates as low as 20%, maybe even lower. Lightning Network remains to be seen with one megabyte blocks. There's going to be a very hard cap on how many transactions you can process. It's an open question because every time you send a Lightning transaction, you've got to access the blockchain. Something I want to talk about later is the Lightning Network. But anyway, for context here, we're talking about a 32-fold increase in the transaction throughput immediately for Bitcoin Cash. And the hard fork coming up next month is going to raise the maximum block size to 32 megabytes. That is not even within close to being the same ballpark as a 50% tweak around the edges. We're talking a 32-fold increase. It took, I don't know, eight years or something before the blocks became full, maybe seven years from the inception of Bitcoin up until one megabyte blocks. Imagine if we had the runway to develop off-chain scaling solutions, if that's something that's necessary, 32 times as large. That's just staggering. If one of these BTC developers were to propose a solution for a 2X transaction throughput increase, people go, oh my gosh, this is brilliant technology. It's going to change Bitcoin forever. Well, we already have 32X. Yeah, totally, exactly. I mean, and it's just worth pointing out that there will be at some future date actually really hard technical challenges that we have to solve to be able to continue to scale. But we get a 32X increase with very little effort. I mean, there's almost nothing that we have to do. The other side of this is the hardware problem, like bandwidth and computer storage and things like that. And you can run numbers on this. And first of all, from a bandwidth point of view, again, there's simply no problem at all. Almost anyone that has any reason to run a node is going to easily be able to increase at 32-fold. And that sounds unbelievable, because it's such a large increase, but actually the thing is the block size was so small before that we're nowhere near limits for conventional commuting equipment that basically almost everyone has. Right, that's the point. So we can increase at 30. Sorry, I was just saying that's a point that I've spoken with a lot of people about. The people don't realize that the one megabyte block size for BTC is not really within two orders of magnitude reasonable for being a long-term cap on the Bitcoin block. One megabyte. So again, for people who aren't techies, your average MP3 file is maybe three megabytes. It's fair to give or take. So we're talking about the Bitcoin network. The most powerful computer network in the entire world and the entire known universe has the participants in the network have the ability to upload a third of an MP3 file worth of transactions every 10 minutes. That's not even close really to being reasonable. Yeah, exactly. I mean, as soon as you start looking into the numbers, anybody that looks at what are the average bandwidth around the world today and what's possible and what is the average things like computing power as well as storage space, we are nowhere, nowhere near something that would be easily handled with computers today. So that's how we can do it. Like there's that much room and the hardware already today widely deployed around the world that we can go up 32-fold with no issue whatsoever. So that's the near term. So there's going to be a hard fork in May where we go all the way up to 32 megabytes with no fundamental issues at all. We're able to do this relatively easily. Now in the distant future, in the next hard fork or years in the future, you can imagine if the transaction volume actually gets up there. First of all, we actually have to have 32 megabytes. We're actually not even using one megabyte right now on average on Bitcoin Cash. So this gives us a huge amount of room to grow without needing to change anything. You can only estimate how long that will take before we have to worry about that again. There are ways you can solve it in the future too. There are things you can do such as in the peer-to-peer protocol, for instance, instead of sending blocks around as one giant message, you have some type of streaming protocol or something like that that will need to be developed to handle that when needed. But that occurs down the line. We're talking orders of magnitude and growth can occur on Bitcoin Cash before we even have to worry about that. So what we need to do right now is we need to be theoretically prepared for that. We can start looking at every possible solution to this when it becomes an issue, but we have several orders of magnitude of growth to go before we actually have to deploy anything in the field to solve those problems at that time. So talking about some of those more distant texts, one of the proposals I saw just maybe a few weeks ago, there was what appears to be an independent Bitcoin Cash researcher who released four different papers on potential scaling solutions. One of them I found very interesting. He calls it Ansible. And the idea is to make zero confirmation transactions more secure, zero confirmation just so you can think of like an instant transaction. So right now with Bitcoin, since the beginning, it's always been the case that transactions take about 10 minutes on average and in order to consider a Bitcoin transaction even reasonably safe and secure, it needs one transaction, it recommended all the way up to six transactions and hours worth of work. Well, this is a proposal to take zero confirmation transactions and make them secure enough to be used in commerce. So do you have any thoughts on that particular proposal? So I don't want to comment on that proposal because I have not read the papers, so I don't want to say anything about that specifically, but I'll comment on zero confidence type of stuff more broadly. So first of all, zero confidence is not insecure. You can use zero confidence today. Actually on yours.org, my company, we have one click zero confidence transfers. You can cash in instant, then you can cash out instantly. We rely on zero confidence. And actually zero confidence is secure in our case because the payment size is extremely small. There is actually a cost to double spend, even if you're using zero confidence. The way the node software is written, it currently does not like rebroadcast, double spends. We've removed RBF from Bitcoin Cash. So like that's a different subject, but RBF replaced by fee or something added to Bitcoin, which allows people to basically increase the fee of a transaction and do a double spend. That code does not exist in Bitcoin Cash. So it's not that easy. So there's a cost actually to