Bitcoin Cash Gives Devs More Freedom, Say Bitcoin Unlimited’s Andrew Stone and Peter Rizun

March 30, 2018 by Jon Southurst 0 Comment 6067 Views

How is Bitcoin Cash doing, eight months after its “birth”? Great, according to Bitcoin Unlimited’s lead developer Andrew Stone and chief scientist Peter Rizun. In this pair of interviews at the Satoshi’s Vision Conference 2018 in Tokyo, the two said developers now have a lot more freedom to make real improvements to the way BCH works, and help it become a useful currency.

Also see: Staying True to Satoshi’s Vision: First Conference Kicks Off in Tokyo

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Andrew Stone: Devs Can Now Work on Interesting Use Cases for BCH

“Everyone’s energized to make positive and awesome changes to the protocol,” Stone said of the changes since he and his colleagues presented Bitcoin scaling solutions at the Future of Bitcoin conference in the Netherlands last year.

Developers are no longer trying to figure out how to work around the limitations of BTC’s 1 MB block size, lack of ability to hard fork, and extension blocks — which were all proposals to shoehorn scaling solutions into Bitcoin last year. Now freed from those constraints, they can work on more interesting solutions.

Hear all his thoughts in the interview here:

Stone spoke about SPV wallets at the conference, and talked to us about some interesting use cases for BCH — not least of which were oracles that could instantly pay out winnings in P2P gambling applications.

Stone spoke to Bitsonline about how Bitcoin Cash’s multiple protocol implementations (e.g: Bitcoin Unlimited, Bitcoin ABC, Bitcoin XT etc.) are a strength, compared to Bitcoin Core as the only serious Bitcoin (BTC) implementation. That is, it’s a strength so long as those different development teams didn’t fall out of sync, he added.

Peter Rizun: There Won’t be BTC and BCH in Five Years

In the (somewhat noisy) corridor at Satoshi’s Vision we also caught up with Peter Rizun — who kept the controversy coming by hinting the proposals for Bitcoin Cash presented at the conference could rock Bitcoin’s confidence and complacency.

There won’t be BTC and BCH in five years, he predicted — BTC will be “forced to smarten up” due to the pressure on its developers by improvements to the Bitcoin Cash protocol. For BTC developers though, “it would take some self-reflection, a come-to-Jesus moment where they realize they’re losing massive market share to altcoins, to Bitcoin Cash.”

Here’s the full interview:

Rizun described how Bitcoin Cash was planned not as a separate cryptocurrency to BTC but out of a contingency plan in case the Bitcoin SegWit2x compromise deal failed.

“(Bitcoin Cash) was Plan B, a backup plan… in case anything fishy happened with BTC — and something fishy did happen with BTC,” he said. In fact, BCH split from the main chain even before the move to SegWit, though ultimately its supporters were correct in their predictions that Bitcoin would not allow a transaction block size increase, even to 2MB.

Bitcoin Cash proponents must also remember that Bitcoin still has the “BTC” ticker symbol which carries enormous value for investors and potential investors, which presents a risk to BCH’s identity and potential to grow.

Rizun’s presentation at Satoshi’s Vision was on the topic of “subchains”, a protocol improvement that could determine the validity of a transaction with 99 percent certainty.

Get a taste of the Satoshi’s Vision conference atmosphere by watching the interviews above, and see Bitsonline‘s YouTube channel for more.

What do you think of Stone and Rizun’s assessments? Let’s hear your thoughts in the comments.

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Video by Jon Southurst, Bitsonline