“But What About the Warlords? “— Something Amazing Just Happened on Bitcoin Cash.
By Bill McGonigle on ALTCOIN MAGAZINE
We’re almost a week past the Bitcoin Cash contentious hardfork (hostile takeover attempt) and people are asking “who won the (hash)war”? The consensus fork won this battle (the “SV” fork lost) but what’s a more interesting answer is “crypto won”.
“But the crypto markets are getting slaughtered”. While indisputable, it’s also expected, if one views the current situation as a battle and the crypto marketplace as a battlefield. There’s carnage everywhere, and plenty of collateral damage, but that’s not surprising from a battle. Both sides fought their hardest and the smoke will clear sooner or later. What will then be seen?
Something really positive for both Bitcoin (Cash) and the future of crypto — it can work. Disputes can be resolved. Contention for governance, which looms over this oddball idea that a group of cooperating and competing allies can maintain and manage a [crypto]currency, can be worked out. When a warlord comes to town with his army — the good people of the currency can win the fight.
“Wait, what? A warlord?” Let’s take a few steps back, and detour through Ancapistan for a moment. Spend any time in socio-politico-economic-historical circles discussing totally free-market solutions to complex problems, and you’ll always hear the objection, “but what about the warlords?” from people who feel that if there’s not one central governing authority (for anything and everything) then eventually any such people will be ruled by actual, real, sword-in-hand warlords. This has been a real problem throughout history — serfs would pledge their allegiance to a king (and an outrageous 10% of their productive output) in exchange for a promise of protection. When a warlord came to town, the King would send out his army (usually…often…sometimes) to protect the village from the warlord. The idea that a bully of a strongman with a rag-tag army would show up to take control of a village that the villagers had spent years getting “just right” and threaten it six ways from Sunday — well, that’s scary, and there has to be a way to handle that fear. And these people didn’t have firearms, so there was often a real power disparity to worry about. These days it’s assumed that huge nation states will serve this function, but even they aren’t always any good at preventing or responding to sneak-attacks. But what does this have to do with a blockchain?
Let’s step back a little bit, to December of 2017. A company called nChain, lead by a guy who vacillated between claiming and not claiming he was the creator of Bitcoin (hereafter Fauxtoshi), was saying some pretty smart things. They were talking about the community consensus method of Blockchain evolution; how Bitcoin was going to finally scale (on the Cash chain), how the November 2018 hardfork would enable a CTOR to provide Graphene-powered scaling, and all sorts of other good things. Funding for startups, huge-block testing environments, etc. People mostly ignored their claims that they were going to get hundreds of patents on Bitcoin, because it didn’t make much sense to patent such obvious things and nChain said it wouldn’t be an issue for Bitcoin Cash developers. You see, the old Bitcoin (now known alternately as Bitcoin Core/Blockstream Core/small-block Bitcoin/BTC) governance refused to allow scaling on the Bitcoin blockchain, claiming it was impossible and that people had to use other methods that would lead to much higher profits for the company Blockstream, which had effectively wrested control of old Bitcoin(BTC) a couple years earlier. Unable to make any progress there, and facing August 2017 changes for their profit-generating-systems that would fundamentally reduce the original security guarantees of Bitcoin, a large portion of the original Bitcoin community (the cypherpunks and others who shared their vision) split off to avoid the change and formed what came to be known as the Bitcoin Cash community, maintaining the original Bitcoin chain without Blockstream’s changes and finally increasing the number of transactions that could be handled on the system (which had been sorely needed for several years, and which drove costs up and usability down on the Old Bitcoin). That community decided that, now freed from Blockstream’s iron-fist control of Bitcoin, it could get back to doing some of the interesting things that people had been wanting to do on Bitcoin for years; as an aside, the reason Ethereum exists today is because Vitalik was turned away from Old Bitcoin — the current Bitcoin Cash community is now finally implementing some of his smart contracts ideas on Bitcoin.
But to get back on topic, to implement these changes that the cypherpunk community had wanted for years was going to take some serious work, and everybody was concerned about changing too much too fast, implementing ideas that weren’t fully considered, or deviating from the essential genius aspects of the original Bitcoin idea (the Satoshi Nakamoto whitepaper). So, an agreement was made among all the major participants to only make these big changes twice a year (on November and May 15th) and to work for three months on trying out new ideas (ending on August and February 15th) which would give implementers three months to make the code changes necessary to stay in sync with the rest of the community. Soon several implementations of Bitcoin emerged, each one both competing with the others on features or performance, or filling a niche, and cooperating with each other to maintain this shared resource of the Bitcoin Cash ecosystem.
Everybody thought this was a good idea, and it worked great in November of 2017 and May of 2018, which gets us up to about August 8th of this year, when nChain started to make some rumblings that it didn’t like the changes that everybody had been working on from mid-May to mid-August. On August 16th, a day after the change window closed, nChain “announced” that they had a different proposal for November 15th, and that it included almost none of the work done by the rest of the community and that it included changes that the rest of the community knew (through extensive data gathering, empirical testing, and software engineering) were unachievable. What’s more they didn’t have any code for anybody to look at to see what was going on, and it’s only from there that it got weirder.