doing a double spend on Bitcoin even when the transaction is not in a block yet. And I don't know what that cost is. There are people that have estimated as being somewhere in the neighborhood of $10,000 or something like that. I don't know what it is. But I will say that I'm pretty sure it's a lot higher than the payment size on our platform, yours.org. So when you're sending $1 around, there's basically no risk that someone's going to double spend you. And the worst case is that in one out of every million transactions, maybe there's a double spend, well, you lose $1. So like in our case, the economics works out where we already have safe Zerocon. And so the question is more like, all right, well, how much money is it safe to send around with Zerocon? So can you send around $1 million? Can I rely on an instant $1 million transaction? I'd be less eager to accept $1 million with Zerocon right now. I'd probably wait 10 minutes for it to be confirmed. So the question is, okay, well, what tactics can we employ to like basically make Zerocon better? How do we make it possible to send even higher value transactions or to put it differently, rely on a smaller number of confirmations or something like that for higher values? There are a bunch of ideas around this. Again, I didn't want to comment on the particular one that you're referring to, but I'll say that you can do things like leverage, like one of the ideas I've heard is allow miners to have sort of these, this sort of parallel blocks where what they can do is when you're mining a block, you don't mine it all the way because you, in order to mine a block, you have to have it demonstrated it's sort of a sufficient amount of proof of work, which means one way of looking at it is the hash and the start of your block has to have a certain number of zeros. So what if you're mining a block and you don't have enough proof of work, but you do find something with a lot of proof of work that proves that you've done work on it. And perhaps there could be like an additional component to the Bitcoin consensus mechanism that allows miners to send around these sort of half finished blocks that have a lot of proof of work, but not enough proof of work to actually be a real block. But if you do that, you can build up like a sort of evidence that a transaction is very likely to be included in the next block and therefore you can rely on that transaction with sort of a higher probability that it's actually going to be included in the next block. Using that tactic is just an example, and I haven't researched that one detail, but that's something that people have proposed. That's a way to make zero-conf more reliable, make it useful for higher value transactions and make it so that you can rely on the receipt of a transaction more quickly. So there are lots of ideas like this that allow us to move forward with the basic architecture of Bitcoin. There's nothing fundamentally wrong with that. I should say it's Bitcoin Cash that we can improve on these things a lot without fundamentally changing anything. We don't have to rely on payment channels or something like that. We don't have to change the fundamentals of how Bitcoin works. We can keep using Bitcoin as it is while still improving these properties. Right. And something I always found funny is this academic pronouncement that in all circumstances, zero-conf is just broken. You can't use zero-conf and you won't be able to in the future, and therefore all these proposals we're not even going to conceive of. We're not even going to talk about weak blocks, I think, is the one you were talking about or the other one I was talking about is Ansible. The reality of this circumstance is there's so much research in independent creative thinking that can be done. Once we've already established the fact that the block size has to be raised in order to scale, we don't have to think about that anymore. That's going to happen. And now it's an open question. How do you get zero-conf? How do you try to program the best money that you can program? That's now an open question, and it's just amazing to see. I know at that conference there were so many lectures about different creative solutions that people are putting out there and saying, hey, maybe this can work. Maybe that can work. Hey, I proposed this several years ago. The BTC community shot it down. Can we talk about it again? Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. So yeah, I mean, I'll just summarize what I said a second ago, which is just the fundamentals are fine. And we can move forward with these sort of additional techniques to improve the basics without fundamentally rearchitecting anything. Okay. So one more question before we get into some of the objections to Bitcoin Cash. Are there any other technologies? You see something like colored coins, for example. Any other kind of big exciting technologies that you see or platforms that are being released on Bitcoin Cash that people should know about that you think look very promising? Sure. I mean, so the first one that comes to mind is this awesome new social network called memo.cash. So I can say this as kind of, it's just interesting to comment on it just because of course I created, not me personally, but we at my business, created a social network based on Bitcoin Cash called yours.org. But ours is more of a conventional social network where we just rely on the blockchain for payments. We don't rely on the blockchain for any other purpose. This new social network, memo.cash, actually relies on the blockchain for everything. So everything that occurs on the social network actually occurs on the Bitcoin Cash blockchain. It's an on-chain social network. That's crazy. And yeah, it's really, really interesting actually. And so it kind of sparked a debate in the Bitcoin Cash world because it's actually pretty extreme to actually put everything on the Bitcoin Cash blockchain. And so some people are now questioning, is that going to work? I mean, can you put everything on the blockchain? But you can run numbers on it actually in somebody wrote an article on yours.org about memo.cash running the numbers on it and saying actually it's going to be fine. You could actually have an entire social network on chain where you do, and note that you have to pay the fees. I mean, you still have to actually pay tiny transaction fees. So it's not like you can put endless data, but you can put a lot of data on there and actually it's going to be okay. If it grew really, really quickly, it's actually still fine. We can have all that data on the blockchain and no one's going to have a problem at