Author: Lightning Huang Shiliang
Bitcash BCH is not only a product, but also a protocol. Stability is very important for currencies and agreements, so how do we get a stable currency, a stable agreement? Dr. Craig Wright recently proposed reverting the BitCash protocol to v0.1 and locking it. Can this achieve stability?
How to get a stable digital currency agreement — stability is developed, not designed
Chapter 1 What is Stability
For money, the definition of stability discussed in this article is simple, the most important attributes are total 21 million BCH, issue rate, homogeneity, etc. The stability of THE BCH agreement will inevitably bring about the stability of the currency, so this paper only talks about the stability of the agreement.
What is the stability of the agreement?
For a currency-based agreement like BitCash, the stability of the agreement mainly refers to the stability of its consensus rules, which is the part of the agreement that all nodes must reach. There are only two ways to change consensus rules: hard bifurcation and soft bifurcation.
First of all, from the perspective of user use, the stability of the agreement means that users and businesses do not need to update the software frequently, which is not supposed to update the software frequently. Absolutely not like Internet products, a weekly version, updated every day, brush sense of existence.
Conversely, businesses design or update their own software without fear that future changes to the protocol layer will invalidate their software.
Second, a stable protocol does not mean an immutable protocol; stable protocol evolution means that the supplementary part is fully compatible with the old part, i.e. the old part cannot be invalidated (unless there is a good reason). For example, the output of a transaction that exists now cannot be invalidated in the future, and the output of a transaction that exists now cannot be invalidated in the future.
Almost nothing is dead, including Internet protocols that are evolving, computer instruction sets like x86 are evolving, and communication protocols get a big update almost every few years. But these agreements are very stable.
The first requirement is that bitcash cannot easily initiate a hard fork, because a hard fork requires all nodes to be upgraded, which is called instability. But a soft fork? Does soft bifurcation harm stability?
Soft forks are also detrimental to stability, because rather than being compatible with the old part of a protocol supplement, the added protocol subtly keeps the old node unaware of its addition. Soft forking will degrade the meaning of a complete node, the meaning of which is to know all the rules of the network. In fact, soft forking is extremely unstable for protocols that make full nodes verifiable.
A stable bitcash protocol should: 1) make no consensus protocol changes unless there is a good reason; 2) Existing rules of consensus agreement should be retained as far as possible, unless there is a good reason to delete them; 3) To add any new rules, use hard forks; 4) Reject all soft forks to ensure that all full nodes verify all consensus rules completely.
So how do you get such a stability pact? It is clear that the current bitcash protocol is unstable, and the entire community can now easily initiate a hard fork.
Chapter 2 The larger the market value, the more stable it is
There is no doubt that bitcash is unstable today, and the most important reason is not that it is well designed at all, but that it is weak. A product with a $9 billion market cap is too small.
The higher the market value, relatively speaking, it means that more people participate in the more enterprises, precipitation in this agreement on the greater the amount of capital, the more money, the more dare not move the agreement.
The real stability does not depend on design, but on money. If you want to get a stable bitcash protocol, you have to find a way to make all aspects of the ecology throw money into it, so that no one dare to move the protocol.
The most typical is the upgrade from IPV4 to IPV6, which is superior to IPV4 in all respects. But the whole world has deposited an incalculable amount of money on IPV4. So many Internet devices and software are all built on IPV4. I don’t know how much money has been invested in IPV4.
The higher the market cap, the more cautious it will be to revise the agreement, and the more stable it will be.
Chapter 3 Decentralization guarantees stability
As far as possible, all parties shall be notified of any changes to the agreement. If the participants are large enough and decentralized enough, the agreement must be more stable.
Decentralization includes the decentralization of users, miners and developers. The meaning of decentralization can be approximated by the number of people, interests, cultural background, geographical location and so on.
The more decentralized it is, the more difficult it is to modify the agreement to organize multi-stakeholder negotiations, the more difficult it is to modify, the more stable it must be.
Decentralization will inevitably bring low development efficiency. Although stability means low development efficiency, stability itself is meaningless. Only valuable protocol stability is meaningful. There is no doubt that the current bitCash protocol does not have the conditions to remain competitive. For compatible efficiency and stability, users, miners and developers need to communicate fully. At present, the development of various coins is seriously divorced from users, and the Bitcoin ABC development team is also too far away from users. Every time a change is released, there is no sufficient communication and communication, which seriously hinders stability.
If a centralized development team determines the direction of the protocol, the potential for instability is huge. Now Dr Craig Wright has shown a strong interest in achieving the stability of the bitcash protocol by restoring it to v0.1 and then locking it down. And fell out with almost every other development team in the process. I think it’s unstable for CSW to get stability in this way, because he’s the biggest central node, he calls the shots, even if he really wants to lock in the protocol, but everyone else in the ecosystem has to worry about his mind changing. This is far, far too unstable.
Chapter 4 Free Markets Guarantee stability
Bitcoin Cash is an open source project that can be approximated as an open free market in which anyone can join and leave. You can use BitCash to start a company, buy and sell, and use any of bitCash’s technologies for your business without anyone’s authorization.
Such a free market is more able to evolve a variety of complex business models and deposit more commercial capital, which may be introduced and withdrawn from different interest groups at any time. Only the free market can be powerful enough to attract millions of people. In this context, the agreement must be more stable. One reason for the Internet’s success is that its inventors, Vint Cerf and Robert Kahn, did not patent TCP/IP. They did not treat it as private property.
In contrast to the free market, patents are a double-edged sword. We do live in a society where patents can be used as both an offense and a defense. Dr. CSW owns a large number of patents, and although he keeps claiming that he licenses them to BCH Ecology for free, promising that they are defensive patents at BCH Ecology, commercial companies that respect knowledge industries may still be worried about this. Obviously, Windows is not as stable as Linux, for that reason.
Chapter 5 Concluding Remarks
If a protocol is stable, it will be more efficient to build a business on it. It also means that the evolution of the protocol itself is inefficient, so stability itself is worthless, and only valuable protocols deserve stability.