Behind the paywall you will find both an audio recording of the episode as well as a full transcript for your reading pleasure.

One thing I’ve always found fascinating in crypto is what happened back in 2020 when nearly all of the “Bitcoin Cash community” decided to part ways with Amaury and Bitcoin ABC. If you don’t know, Bitcoin ABC, led by Amaury Sechet, was the team that created Bitcoin Cash, and it was their software that was being run by pretty much all the BCH miners and exchanges. 

I think the reason I found this so fascinating was because before the BCH/XEC split, we saw ourselves as being part of the same community. These were people with whom I’d been interacting with online for years, people who’d graciously shared their knowledge with me, who I believed shared the same goals and values as me, and yet somehow they saw the situation that was unfolding then so differently from me.

So I’ve decided I’m going to split this into two separate episodes. In this first episode, I’m going to talk about how I ended up supporting Amaury and Bitcoin ABC, like a retelling of the events that led me here, and part 2 will be more like a list of the reasons why I thought investing in Amaury and Bitcoin ABC was a better idea than leaving my money in BCH.

To tell this properly, I’m going to start us off in early 2019. It was about a year and a half after the block size wars had culminated in the BCH fork, and a couple of months after the hash wars had led to the BSV fork.

If you weren’t around back then, all you need to know is that the entire crypto market was pretty much rekt. I remember I was in a state of shock myself after experiencing the euphoria of BCH topping out at $4000 a coin when the Coinbase listing was announced, and crashing all the way down to $75 a coin only a year later.

I’d lost so much money betting on BCH that I was literally questioning my life choices. But somehow I didn’t give up. I dumped my forked BSV to buy more BCH. And as the price started to recover, I remember thinking to myself, at least now that we’ve gotten rid of the crazy bsv folks, we can finally stop arguing and focus on building.

Boy was I wrong. 

The bear market revealed a new problem, which would lead to more problems, but it all started with the lack of funding. When the price of BCH was in the thousands there was plenty of money to go around. But with the price of BCH sitting in the low triple digits, after having recovered from briefly being in the double digits, money in the BCH ecosystem had become a scarce resource.

So I believe it was around this time that Amaury started raising some alarm bells that they needed funding or the project would be in trouble. The message was loud and clear: Bitcoin ABC needed money to continue working on the project. But I guess nobody wanted to hear this, myself included.

From what I remember, I didn’t know too much about Amaury back then. I must have known he was the founder of Bitcoin ABC, but I didn’t really know what that meant. First of all, there were like five or six different Bitcoin Cash clients besides Bitcoin ABC, and at the time I didn’t think much of cryptocurrency founders to begin with other than Satoshi. The other founders I knew of like Charlie Lee, Charles Hoskinson, Justin Sun, Dan Larimer, all of them seemed more like charlatans than visionaries. 

Maybe I saw Amaury the same way, like he was just another grifter trying to cash in. 

I also want to mention that at the time, my opinion was heavily influenced by the people I was interacting with within the BCH community then. Basically, I was like a junior member of the peanut gallery who loved to talk about BCH without actually contributing anything that was really useful.

At one point, a more senior member of the peanut gallery even DMed me and said they were working behind the scenes to find someone to replace Amaury. It’s funny to think about it now, but I remember being happy to hear this. I was like great, I hope you guys find someone who’s a better leader. I was so clueless. 

The reason I’m saying all this is to show that I wasn’t always a fan of Amaury’s. I wanted him to be more encouraging and more positive, which if you think about it is more like a cheerleader than an actual leader. I wasn’t smart enough to realize that a better cheerleader wasn’t going to solve any of the problems facing BCH.

So how did I end up changing my mind about him?

I’ve shared this story before, but I’ll share it again because I appreciate the irony of it. So back in 2019 as Amaury was trying to warn everyone about the lack of funding, the community wasn’t having it. They thought he was just being his usual negative self, and I guess I was getting fed up with it as well. Maybe I was angry that I’d lost a bunch of money, and thought Amaury was just being selfish, or just looking to line his own pockets.

Most of the conversation was happening in the Coinspice Telegram channel, which was a private channel with maybe a couple hundred BCH community members in it at the time. I can’t remember exactly what led to this, but I eventually wrote this to Amaury in the channel for everyone to see: “So ur holding the network hostage, gotcha.”

To which he replied with two words, “Fuck you.”

I’d never seen Amaury say that to anyone before. I’ve actually never seen him say that to anyone since, and I remember as soon as I read his response it stung me a bit. It made me not just reconsider what I wrote, but it gave me pause and led me to do some thinking.

I guess it kind of woke me up and instead of just going along with the crowd, I started to actually think for myself. His reaction made me wonder why he’d become so angry, and I thought perhaps it was because I was accusing him of something that he wasn’t.