all. And you're still going to be able to use Bitcoin Cash the way you normally would. In fact, actually, I think that's a good thing. I think it's really cool to see this unique use. And I think there is a real use case for exactly what memo.cash is. It is uncensurable. I mean, it is as uncensurable as it gets. We have an uncensurable Twitter on Bitcoin Cash right now. It's memo.cash. And I think that's great. That is incredibly exciting. And everybody keeps talking about the censorship on social media. That is a very clever solution to tie social media into the blockchain. And I also think it's worth pointing out that I know a lot of people's objections to stuff like that is, oh, it can't scale, it can't scale. I don't think that's the right way to think about these technologies. If something like memo.cash works for people and it grows a community, I don't think it's a valuable calculation at present to say, hey, 10 years from now, if the entire globe is using it and nothing else changes, is the blockchain going to be too big? Well, that's a problem that nobody's going to have to deal with because these things progress slowly. If it grows in popularity and if we have maybe memo.cash to reduce the size of the blockchain, we'll come up with some pseudo off-chain technology that somehow is a provable hash on the blockchain but it's not actually stored there. All of these problems I think can be solved. You don't have to solve a problem 10 years out thinking what if it scales a billion percent. Yeah, absolutely. In fact, actually, I want to come back to something you sort of said a second ago. There's a philosophical difference, I think, between the Bitcoin core people and Bitcoin cash people and there's a lot I could say about that but part of it is there's a desire as I see it on the Bitcoin core side that they really believe in security perfection where basically something is either secure or it's broken and that is a very impractical point of view because in reality it is almost always the case that there's sort of a spectrum here where you can be more secure, you can be less secure and you got to think about the cost of things because sometimes it simply doesn't make economic sense to be perfectly secure because it's too expensive and you need to move forward somehow and so sometimes you need to accept 99% security instead of perfect security. In fact, as it's almost always the case in cryptography you pretty much actually never have literally perfect security. You just have very, very, very good security. 99.99999 something percent security. So you almost never have perfect security anyway. It's almost impossible actually a lot of the time at least sometimes we actually don't even know a perfect solution. So you just have to always balance this. So when people say things like this like you have to put in the economics into the question so that like okay well when is it secure enough that it solves every problem that we actually have and then we don't need to make it more secure because it's good enough. I mean it's like it fully solves the actual problem in practice right now. So there is no problem anymore. We can get by with 99.999 something percent without necessarily 100% security. Right and for a cryptography point I mean I don't really think you can have literally 100% security with any crypto thing because technically you could guess somebody's private key. Just take a keyboard, bunch in the numbers and maybe you can guess the private key. Now if that sounds scary don't worry. There's an unfathomably tiny chance that that could ever be done but theoretically it could be done. So I want to run through kind of a list of common objections for people that are still on the fence or have heard criticisms of Bitcoin Cash and we'll see what sticks, what's a valid point and maybe what's not so much. So I guess the biggest, I don't even know what the biggest objection is at this point. One of the biggest objections is that there's going to be centralization concerns that when you raise the block size it's a short-term fix but what'll happen is the price of running nodes goes up and so you have centralization of nodes. Is that true? Is it important? Is that a valid criticism? So I guess I'll start and say I think it's a valid question to ask and I think that definitely needs to be something that we keep in mind and we have a good answer to this question. It is true that if tomorrow blocks suddenly were one terabyte in size almost no one could afford to run a node. So the question is like, okay well they're not probably going to be one terabyte literally tomorrow. So is the cost of running a node going to be acceptable somehow that we can ensure that certain properties of the network that are hard to measure and hard to define and all that but that we want it to stay decentralized and it shouldn't be that there's one person somewhere that completely controls the network because they're the only ones that can afford it. So it's a good question but it's again one of these questions that's completely separated from reality when we're talking about what we are right now. I mean just like we were talking about earlier we can safely go to 32 megabytes which is a huge increase in the maximum block size I think without worrying about decentralization at all everyone that's currently running a node is going to continue to be able to run a node at 32 megabytes. Yes it increases the cost of running a node but it's pretty small it like doesn't actually make any practical difference in whether you're going to run a node or not. In fact you know the argument is basically that it's actually incredibly useful to allow the block size to increase because that increases the utility of the network as a whole and therefore you actually have more of a reason to run a node and we've seen exactly that logic play out in Ethereum in Ethereum actually the blockchain is growing more quickly than Bitcoin now because you know Bitcoin block size is strictly limited so it can only grow so fast we've actually seen more nodes on Ethereum I'm not sure if that's true at the present moment we've seen it at times in the past I don't know what the numbers are right now but we've seen that logic play out that actually more people run nodes on Ethereum as it becomes more useful so the cost increases but the gain you have from using Ethereum actually compensates for that increase in cost so I think it's an important calculus to run and when you start running realistic numbers on this there just isn't any problem anytime soon with centralization when we're talking about going up to 32 megabyte blocks and