Here’s what Joey King, the lead developer of the Cashtab web wallet, had to say about compounding interest returns during our conversation back in January:
“The reason Cashtab is quite good today and wasn’t quite good before is because it’s had relentless attention for years. It’s been on the same app, the same codebase, the same ultimate problem we’re trying to solve: good user experience for transactions on a web-based cash currency. And you start getting compound interest returns when you work on a problem in that way, when you have a lot of focus, when it’s over years and you’re making the same thing better all the time. Whereas even if you are quite a good developer or quite a good problem solver, if you’re always trying to solve a thousand different problems, every problem doesn’t get a lot of attention and you don’t get the benefits of that extended focus. So we’re starting to see this now, and not just on Cashtab but with the rest of the tool suite and the software that Bitcoin ABC puts out. We’ve had years of really relentless building, and focused attention, all well tested, and every test that’s added is just another baton in the mountain that we’re climbing. And now that we have so many tests, and so much stuff that does work, and so many lessons learned in empirical history, we’re building on a much more elevated platform. We have better tools, we have faster tech, and we have a better understanding. And development now, even though we’ve been building for years, development keeps getting faster, and the amount of features we’re able to add keeps getting faster, even with the same resources, so you get this compound interest return by being able to focus and manage the stuff professionally.”
If you’re unfamiliar with the concept, compounding interest is when interest earned is added to your principal, so future interest is calculated on the new total. This leads to exponential growth over time because of the compounding effect you get earning interest on both the initial principal and the accumulated interest from previous periods.
For example, let’s say you start with $100 and earn 10% annually. In the below table you can see how much money you’d have after 1, 2, 4, 8, and 16 years of compounding interest versus non-compounding (simple) interest:
Notice how the difference is hardly noticeable after the first four years but becomes impossible not to notice by year 16. This is the effect of compounding.
It is exactly what Bitcoin ABC has been doing since the eCash project started, and it is becoming increasingly difficult to ignore the results of all their hard work today. Whether it’s the rich feature set of the Cashtab wallet, the rise of the new XECx token, or the recent launch of the PayButton plugin, none of these things would exist today if the team hadn’t been continuously building over the past four years.
But there’s also a flip side to this story. When talking about projects that struggle to reach this kind of momentum in their technical development, Joey described it this way: