Behind the paywall, you can see the questions I’ve compiled for my upcoming interview with Amaury Séchet, creator of the eCash project. Questions may change during the actual interview, but you can get a taste for what I plan to ask him. If there’s something you feel I’ve missed, leave a comment behind the paywall.

  1. Five years ago, you told me you started programming when you were nine or ten. I was curious, what was it about programming that interested you from such a young age?
  2. At what age did you know you were going to work in software, and did you have any specific goals or dreams? Whether it was building a start-up, working for a big tech company like Facebook, which I’ll be asking you about later, or even creating something like Bitcoin?
  3. Sorry, this is mostly just for fun, but I have to ask, when did you start doing Rubiks cubes and what age did you do so competitively? What was your fastest solve in competition?
  4. Okay, so you’re a kid growing up in France, you’re into coding, and Rubiks cube, now when did you start getting into the whole freedom and anarchocapitalist thing? What made you interested in something like that since I imagine France was a mostly free country back then?
  5. Then Bitcoin comes out, and I know you were skeptical at first because you’d seen other such projects try and fail, but then the Cyprus banking crisis hits you realize Bitcoin might become something bigger, but you still didn’t participate in the community until much later. My question is when did you actually start participating in the forums. Was this on Reddit? Bitcoin talk? Something else? What year?
  6. During my interview with Antony Zegers, he mentioned the first time you guys met was at the Bitcoin scaling conference at the Westin St. Francis in San Francisco back in 2016? Was that the first time you had attended a Bitcoin conference?
  7. At the time, were you still working at Facebook?
  8. Can you tell us about the kind of work you did there? What you learned? What your experience there was like?
  9. Why did you leave Facebook? Was it because you decided to work on Bitcoin ABC full time? (For those that don’t know, Bitcoin ABC is the development team that writes and maintains the eCash implementation of Bitcoin, but before that, it was also the implementation that led to the Bitcoin Cash fork.)
  10. Was that a hard decision to leave your career at Facebook for something more uncertain? Was this one of those situations where you felt like you were taking yourself out of your comfort zone, and you did it because you believed scaling Bitcoin was worth the risk?
  11. Now I want to ask you as an engineer, over the last ten years, how do you feel the crypto industry has changed from your perspective?
  12. At the current moment, how do you feel about crypto’s chances of fulfilling the original mission? Optimistic? Pessimistic?
  13. You have said many times that the reason you were interested in Bitcoin is because you believed it could be a civilization changing technology. But you’ve also said how it changes civilization is impossible to know, but I still have to ask you, if it were up to you, what kind of impact do you hope crypto will have on the world? Another way of saying it might be what kind of world do you hope your children get to grow up in? Would it be similar to our world today, or would it be radically different?
  14. Speaking of children, one thing I’ve noticed is that so many of the leaders in the eCash ecosystem happen to be fathers, many of whom have had children while working on the project. Is it just me, or does eCash have an extremely high dad to non-dad ratio compared to most crypto projects?
  15. Earlier I mentioned you believe crypto can be civilization changing. I think it was during your presentation at the Tokyo Satoshi’s Vision conference in Spring 2018 that I first began to understand why Bitcoin was so revolutionary. During that talk, you went over the properties of money, then explained that until Bitcoin, it had been impossible for us to have a form of money that could act as both a good store of value, and medium of exchange, over a long period of time. You also talked about how throughout the history of mankind, we’ve seen the same pattern repeat itself over and over again as civilizations tend to evolve from using sound money like gold or other precious metals, to fiat money because it is more convenient to use as an economy scales since it’s not easy transacting in gold. But the problem is that eventually, fiat currencies always end up hyper inflating leading to the empire’s downfall. A couple of years back, Ray Dalio even made some headlines with his book talking about exactly the same thing, except not only is he a few years after you, but his book also fails to mention that a potential solution is now staring us in the face in crypto. You believe crypto can finally break that cycle of civilizations constantly rising and falling. Sorry this is so long, but what I’m trying to get at is, why do you think there are so few people who see this? Bitcoiners think it’s only supposed to be a good store of value, digital gold, when it’s really the fact that it can be both digital gold and digital cash that make it so powerful? Why do so many seem to miss the entire point of Bitcoin?
  16. Another thing I asked you five years ago was that if you could have dinner with Satoshi, you would encourage him to use some of his coins to foster the growth and adoption of Bitcoin. If you were the one with a million Bitcoins, how would you use them to foster growth and adoption of crypto?
  17. In a few days, it’s going to be May 15, the regular semi-annual upgrade day for eCash. It doesn’t look like we’re getting pre-consensus this time around, but it does feel like it’s getting close. Have you been following its development progress? Is it turning out the way you hoped it would when you first thought of it all those years ago?
  18. How did you come up with the idea for pre-consensus and the rest of the eCash roadmap? When did you first start to think Bitcoin could handle millions of onchain transactions per second? Did the solution just come to you one day, or were you actively thinking of how to solve that problem?
  19. I’ve heard you say in interviews that with the current tech, we could comfortably handle 20 MB blocks, but too much bigger than that could lead to problems. I know eCash is nowhere near the 20MB limit yet, but what are some of the bottlenecks that would need to be solved to get us from 20MB to let’s say 100MB blocks?
  20. In an old Coinspice interview, you said at the time that BCH was not seen as a serious alternative because it was poorly maintained due to poor funding, was in a state of constant revolution, had been complacent with scams, and some of its leaders had alienated a good portion of the crypto space. I would say eCash doesn’t seem to suffer from any of those issues as the code is well-maintained, the community doesn’t waste time arguing or bickering, and has never associated with scammers, so what do you think is preventing eCash from attracting wider interest from the crypto space?
  21. I know that you are currently not working on eCash full time, do you see yourself ever coming back to work on it full time in the future?
  22. Satoshi famously left the Bitcoin project by saying he had moved on to other things, what would cause you to consider moving on from the eCash project?
  23. One of your sayings is you’ve got to plan for success. Let’s say the price of XEC were to suddenly 10x, or even 100x, how would you want the project to use those resources?
  24. Anything you want to say to the eCash community, or to your team at Bitcoin ABC? What do you think XEC supporters can do to try and help it succeed?

Bonus questions

  1. Any guess as to the address that’s accumulated over 650B XEC over the last 6 months across more than 1000 transactions?
  2. What do you think of this whole removing the op code limit debate that’s currently going on in Bitcoin?
  3. As a dad, given the rapid development of AI, any plans for what you’re going to encourage your kids to learn or do to prepare them for the future?

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