I'll add one other point on this that's kind of confusing to a lot of people the primary cost for mining so people will say things like we're going to if the cost of running a node increases then we're going to have minor centralization minor centralization is really a completely different question than like the size of the blocks the hard part about mining is actually running as proof of work calculations that's where the cost of mining is expensive running a full node is really really cheap for miners right now we can increase the block size quite a lot and the bandwidth and storage space and computational space of validating blocks and storing blocks is way lower than what they're spending on the proof of work calculations so we have a lot of room to grow before we even have to worry about that impact on mining centralization at all so the mining centralization is a different question when you're talking about proof of work but that is not impacted whatsoever with the size of blocks so what about mining centralization there's also a worry that people have they say oh Bitcoin cash is like China coin it's all central it's just the Chinese miners that are mining it and maybe the biggest Chinese miner Jihan Wu maybe this is kind of his pet project this is the Jihan coin what do you think about that well I think that first of all again it's a good question to ask we should ask that question because you can look at who's mining Bitcoin or Bitcoin cash and you know there are individuals and there are mining pools and it is definitely bad if one entity controls more than 50% of the mining power in fact with the selfish mining sort of discovery even having as much as little as one third is actually a bad thing that you can start doing these sort of attacks on the network so we don't want it to be the case that one miner dominates the mining power in the network now that currently isn't the case with either Bitcoin or Bitcoin cash but again I'm not actually sure what the numbers are as of today but it is still like we're sort of always on edge here like it is bad if like the miners if there's one entity that has a majority of mining power because they can start doing double spins and stuff like that but I think there's a it's another case where there is like this economic calculus that you can't ignore I think it is actually the true that miners don't actually want greater than 50% of the of the mining power because they recognize a problem that that creates and they're actually incentivized to not have more than 50% they understand the threat to their own network when that happens it's not in their interest to have greater than 50% mining power the way I look at this is as follows in fact I tweeted something about this just this morning that was kind of vague but what miners actually want is not simply to maximize the amount of Bitcoin they have because people look at Bitcoin or Bitcoin cash and think that well what they want to do is they want to attack the network every which way so as to completely dominate and have every Bitcoin but they don't actually want to do that because in order to actually maximize their own wealth in life that would be a stupid idea it would ruin the network and you're not going to get anything if you have every Bitcoin and you want other people to have some and you want other people to use it and stuff so that the Bitcoin you do have is actually useful and is worth something so that calculus factors in and I don't have any numbers or something like that but you could probably find a way to to write it down in a formal way where you actually drive this and I think that what you would find is that that there probably isn't a problem nonetheless it is a great question to ask and I'll just in a nutshell I would say that good question let's figure out what is the answer to this maybe there are ways we could improve mining to improve mining centralization but it's another case where the size of blocks has nothing to do with that question and there's nothing wrong with having greater transaction volume and a couple comments on that one is we've actually seen some competition amongst governments to pitch their geographic locations as potential hot spots for mining because I think it I think one was Canada if I'm not mistaken they have a I think it's a nuke plant up there they have some power plant that's generating more electricity than that is being consumed and so they have an oversupply of it and it's I guess that's a problem with grids can only handle so much power so they're trying to make a bid to say hey you Bitcoin miners look we could we could actually use you to consume some of this excess electricity and that's on the other side of the world in Canada so I totally agree with you as the utility of the Bitcoin network grows then people are going to recognize that all over the world and then suddenly you're going to see I think a natural decentralization that happens and on that point this idea that the miners and nefarious actors are going to try to hoard all their Bitcoin cash or Bitcoin to become wealthy and you know steal it from people and then somehow they become wealthy and even at the expense of the network is totally bonkers I just remember I read an article yesterday Yahoo News put out talking about Bitcoin versus Bitcoin cash in the comment section somebody was saying along the lines of well I think this whole Bitcoin crypto thing is kind of a scam because we don't know who developed it and someday he's going to turn around and take everybody's coins and become you know a trillionaire I was thinking well you didn't really think that one through because if it's the case that Bitcoin is fundamentally flawed where you lose all of your Bitcoin because somebody the developer stole all your Bitcoin that person's not going to be able to sell it to anybody because it's not going to have a market value it's got no utility so you can't it's not that the coin somehow possesses this monetary value by itself it's that it gets its value through its use in exchange and that's why the utility of the coin is so dang important and it's also why I'd say the BTC is a store of value only it doesn't make a lot of sense because coins gain their value through use in commerce yeah yeah I think that's absolutely correct okay so next question this has been a popular one since the beginning of Bitcoin Cash which is about the development of it is there only one or two developers working on BCH is it kind of a development what's the word I'm looking at like tumbleweeds in the development landscape no I mean yeah that's it's an interesting criticism because