In less than twenty-four hours, the e.cash domain will officially go live, and honestly, I’m finding it hard to find the right words to properly mark the occasion. It’s as if anything I write will be disappointing, but I guess that’s to be expected considering how long I’ve waited for this moment.
It’s been exactly 3 years and 11 months since Bitcoin ABC launched the Bitcoin Cash network back on August 1, 2017, which also happens to be only a couple weeks after I bought my very first coins. As a result of that timing, I stumbled upon the BCH project just as it was starting, and it feels like I’ve been on a four-year long journey ever since.
Now I like to think this phase of the journey is finally coming to an end, and I hope to one day look back and think of July 1, 2021 as a graduation day of sorts.
If I take a moment to think about everything that’s transpired during that time, in many ways it does remind me a lot of college. A lot of silliness and bad decisions combined with a great deal of learning and valuable experiences.
Maybe a good way of looking at this launch is like a big graduation party, as a way to mark the end of one phase and the beginning of a new one. But just as with college graduation, it doesn’t mean that the work is finished, only that it’s time to go from being a student to becoming a professional. And from what I’ve seen so far, Bitcoin ABC appears to be more than ready.
For me, the entire rollout of this launch has demonstrated the seriousness of their intent. Everything from the logo (which is absolutely beautiful in my humble opinion), to the announcements being released by the exchanges, not to mention the bold decision to redenominate the base unit, all point to the fact that Bitcoin ABC is done playing games. Their leadership is setting the tone for the eCash project and creating a Schelling point for their supporters to rally behind.
But of course there’s still a ton of work left to do, and I’m sure they would be the first to tell you that this is when the real work begins.
In the short term, what I hope for the future of eCash is that this new rebrand will help more and more people around the world discover this project exists and what it’s all about. I hope the value of eCash grows so that the project can attract even more talented individuals who recognize its potential and feel compelled to contribute to the project in a meaningful way.
In the medium term, I want to finally see the completion of the Avalanche consensus layer making eCash one of the most secure blockchains in the world by leveraging both Proof of Work and Proof of Stake to differentiate it from all the other Bitcoin variants. This will mean the eCash network will finally be able to enable secure instant confirmations and become virtually impervious to 51% attacks. Who says no to that?
But Avalanche is only the beginning. I want to see fractional satoshis, and Merklix trees, and everything else listed here: https://ecash.coin.dance/development.
I want the eCash network to be the fastest payment network that’s ever existed and scale to heights that were never thought possible. I hope to see more forward-thinking ideas like the introduction of staking rewards, which will incentivize people to participate in the network and help it become sufficiently decentralized and censorship resistant.
I want to see the formation of the Global Network Council and watch as it evolves to become an organization that works for the greater good. I want to see professional grade wallets, indexers, and developer kits, not just hacky infrastructure put together by hobby developers working for donations. I want to see a robust ecosystem that makes it easy to onboard new users and entrepreneurs, leading to a proliferation of new use cases and profit-seeking companies that can one day lead the next technological revolution.
In a nutshell, I want to see everything that I imagined when I made my first 0-conf transaction all those years ago. I want to see the future that I envisioned when that lightbulb first turned on inside my brain and I realized what a revolutionary discovery Bitcoin truly was. Not as digital gold, but as electronic cash.
I can’t see the future, obviously. This project’s mission to create the most advanced form of money the world has ever seen is as ambitious as it gets. But I believe in its chances for success because I believe in the people who are busy laying the groundwork for its future as well as the incentives that are now properly in place to give it the best chance for success.
While eCash has plenty of competition, what I think makes it unique from the thousands of other cryptocurrencies out there is its lineage. This isn’t a project that was thought up on a whim or created to be a pump and dump. The eCash network goes all the way back to the original genesis block mined by Satoshi Nakamoto and also shares the same total supply. In my view eCash is as legitimate as it gets because no shortcuts have been taken. Everything Bitcoin ABC has done has been earned. Miners and holders can always leave and rejoin the network at will and always have the freedom to act in their own best interest. Those who have chosen to follow Bitcoin ABC like myself do so voluntarily because good ideas don’t require force.
I will choose to be up bright and early tomorrow morning because I want to witness what could be a historic moment in Bitcoin, and I want to be able to say I was there from the very beginning as Bitcoin ABC embarks on its quest to redefine the meaning of wealth.