Pretty soon nChain was insisting that its version of Bitcoin Cash was going to be the only version of Bitcoin Cash. That it had the only cogent vision. That they and only they had the original vision of Satoshi and that they were going to deliver that to the Bitcoin Cash community (which really wasn’t looking for that, and which wasn’t even what was actually being offered — but it sounded good to some who listen to stories without looking at the tech). This all happened just about a year after the chainfork that led to Bitcoin Core and Bitcoin Cash going their separate ways and, perhaps not coincidentally, about a year after many of nChain’s “in 12 months” promises failed to materialized. What they actually seemed to do is to clone an old version of the Bitcoin ABC code (one of the consensus community’s Bitcoin node implementations), changed a constant in the code, and re-enabled some old Bitcoin “op-codes” and called it done. They said everything else was ‘dangerous’ and that only they could be trusted to be in control of Bitcoin Cash. It was a blatant attempt at bullying and a power grab. And then, all of that being strange enough — it got really weird.
nChain people started saying they would sue anybody who didn’t go along with their plans (via patent enforcement). That they would completely destroy any opposition with a hashwar and market manipulation, that they’d turn in Bitcoin Cash developers and miners to the SEC on some preposterous theory, and for all of the competing currencies outside of the Bitcoin ecosystems that promise privacy (e.g. Monero, DASH, ZCash, etc.) that they would spend 2019 unmasking those transactions — effectively an “Imma call the cops on all y’alls” play (which seems exceedingly unwise given whose transactions such an “unmasking” might show, even if it weren’t a mathematically-impossible bluff). Fauxtoshi even claimed without reservation, in an email to Bitcoin.com that people had to follow him because “I AM Satoshi”. For anybody who was around in the early days, this certainly not the playbook of that Mr. Nakamoto. Fauxtoshi even said in the recent past that such claims would be a bad reason to listen to him.
The ABC team went about preparing its code the same way it always did; the Bitcoin Unlimited team did its usual job of top-notch software engineering and implemented both versions but defaulted its software to the community-consensus version of the changes. Most of the other implementations did just the same — the developers and the users were almost all on the community side, with the notable exceptions of companies in which nChain had made an investment.
In the week leading up to the November hardfork, the nChain and associated people began rattling their sabers again. They promised they controlled the majority of hashpower (the ability to create new Bitcoin blocks with very fast dedicated computers). They loudly proclaimed that the end was nigh for the community process and that they would be sacking the village imminently. “Resistance is Futile,” could faintly be heard in the subtext (which sent the exchanges and markets into a panic). The Bitcoin Cash community would be coming under the control of the True Guardians of the mind of Satoshi, and it would be led by his lord and savior … errr, Fauxtoshi.
Except that didn’t happen. The cypherpunks won. The CoinSpice YouTube livestream was the best damn entertainment this month, as people from around the world watched and participated in this battle to accumulate the most Proof of Work (in Bitcoin, the competing blockchain with the most proof of work is the best one that everybody uses). For all the proclamations by nChain that they had the majority of miners on the chain — well, they either didn’t or they didn’t show up. Who did show up was most of the community miners, Bitcoin.com’s miners, which gave the consensus chain an early headstart, and then just as nChain started to deploy (many say “rent”) additional power to try to overtake the community miners, Bitmain’s mining pools spiked the chart like a dragon taking to the sky, and, well, they smote the SV chain. It never recovered, and as of this writing the community-consensus chain is still 50% ahead of the SV chain. None of their attempts to increase hashpower have even come close to the combined power of Bitcoin.com, Bitmain, and others on the community chain.
So why did this happen? Séchet, the lead developer for ABC, put it succinctly (paraphrasing) when he said that the miners he talks to don’t want to make the decisions for the entire ecosystem. They want to mine and make money and to do that they have to mine a chain that people actually want to use. Sure, they don’t want changes that would be harmful to miners, but more importantly they want the community to figure out what people want to use, what developers need to do to make that happen, and when people are using Bitcoin as peer-to-peer electronic cash on a mass scale, then the miners will be happier than ever. And they certainly didn’t want to see one company, seemingly controlled by one man with a bad temper and an inability to deliver, take over Bitcoin Cash, regardless of anybody’s distant past.
But what does this all mean? This means that Bitcoin Cash has withstood the most difficult attack that any cryptocurrency has sustained. That governance really does work on a distributed scale, that “co-opetition” is a viable strategy for growing a budding technology and economy. That free market currencies really can work. That “crypto” has a very real and important future in the years ahead.
Still, none of the other cryptocurrencies have been through this. While there have been a few splits (e.g. ETH/ETC, BTC/BCH), never before has one tried to muster millions (billions?) of dollars of resources to conquer the other with a hashwar. Bitcoin (Cash chain) now has an attribute none of the other players in this market can advertise — it’s battle-tested. The “good guys” worked together and won.
“But who will fight the warlords?” We will. Because, now, we are all Satoshi.
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Addendum: This didn’t fit well elsewhere in the essay, but we need to think about the exchanges’ part in this. Besides panicking, they were entirely willing to allow a hostile takeover attempt, to allow one company to hijack a community, if the hashpower could be brought to bear (though that was never really a credible threat). There are two sides to this coin: if the exchanges respected community processes and didn’t entertain the idea of a hostile takeover it’s likely we wouldn’t have seen a $70B loss in total crypto market cap over the past few weeks. That’s pretty expensive to strictly adhere to a posited “miners-decide-everything” perspective. On the other hand, exchanges make money whenever anybody moves money, and the more bullish or the more bearish the market is, the more they make. There are some perverse incentive problems here that probably only decentralized exchange systems can resolve. As long as exchanges are willing to “give away” a symbol to any hostile takeover attempts, volatility and uncertainty will remain high. This is good for exchanges but bad for users and investors.
Edit 20181122: corrected typo “March -> May”, clarified hashwar takeover, fixed word “resolve” in addendum.
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