it's something that you know it's you know the people people will see look at the genesis of Bitcoin Cash and there are a lot of like we're kind of poor at like really accumulating information I mean Bitcoin Cash is brand new so we kind of still have a lot to learn about how to communicate well and how to collaborate with one another and stuff like that but to answer this question no I mean of course there are actually a lot of developers so there are multiple different developer teams there's the Bitcoin ABC which has a number of different developers this include you know Amari Sashay who is sort of the I guess you could say he's sort of the the genesis developer he did sort of the most important work to make Bitcoin Cash possible and he still does critical work today however there are a number of developers that work on Bitcoin ABC that includes Shema Chancellor someone that I know he's a great person there are other developers that contribute to Bitcoin ABC that's kind of its own project there's another one called Bitcoin Unlimited that has actually been around for several years because Bitcoin Unlimited played an important role in the history of this debate and they worked on raising the maximum block size for Bitcoin going back several years they now are basically fully dedicated to Bitcoin Cash and they have their own separate implementation they have an organization that's well funded you know working on that project there are several others too there's another one called BitPrim BitPrim is a company based in Argentina they have a their own implementation of Bitcoin Cash there's another one called Parity these are the same people that created the Parity Ethereum client have one for Bitcoin Cash there are others too I mean these are not even all of them so there are actually a lot of developers you know working on this there are developers working on wallets too it's not just the protocol developers it's the people working at at sort of the application layer the wallet layer on top of that also collaborating with one another I would put myself in that camp myself in my business we don't work at things on a protocol level but we collaborate with with all of the developers we're on you know Slack channels Telegram groups and stuff like that we're all in touch with one another and we collaborate and we provide feedback on the on the state of the protocol what's important to us as a company what's important to them you know you know for technical reasons and stuff like that so there are a lot of developers I don't know what the number is but it's certainly probably dozens of people that are involved in the development of the protocol and probably hundreds thousands working on layers above that I don't have numbers but it's it's a lot more than one so I guess this kind of answers another question which is isn't this just Roger Veer's pet project is this I see that all the time I saw it on that Yahoo news article as they became up a few places isn't this isn't just I guess this isn't just one guy in his goofy vision to scam a few people and make make a few million no I mean for for those of us in Bitcoin Cash it almost seems silly to say that now Roger Veer is like he's a very prominent person involved in Bitcoin Cash he had nothing to do with creating Bitcoin Cash I'm not even I think they might mine it I'm not sure what the status that their mining is but they're not like a majority miner I mean they're I don't know what their mining power is I think they are a miner though they do mine it but there are a lot of other miners as well I don't think they have any involvement in the protocol itself actually I mean all the all the companies and people and individuals working on the on the protocol actually does not involve Roger Veer or Bitcoin.com at all as far as I know involves other businesses other people so in a nutshell no and Roger Veer isn't the leader I like Roger Veer a lot I think he's done a lot of great things but he is not the leader of Bitcoin Cash yeah and it's it's really kind of sad to see Roger's name be slandered because for years he was seen that he got the nickname Bitcoin Jesus for a reason because he was this constant tireless supporter of the vision of global decentralized peer-to-peer electronic cash and as soon as for just for political reasons he didn't tow that line anymore and he doesn't like the direction of BTC development nor do I nor do you he's now been slandered into this into this boogeyman I'm sure he gets death threats all the time it's constantly harassed by by people it's really a shame absolutely and you know look you can Roger Veer has been around for quite a long time and you can go back and see the stuff he was saying before and the stuff he's saying now and it's the same he's talking about the same stuff same lines he uses the same same paragraphs in his speeches yeah exactly so it's it's absurd that the narrative has changed where he used to be a hero and now he's the enemy to those people okay so I got just a couple more questions for you one is a really interesting question I don't know an answer to it which is can these two chains BTC and BCH can they exist peacefully in the short term I think the answer is obviously yes but in the long term do you think that there is room for two proof of work chains two coins that really kind of cover the same use case because if if the lightning network works it can just be imported over to BCH no problem what do you think can they can we exist in peace yeah it's a very good question it's like we all want to know the answer this question because it changes a lot about how things are going to unfold in the future I look at this two ways so first of all there's I consider myself a former Bitcoin maximus I say that because I used to really strongly believe in the network effect of money in fact I still do but I now realize there's more than that because there are other effects here so money has a strong network effect we all have a tendency to want to use the same kind of money because it's really it's just better for all of us if I can send value to you you can send value to me we don't have to worry about oh well I want to use Steve point or you want to use lying coin or something like that it's just easier if there's one but there's another effect here which actually there's an effect that people want to control the money and we see this in the history of the financial system for a long time nation states have long wanted to control money and they try really hard to control the mint they want to control the construction of the coin or in the modern world they want to control the