In other words, he wasn’t doing this to hold the network hostage, he was doing it because he wanted to keep the project alive, a project that he had started, that he had put himself out on a limb for, and devoted years of his life to, because it was something he believed could change the world.

Meanwhile, here I was playing it safe with my corporate job while treating BCH as not even a hobby, but more like some kind of social club while hoping it might make me rich one day. 

In case you didn’t know, prior to working on BCH full time, Amaury had been a software engineer at Facebook for four years. He could have probably gotten a job anywhere, but he’d gone all in on BCH. And it wasn’t just him. People had followed him, decided to work with him to help fulfill this vision to scale Bitcoin, and all he wanted was enough funding to keep that dream alive.

But instead all he got was people like me accusing him of holding the network hostage, like he was the kind of person who would be willing to destroy his own creation and hurt all those people who had trusted him, just so he could get paid.

If Amaury had never told me to fuck off, who knows if I would have ever woken up, but that’s why I find it so ironic. That the one person I’ve ever seen him cuss out, ended up becoming one of his biggest supporters.

Like I said, it’s been a while so I don’t remember all the details, but I want to say that after that moment, I started paying closer attention to what Amaury had to say. Instead of only wanting to see the negative, I listened to hear the meaning behind his words and started to realize he made a lot of good points.

Like the fact that while there were half a dozen BCH node implementations in addition to Bitcoin ABC, the fact was none of the miners and exchanges ran anything but ABC’s code. The reason being the other node implementations were less reliable as they were run by hobby devs. Bitcoin ABC was run by professionals.

This might also explain why those other teams didn’t appreciate hearing Amaury complain about funding since none of them were funded either. Why should he get paid when they weren’t.

Don’t get me wrong. I think it’s great to have people volunteer for a project and help out in whatever way they can, but if you want to be taken seriously, especially if you’re building what’s supposed to become a new digital reserve currency, you need professionals, people who are reliable and dependable, who are paid to work on the project full time, not just on and off when time permits, which is kind of what you see in a lot of other projects.

This is why funding was so important to Amaury. In order to attract talent, in order to attract more than just those people willing to work for free, you need to be able to show you’re going to still be solvent for the next few years, not just the next few months.

While it might sound heroic to have people come together and build open source software project through nothing but sheer grit and determination, working on it in their free time, it’s just not realistic. To be a professional project, you need as many talented people as you can get, enough people with knowledge about the codebase so if something ever goes wrong, there’s always someone who is awake and knows how to fix it.

As we approached the Summer of 2019, it felt like the BCH community was finally beginning to hear Amaury’s message. In June, Roger Ver and his company Bitcoin.com announced they were going to host a fundraiser to try and help the situation. I remember being excited when I first heard the news. This was great, we might finally get a solution to the funding problem, I thought, but as I was about to learn, nothing is ever as it seems when it comes to Roger.

First of all, the fundraiser didn’t raise nearly enough, especially since Bitcoin ABC had to share the funds with all the hobby developers I’ve been referring to, including the team at Bitcoin Unlimited, which made no sense at all considering they were still sitting on something like 1000 BTC that had been donated to them back in 2016.

I don’t remember the exact number, but I want to say Bitcoin ABC received somewhere in the neighborhood of $300K, which I know may sound like a lot to some of you, but the truth is it’s barely enough to pay for one decent engineer for one year, let alone an entire team.

The fact that Roger celebrated this as some big win for the community was bad enough, but when he tried to act like the funds that had been donated by members of the community like myself, were actually donated from his own wallet, it was such a shameless thing to do I couldn’t believe it. I even called him out on it only to have him double down on his claim. 

Anyway, this might have been when I started to see that not only had I misjudged Amaury, I’d also misjudged Roger.

Now I don’t want this to sound like I’m going to turn this into a bash Roger session, but considering Roger was kind of the ring leader of the anti-Amaury crowd, I feel like it’s necessary I talk about him at least a little. For the record, I don’t agree with what the US government is doing to Roger today. I think taxation is theft, so whatever he’s being accused of, I don’t think he deserves to go to jail for it, let alone 109 years at that, but that doesn’t excuse him for acting like a big weasel during his BCH days.

So the only thing I knew about Roger when I first got into Bitcoin was that he was this OG whale who found out about Bitcoin early, went all in, and made a boatload of money. During the days of the flippening rumors, Roger’s name would always come up about how he had hundreds of thousands of Bitcoin and that he could use them to dump BTC and pump BCH. In other words, was one of us, a big blocker.

Then in March 2018, there was this Bitcoin Cash conference held in Tokyo called the Satoshi’s Vision Conference. Amaury spoke there, as did Antony Zegers, among many others, but Roger was the keynote speaker so I remember being really excited to hear what he had to say. 

