I am voting for this BUIP. We have had a significant amount of discussion after ABC has left, but what we haven’t done is deliver features. Even simple things like produce a roadmap have been blocked. And note that decentralized collaboration CAN produce a roadmap – we would just indicate for each roadmap item who is interested in it. In this ecosystem, where significant investment is based on future speculation, it is obvious that a roadmap is needed.
On the technical side, I have personally been involved in the most significant CHIP effort (Group tokens) so far, and the problem that I faced was that a “consensus” style system tends to remove features down to the bare minimum, because the proposal has to be what everyone agrees on and so the smaller the change, the more likely no one will disagree. There were no security related criticisms to Group features, the criticisms were “I don’t think that is needed”. But what we need to do it broaden our functionality to appeal to more use cases, not gaze into our crystal balls!
This idea can do that by letting developers build awesome stuff on in a real sandbox and prove their value before merging.
Think of it as a race with many participants but lets break them into 2 participants, B(CH) and N(extchain), and everyone else. B gets a 700 mile head start on N, and it has a “magic power” which is that if it wants it can grab ANY advances that N makes easily! But B is BEHIND lots of other participants and has been losing ground.
The only way N will overtake B is if B does nothing. This should be obvious. But N’s advances can help B, so N can push B forward against its true competitors.
So it seems obvious that N is a net good. Now you might say, well, you guys took away from BCH to make Nextchain. You are no longer pushing BCH forward directly. First of all, we ARE pushing BCH forward. We remain 100% in support of BCH. But the reality is that BCHN is doing a good job with the day to day BCH work and so a lot of effort is just duplicated or wasted. Its like an army invading new territory. Do you want everyone in a bunch, or do you want scouts ranging around, finding the right path and looking for the adversary? The answer should be obvious. And what BU is doing right now and HAS BEEN doing this whole time is scouting new features and ideas. So nothing is being taken away because we won’t do things differently. But the problem is that when we say we’ve found a nice valley to build a fort in, 1 or 2 people don’t believe us and that blocks its use. What we need is to be able to bring a small advance party into that valley so they can all shout “hey its good over here!”
The opponents of this BUIP made a suggestion to use a sidechain. I offered to completely fund their sidechain development on BCH, but the offer was not accepted. This makes me question the honesty of their suggestion, because the situation was very similar to this: what if someone offered to pay for feature A that you wanted in BCH and B in some other random altcoin, or neither? I think the answer to take this person up on their offer should be obvious, because the net value to BCH ought to be greater than the disadvantage gained by competition in that altcoin (especially in the context of many competitors). This is why athletes train together.
So if this passes, I’ll commit to opening another BUIP funding that suggestion and voting for it.
So you have two choices.
First, you can vote YES for action. You can vote to enable 2 ways to drive features into BCH. One of the ways is suggested by me, the guy who first proposed OP_CDS, which is arguably the ONLY feature that has enabled new use cases and new adoption, and has been right about many other things, including how important transaction introspection and miner validated tokens – let’s be honest, REAL tokens – would be for blockchains. If we had had these tokens in late 2017 when I first proposed them, what would BCH look like today? So maybe I’m also right about this, even if it makes you nervous.
The other way, drivechains, is suggested by the opposition, who are quite notable personalities in BCH and so their idea should be taken seriously. Its their best idea to solve the problems I’ve identified. I think their solution has serious problems, the simplest of which is that the latest recommended implementation of it requires an opcode that does not exist on BCH and so the EARLIEST deployment is May 2022, (and miner cooperation, and lower security, and, and and…)
But regardless of my opinion, let’s have both, and see which method delivers the most value into the BCH blockchain!!! Do you see the fundamental difference in my philosophy verses the opposition? I am voting for new and exciting ideas and efforts, even ones that I don’t necessarily want to use. The opposition seeks to block my ideas and force their own solutions.
The above is what will happen if you vote YES for action!!!
Or you can vote NO for inaction. You can vote to do nothing. You can vote to sit around and pray that other, innovative blockchains run out of blockspace so maybe just maybe we get some of their leavings. You can pray that ETH fails to scale so that smartBCH gets some outside users, rather than actually being a black hole that will suck the BCH ledger into it and in doing so radiate out energy to power ETH projects.
If you vote NO for inaction, then I guess you can look directly in the mirror to see the reason why BCH has slipped from the #3 crypto to #13 in market cap and in price from .1 BTC to .018.