fiat currency which are unbacked by anything and they really strongly control the currency for their nation state and that's contrary to the the network effect of money you go around the world you travel around the world and every nation state that you go to they want to control their own money you got to use a different currency there so there are these two sort of competing effects and you can see that in the cryptocurrency world we see that yes money has a network effect and it's actually valuable if everybody uses the same one or if more people use the same one but you still see these other people projects businesses trying to create a new kind of money because they recognize the power they get if they control it so I think that that's part of it there's that economic question so I could see it I could see it sort of happening both ways I could see it being the case that one of them grows and becomes really bigger and dominates the other ones but I could also see there's continuing to be a number of different cryptocurrencies it depends on which effect is sort of more powerful but there are other sort of technical questions you can ask that have to do with the way the protocols work with bitcoin versus bitcoin cash specifically and this involves the fact that they share the same proof of work function and I think this actually is probably this effect is balanced in favor of bitcoin cash because of the way the difficulty adjustment algorithm works bitcoin cash is more stable bitcoin cash can survive as the minority chain and if it ever achieves greater utility the miners will sort of switch over and start using bitcoin cash bitcoin core again due to technical reasons that have to do with the way the difficulty adjustment algorithm works is less stable bitcoin core cannot adjust rapidly downward in difficulty so if it ever were the case that bitcoin cash fluctuated higher in price than bitcoin core the miners would switch over and if it happened quickly bitcoin cores blocks would occur very very very slowly which would mean that it's like totally totally useless because if they're already strictly limited in size and small and all that the fees would get really really high in that scenario so for technical reasons I think the scales are sort of slightly in favor of bitcoin cash but there's no guarantee here and I'm not going to try and predict the future I'll just I'll sort of leave that as it is so there are the two effects the network effect of money but then the network the network effect of trying to control the money which compete and I think that's what we're seeing happen right now and we're going to we're going to see that sort of economic sort of battle played out in the coming year and years yeah I've got a few ideas on that too that's a great way of putting it and I also kind of would put my call myself of former bitcoin maximalist for economic reasons but there are so many different dynamics at play here and what you just said one of which I was having a conversation with my friend on this and he challenged me and made a really good point and now I'm a little more open minded than I was before I was saying that look if you have all of the use case of let's say BTC a paralleled by BCH in other words you know digital currency peer-to-peer on the internet if you can do that with bitcoin cash and you have lower transaction fees better confirmation times there's not going to be a use case for BTC let's say the lightning network works and you get micro payments which is what the lightning network is supposed to be for but somehow it works and you get regular payments as well you can port the technology over to BCH so I don't see a utility benefit that BTC would have at all when compared to BCH so my point was to say I don't even really I think that in the long run BCH is going to gobble up BTC but he was saying well it's still theoretically possible that people big institutions companies organizations might choose to use BTC as a store of value by convention and I was looking at it just for pure economics well why would they do that you could use BCH as a store of value be a better store of value but it's true to say that humans social convention is important so if it were somehow possible that the that there was some psychological benefit people got from from BTC and that was the convention that developed I suppose maybe there could be a unique place for BTC and just we just treat it as the store of value because BTC is safe in the BCH I mean maybe I could see that that's the that's a scenario I guess in which I could see BTC live you want to comment on that yeah I mean so I'll start by saying yeah I mean some people actually think that it's a good idea that BTC is a store of value only and all the other use cases somehow use some other technology well but Bitcoin Cash also has the exact same store of value use case and other stuff so why would anybody only use it for a store of value it seems really unusual I mean imagine imagine you get paid at any other cryptocurrency because no one's going to pay you in BTC if the fees are outrageous now that's actually not currently true there are people that earn money in BTC and there's actually still a lot of that going on that has not switched to Bitcoin Cash yet or to others but there's only so many people that can ever earn money with BTC given the limited block size so anyway it doesn't it strikes me as sort of why would anybody earn money in one cryptocurrency and then switch to something else exclusively for store of value if the cryptocurrency that they get paid in is also a store of value you just why would you switch it doesn't make any sense right I'll say there is one argument though in favor of that which is currently Bitcoin Core Bitcoin BTC is the most secure blockchain because you can look at how much mining power is on it and I think it's pretty much inarguable it is the most secure it is the it is the most expensive to double spend on Bitcoin Core which that is an important property and so you could argue that actually that does make it a better store of value than Bitcoin Cash or than any of the other cryptocurrencies but that doesn't happen there are any of these other use cases could could sort of you know you know launch the price of Bitcoin Cash so much higher that the miners switch over it becomes more secure and then there's no argument left in favor of Bitcoin Core I agree and also on the point of being a former Bitcoin maximalist there's also an interesting economic point here which is that the cost of exchanging currencies is now less than it ever has been exchanging cryptos trivially