I remember watching the stream from my living room on the other side of the planet as Roger got up on stage to deliver his presentation. But ten minutes in he revealed that all his slides were just taken from a blog post written by Brian Armstrong of Coinbase. I couldn’t help but be disappointed. Not that there was anything wrong with what he was presenting, but the fact that he was supposed to be a key leader of BCH and he couldn’t even come up with his own presentation. It was my first real glimpse into the kind of guy Roger was.

Instead of putting in the work to come up with his own ideas, he took the easy way out by using someone else’s ideas and presenting them, and taking the easy way out seems to be a kind of a theme with Roger. Another presenter at that conference was none other than Craig Wright, faketoshi himself, and my understanding is that it was Roger who pushed to get him a speaking slot, presumably because he thought Craig was Satoshi, and if he was, that meant he held over 1M BTC, and it would have also been the easiest way for Bitcoin Cash to flip Bitcoin.

Okay so now let’s go back to 2019. Amaury’s complaints were heard, Roger hosts a fundraiser, which in his mind is a great success and Amaury and Bitcoin ABC ought to be grateful, but to them still doesn’t come close to solving the long-term problem. 

So there’s all this tension between Roger and Amaury, and in the wake of all this is when the Bitcoin Cash City Conference convenes in Townsville Australia in September of that year.

I bring this up because this is where Amaury gave one of my all time favorite talks by him called Bitcoin Cash’s Culture. I remember watching it in my kitchen and being so impressed that I immediately started transcribing the whole thing for people to be able to read it.

I want to say it was the first time I fully appreciated how smart Amaury was, because he laid out the reasons why BCH was failing, what we needed do to turn things around, while introducing these concepts I’d never even heard of before that helped make it all make sense. Concepts like technical decay, Schelling points, commitment strategies, and so on.

But on top of finding him extremely knowledgeable, he also came across as gracious and funny. Recently Vlad Costea interviewed the current CEO of Bitcoin.com, Corbin Fraser, and he said pretty much the same thing when the two of them were discussing Amaury. That he found it hard to believe that the guy he had interviewed a few months ago on his show was the same person the BCH community thought was so toxic.

In any case, despite his great talk in Australia, the funding problem remained, and it didn’t help that the biggest whale in BCH, who couldn’t attend that conference by the way, and the lead developer of BCH, weren’t exactly seeing eye to eye.

The situation only got worse when Roger accused Bitcoin ABC of “dragging their feet” because they wouldn’t prioritize a feature that he really wanted for his gambling site. Never mind that ABC had a roadmap they were following, and that this feature was of no real benefit to anyone but Roger at the time.

While some may think Amaury could have handled the situation better, what I remember is him publishing an article called “Clearing the way for cooperation” in which he even apologized to Roger for any mistakes he may have made and tried to make amends for the benefit of BCH.

But Roger didn’t seem interested in diplomacy. Maybe because in his own words, developers needed to be put on a tight leash rather than given a universal basic income.

Amaury’s article olive branch of an article was published on January 13, 2020, and then 9 days later, everything changed when the CEO of one of the biggest BTC and BCH mining pools published a Medium article titled “Infrastructure Funding Plan for Bitcoin Cash”

In it he proposed using a portion of the block reward to fund developers. The initial plan was to direct 12.5% of the block reward for a 6-month period in order to raise about $6M. He pointed out how the best part was that it would be paid for by the BTC miners due to the way sha256 mining worked, and the article was signed by Jiang Zhuoer of BTC.TOP, Haipo Yang of Coinex and ViaBTC, Jihan Wu of Bitmain and Antpool, and Roger Ver of Bitcoin.com.

This was a huge deal. Everybody in the community was talking about it. It was hilarious because the original version mentioned something about let’s not debate this and just give it a try, and then of course the BCH community did nothing but debate it over the next several weeks and months.

In the beginning, the community seemed to be pretty evenly split on the proposal. Roger even put out a video explaining how smart it was to make the Bitcoin Core miners pay for Bitcoin Cash’s development. But as soon as the peanut gallery started to revolt, he folded like a piece of paper. He claimed the proposal had been made without his consultation, that he had never even agreed to put his name on it, even after the fact that he’d made multiple videos touting the IFP as a good thing.

Once Roger folded, a lot of other people folded as well. Those who had originally been in favor quickly flipped their positions. In a way, it was like Avalanche consensus in real life as a majority eventually took over and it was decided that the BCH community wasn’t interested in pursuing the IFP.

There were too many questions and not enough answers, they said, like who controlled the funds, how would they decide who got funded, and so on, and the IFP was dead on arrival.

Meanwhile, the price of BCH was still stagnant, and ABC still needed funding.

They went back to the drawing board and did what the community suggested, which was to put together a business plan and lay out exactly how much money they needed, what they needed the money for, timelines on deliverables, etc.

