Guest Post: “Water for Every Farm; Self-Custody for Everyone – P.A. Yeomans and the eCash Roadmap” by Mirvyn

What follows is the first ever guest post on this blog. Not only do I think it’s a great article that every eCash supporter should read, but I also wanted to use this opportunity to showcase a cool eCash app that built by Cláudio Gil called thebigguy.club. It allows anyone to “generate an address that ensures each party will get the agreed-upon share”. I am using it to split all payments received to unlock this article 50/50 between myself and Mirvyn less the 20 XEC fee charged by the app. Now onto the article…

Water for Every Farm; Self-Custody for Everyone — P.A. Yeomans and the eCash Roadmap

by @Mirvyn

As my knowledge of the eCash project continues to grow — thanks to the eCashers with expertise who graciously share their knowledge — I am continually astounded by the engineering feats being accomplished by the Bitcoin ABC development team and contributors. It would be easy — and worthwhile — to talk from a UX (user experience) standpoint, though my appreciation goes a lot deeper; to what enables that very UX to exist at all; i.e. the eCash Roadmap.

When — as a newly-minted Bitcoin Cash (BCH) fan who unexpectedly stumbled across XEC — I first looked into eCash and read the Roadmap, very little of it made sense to me. And, to be honest, at the time all I really cared about was how many steps remained until its completion. However, after listening to many interviews of the eCash developers and reading every article about updates to the network, I have since come to not only gain a fair understanding of the eCash Roadmap itself, but also the immense planning that has gone into it.

Hearing the eCash developers explain the pros and cons of different approaches to building a cryptocurrency network — why certain things work; why certain things don’t; what is conducive to scaling, transaction finality, network security, etc. — it is clearly apparent that every strategic decision for eCash has been made with the utmost long-term goal in mind: to achieve — in its optimal form — Bitcoin technology at mankind scale, so that every single person on Earth can have self-custody of decentralised, sound money. Time and time again, this deep planning by Bitcoin ABC has called to mind a brilliancy from another of my areas of interest — soil fertility — and specifically, the work of P.A. Yeomans.

P.A. Yeomans (1905-1984) was an Australian mining engineer who inherited farmland, after his brother-in-law was tragically killed in a grass fire. Working on the farm, Yeomans put his brains into action, seeking to drought-proof his property on what is the driest inhabited continent on Earth. Through a great deal of thought — and, what P.A. himself described as many failures along the way — Yeomans succeeded in developing his Keyline Plan — whereby he demonstrated how to hydrate land by making water flow away from valleys and out towards ridges; the reverse of what normally occurs in a landscape. Word got around, and every weekend fellow farmers would drive vast distances to see what P.A. had accomplished, and to learn his methods.

In order to expedite teaching others, Yeomans wrote ‘The Keyline Plan’ (1958). With a tireless work ethic, and ever the inventor and innovator, P.A. advanced his Keyline system, developing the Keyline Scale Of Permanence (KSOP), as expounded upon in ‘Water for Every Farm’ (1965). The Keyline Scale Of Permanence is all about prioritization, with a dose of ‘reality check’ against cognitive bias and wishful thinking. Put simply, its premise is: if you pay attention to things in the proper order and put things in their right place, the land will have maximum efficiency of water infiltration, with minimal upkeep. However, if you don’t get the prioritization right, then you’ll not only miss the mark, but you’re guaranteed to have a maintenance nightmare down the track, as what you’ve built continually breaks down.

I frequently hear this P.A. Yeomans type of thinking when listening to the Bitcoin ABC developers talking about building eCash; e.g. what not to ‘bake into’ the Base Layer; what needs to be kept as Layer 1, etc. Everything is always explained with long-term viability and utility in mind. Like Yeomans’ Keyline Scale Of Permanence, the eCash Roadmap has been thought through prudently and logically, with due prioritization given to all critical factors so as to attain maximum efficiency, in perpetuity. And, like the Keyline Scale, there’s no rolling the dice or fanciful thinking about what “might” work; every precaution is taken to ensure that things aren’t ‘busted’ in some way. And, like P.A. himself, there’s no hype, and plenty of honesty that things are only finally gotten right after many revisions and rigorous testing; as per Thomas Edison’s “Genius is 1% inspiration and 99% perspiration.”

It is not just the logistics of the Roadmap or the UX that makes the eCash project so robust. Something that has always struck me is the eCash developers’ depth of economics knowledge, plus their commitment to attaining economic freedom for others. So, as amazing as the eCash tech is, what makes it even more so is that the eCash project is not built to be an end in itself; its purpose lies beyond; in that of service — to facilitate long-term economic stability for future generations. The month of May has just finished, and we have seen: the semi-annual upgrade; the implementation of AssumeUTXO; WordPress adding The Paybutton to their plugin directory; and, of course, the historic first-ever USD-backed stablecoin by a U.S. public entity — $MUSD — launch exclusively on the eCash network. With Bitcoin ABC having done due diligence in their original planning, the quality of eCash is becoming irrefutable, and the blessing that is: self-custody of P2P-ready decentralized sound money — for all people, becomes ever closer.