easy so an argument in favor of there being only one currency is that oh well you have to if you have to carry around a bunch of you know different currencies it's clunky it's it's inefficient but if now switching between currencies digital currencies is either a one button or it's behind the scenes that means maybe this one currency to rule them all idea is not as airtight as it once seemed yeah no I think that's I think that's definitely true just a brief comment on that it's interesting to think about how it works both in the cryptocurrency world and the traditional financial system because I was saying earlier about how different nations states have their own currency and that's that's true you know I went to Japan recently and I did have to get some cash there because they actually like cash a lot there so I had to have some of the local currency but actually most of the money I spent in Japan was on my credit card and my credit card is a United States based credit card with the US Bank US dollars and actually every conversion happened on the fly so that actually already pretty much works that way for most transactions in the traditional financial system and in the cryptocurrency world you can do the exact same thing using shapeshifter other technologies other you can you have decentralized technologies to do the same thing so it's true that the cost of that's really low what that means is you can hold whatever you want to hold and you can get into and out of these other currencies extremely easily quickly and inexpensively that's a good point and it kind of ties into the last question that I have for you we were talking about the BTC and BCH use the same algorithm the same mining algorithm and this leads to a scenario that I want to get your thoughts on which is is BCH in a circumstance where potentially a hostile BTC miner could screw with the BCH network because they do share the same algorithm and there's so much more mining power on the BTC chain is that a theoretical area of attack you have some angry pool of BTC miners who say hey we're going to screw around with the hash rate on BCH what do you think about that so yeah I do think that is it is a concern so this is something where the difficulty adjustment algorithm of bitcoin cash is much better than bitcoin which helps a lot with this if a miner started to attack you know the mining bitcoin cash you effectively have to apply more mining power to it so you can they can do things like that so because bitcoin cash is it's probably approximately 10% the mining power of bitcoin core right now you could take a large bitcoin miner and they could do things like imagine there are 10% of bitcoin well that's the entire bitcoin cash mining network so they could do things like have a 50% probability of rewriting a block or something like that they can do that in theory I don't think we've seen that happen in practice because it's still extremely expensive and part of the argument about why that doesn't happen is that actually the price of bitcoin cash is also a lot lower so like you have to you have to run numbers on this how much money do you earn by trying to double spend bitcoin cash versus how much money do you earn simply by mining one or the other and you don't necessarily come out ahead by double spending one right but that is definitely true and so that's a it is better to be the longer chain for that reason and I'll say that I want to reference an argument by Vinnie Lingham who talked about exactly this issue shortly after bitcoin cash was created his argument is basically that this actually is stable for exactly the reason that the price of bitcoin cash is lower and they're actually the mining power is in proportion with the amount of the price so actually that theoretically the effects sort of cancel each other that the gain from double spending on bitcoin cash is lower because of the price and so therefore your incentives are such as to basically continue mining one or the other that's I would like to see that drawn out formally I'm not sure if that's true or not but I'll say that I do regard that as a risk and it's something to just forget our mind about all these technologies there's another incentive which is you know if a BTC miner were to screw with the BCH network in a way that undermine the confidence in BCH it's also going to undermine the confidence of BTC so these two technologies are linked especially in the minds of a general investors and if if you screw with one if you screw with the functionality of one you're also demonstrating that in theory a bigger hash you know bigger hash rate or big player in the hash rate network of BTC could be could be disastrous as well that being said I agree I don't I don't think it's really in anybody's I don't think it's in any businesses interest to do this whether or not you had a truly malicious actor on the network you know I think that's an open question how much damage they could do to to BCH or BTC yeah I think that's true I think that I would I would if there was such an attack I actually the thing is there's so much overlap between the Bitcoin miners and Bitcoin cash miners they're pretty much the same it's not like they're different entities but imagine a nation state wanted to attack Bitcoin cash that's one tenth as expensive as expensive as it is to attack Bitcoin so yes a purely malicious actor would find it easier to attack Bitcoin cash than Bitcoin right okay so I know I said that was the last question but I got one more question for you so a lot of BTC supporters are going to be talking about the lightning network I remember it's just a lot a lot of funny stories about that you've been somewhat critical of the lightning network at least as proposed with one megabyte blocks now we've seen the lightning network actually released on the main net for BTC I think way ahead of when was a a responsible point from a development perspective can we talk just for a few minutes about the state of lightning how is the lightning network working in practice is it has it lived up to the hype does it look very promising yeah so first of all I don't consider myself critical of lightning network in like a general sense like I think it's interesting technology it does have use cases and I think it's great to see that it's being developed and I have a great deal of respect for the people working on lightning network I think it is it has a lot of benefits I'm critical of the idea that the lightning network is the only way to scale Bitcoin I think that's I think that idea is absurd I think that we need to scale on chain and then you can also use lightning network