In the end, it came to about $3M that they were asking for. Thanks to one anonymous donor, I’ve always assumed it was Jihan Wu of Bitmain, ABC managed to raise about $1.5M, or about half of the amount. It’s funny if you think about it, whether it was Jihan or someone else, whoever it was never sought to take credit for their donation, while you had Roger trying to take credit for money he hadn’t even donated.

Anyway Bitcoin ABC still needed about another $1.5M and this was when the community came up with the idea of the flipstarter. Basically it was like kickstarter but using BCH. People could commit a certain amount for a funding proposal, and if it reached a certain threshold, the funds would get donated, and if it didn’t meet the threshold, the funds would get returned. 

I think there were anywhere from 5 to 10 flipstarters at the time. One for BCHD, one for BCHN, Bitcoin Verde, and some others. It was basically all the hobby devs asking for money to fund their hobby nodes.

In the end, literally every team that asked for funding got funded except for Amaury and Bitcoin ABC. I’m talking millions of dollars of BCH donated by various BCH whales to every team other than the one that had not only put BCH on the map but had thanklessly maintained the network for the first three years of its existence.

ABC had requested $1.5M, and the community basically just gave them the middle finger. It was like ABC had committed an unforgivable sin for even thinking they might be entitled to get paid out of the block reward and were no longer welcome.

So what did they do? Having been left with no choice, they decided they were going to implement their own version of the IFP whether people liked it or not. What this meant was that after the November 15, 2020 upgrade, any miners using Bitcoin ABC’s software would have to direct 8% of the block reward to an address that would be used to pay for development, with half of the money going to ABC for protocol development, and half going to a council that would use the funds to pay for other infrastructure projects.

People lost it. Or should I say, the Bcashers lost it.

They signed petitions and called ABC’s plan a forced tax, while ignoring the fact that mining, holding, or buying XEC was entirely voluntary. They compared it to extortion, and people like myself who supported ABC and their plan were kicked out of community channels, channels I’d participated in for years, which gives you a glimpse into why I say they suffered from Amaury derangement syndrome.

Remember that ABC had done nothing but provide value since the beginning of BCH. They were the ones who had to get up in the middle of the night if something wasn’t working. They were the ones who had to guide us through the hash war even though it was Roger who platformed Craig and created the mess in the first place. Now they were seen as nothing more than a bunch of greedy developers looking to collect a paycheck.

Never mind the fact that for years Amaury had been publicly explaining exactly what he’s been trying to build, and how they could scale Bitcoin. Never mind that he and the other engineers could easily go find higher paying jobs elsewhere if they wanted.

I remember when the creator of the Cashtab wallet, Joey King left Bitcoin.com to join Amaury and ABC, Roger said it was because he was better at software than he was at business. When Joannes Vermorel, founder of an actually successful logistics business in France, gave an entire presentation explaining why ABC represented greater than 90% of the value of BCH, no one listened. They even tried to accuse me of getting paid to write articles in support of ABC.

It was truly bizarre.

I admit I wanted ABC to win because I saw them as the good guys in this story. They represented the honest, hard working characters in the movie while the rest of the community acted like the mob with their pitch forks out looking for blood.

But while I supported ABC because I thought they were the good guys, rooting for someone isn’t the same as investing in someone. I wouldn’t invest in someone because I think they’re a good person, I invest in them because I think they will succeed.

After the presentation that Amaury gave in Townsville, I must have gone back and watched as many of his old interviews and presentations that I could find. His explanations of how money evolved and why it was so foundationally important to the rise and fall of civilizations made me see how passionate he was about Bitcoin. To top it all off, Amaury was saying all this before it was made popular by people like Ray Dalio who wrote an entire book on the subject but disappointingly failed to see how crypto might solve the problem once and for all.

It must have been at least five years ago when Amaury was warning us about how we were suddenly going from a society that suffered from information scarcity to information overload and all the problems that would cause. Now with the rise of ai, we’re seeing exactly what he warned about beginning to unfold.

I’m not here to tell you Amaury is the second coming of Satoshi. I don’t think he’s perfect, and neither is Bitcoin ABC. But I do think their team and their roadmap represents our best chance of fulfilling the original vision of Bitcoin. 

I support Bitcoin ABC because I see them as honest and hard-working, because they share the same beliefs as me and value things like individual freedom and free markets, but if that was all it was, I wouldn’t be sitting here recording this podcast, or have a huge portion of my net worth tied to XEC.

For me to do that, I’m going to need a whole lot more, but that will have to wait for part 2 of this series where I will go over the qualities I saw in ABC that made me choose to put my money in their fork as well as go over some of the aftermath of the BCH/XEC split.

Until the next time, thank you for listening to another episode of the ProofOfWriting.com podcast.

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