for some stuff but the idea that we need to keep the block size strictly limited and then only scale via this completely different network I think is is is crazy for reasons I've sketched out and I'll say I'll sort of summarize them there are a bunch of problems with the lightning network if you regard it as being the exclusive scaling mechanism for for Bitcoin those problems are all you pretty much have to do with the usability of it as well as sort of the economics of it so it's I don't even remember all of them because I have like 20 points you have to find my article or watch the video I made about it but some of them are things like for instance the recipient of funds has to be online in order to receive funds that's completely different than how Bitcoin works you don't have to be online to receive funds on Bitcoin and that makes a giant practical difference for apps such as the app that we created yours.org we simply cannot require that our users be online all of the time it's a huge usability problem that you have to be online to receive a payment you can't just turn your computer off you know and receive money while you're sleeping you have to leave your computer on in fact you have to leave the app open and running that's a big problem there are other problems too like things like well these channels actually have to be funded so you have to lock up money so if you with the app that we created yours.org we we can't have every user open a channel with every other user we do have to route payments because otherwise the cost of just opening the channel with every other user would be too expensive when you route payments though you got to have like a lot of money online to do the routing because if somebody sends like person A person B person C person A is sending to person C through B B has to open a channel with C with some money on it they got to lock up money available for all the money A might ultimately want to send to C and so that means imagine you send one dollar well you can't just open a one dollar payment channel for two reasons the fees are too high and secondly well what are you going to do after you send one dollar that you open another channel that defeats the purpose you got to fund your channel with like a hundred dollars in fact if you run the numbers on it it depends on how expensive the fees are you pretty much have to have a minimum of like something like probably like a hundred times the cost of fees so fees are a dollar you pretty much have to have like a hundred dollars locked up in the payment channel that's a problem where does that money come from you got to lock up your money where who funds that where is that you got to have the computer online which means not just to receive it but also from a security point of view what if somebody hacks you you can't do cold storage with the Lightning network so anyway those are just some of the problems there's actually a bunch of sort of weird problems that if you think about it as being the exclusive scaling solution to bitcoin there are a bunch of problems that are not even solved like how do you actually even route payments in a decentralized way through the Lightning network I don't believe anyone has actually solved that problem yet it isn't simply routing like it is on the internet it has a bunch of different properties that are different and it's hard to do and right now in the Lightning network it's not finished it actually doesn't completely solve the problem because these Lightning nodes share the full state of the network with one another they're not even saving any data I mean like they're not actually they haven't yet gotten to the point where they actually have anything to gain at all over just putting stuff on chain so I am optimistic that Lightning network is good technology does solve some problems but I think it's crazy to think about it as being the exclusive scaling mechanism bitcoin that just isn't going to work I definitely think you cannot simply scale bitcoin with Lightning network only they're never going to get to a larger audience that way agreed and at the time Lightning network I remember when the technology I don't know the talk the first talk they gave on the Lightning network I was very exciting but it was about micro payments and it was explicit from the beginning this is about small value transactions the idea that this is going to be for regular cash you should just crazy because you have to lock up a huge amount of funds and something that people don't realize is there's a risk of losing your funds if you're not monitoring them so you have to have your money in a hot wallet and if you're not actively monitoring it you could theoretically end up losing it because somebody could essentially trick your computer and close a contract and when you didn't want to close it and so the theoretical idea they put out there to solve this well we're going to develop watch towers which is the word for another system on top of the Lightning network to monitor all your open channels to make sure that they're not hacked but it's like this is it's very theoretical it's still greatly in process but this is people want to use digital cash now we had a workable system and this is there's so many practical problems it's crazy just the one fact of that you have to be online to receive a lightning payment is not practical for for commerce the idea that if you take a if you have an open channel and then you're taking a flight across the country and you have to turn off your phone now you could lose money or you have to close your channel I mean that's not really close to being practical so and we've already seen just in the short time of Lightning network's been on the main net there's been people have lost funds and not necessarily I don't know if it's malicious or not just just bonking around with the code it's buggy it's you know there's pretty much no stores that are using it this panacea people were promised just has not come into reality and it may not yeah I think that's correct and I have publicly predicted it never will for these reasons I think that the people the proponents of this underestimate how serious these challenges are and I don't think they're I think some of these are actually unsolvable problems and so I don't think it ever will you know succeed the way that people think it will well this has been an awesome conversation Ryan I appreciate your time I feel like we've covered a lot and I know this is going to help a lot of people in their in their research so thanks for coming on yeah yeah thanks a lot Steve this was a great conversation thanks for having me