Imagine you meet someone new, get to know them, and quickly fall in love. Everything’s exciting at first. You feel your whole perspective on life is beginning to change, your eyes open to new possibilities. Even after the initial excitement wears off you still see a future with this person. You think they have everything you’re looking for, and more importantly, the two of you share the same goals. Then about six months into the relationship you begin to see some flaws you didn’t notice before. But you remain undeterred because you’re already all in. You’ve seen the amazing future you can have together and you can’t imagine it any other way. And so you wait, and the years pass. There are plenty of ups and downs along the way, but mostly downs. Despite this you lend your support throughout it all with the hope that eventually it will have been worth it. You see yourself getting married, having beautiful children, and building a beautiful home together, and all you’re waiting for is the person to say yes, Avalanche is ready =)
Maybe this sounds a bit overly dramatic to you, but the truth is I don’t think I’m being dramatic enough. What I do know is yesterday’s announcement that Avalanche will go live on September 14 is something I’ve been waiting for for more than four years. That’s over fifteen hundred days.
I noticed a lot of people on Twitter have been asking what the launch of Avalanche means for eCash. In the future I’ll write an article about what it means, technically, but for now, I thought I’d write about what it means for me, personally.
I see the launch of Avalanche as validation, validation of Bitcoin ABC’s proof of work. But that doesn’t mean that their work is over, because this isn’t an ending, it’s a beginning.
I don’t think enough people realize the difficulty of what Bitcoin ABC has accomplished. In 2009, Satoshi released the first Bitcoin client and introduced us to the Nakamoto consensus mechanism. Then in 2018, an anonymous group named Team Rocket released the Avalanche white paper. But it’s going to be Bitcoin ABC who found a way to combine these two mechanisms to make something greater than the sum of its parts.
Most of us probably can’t fathom the amount of technical work that went into making this happen. All the details that needed to be ironed out, the attack vectors that had to be considered, and the countless decisions that had to be made in finally solving post-consensus. The engineers of Bitcoin ABC also had to build new infrastructure, and tooling, not to mention the countless lines of C++ that had to be written. And that’s before getting into all the drama and the politics that had to be overcome in order for this fork to even survive.
That’s why what this Avalanche launch means to me more than anything is that the eCash project is alive and well, and that finally, real technical progress is being made since the days of Satoshi.
But like I said, this is only the beginning. There are many more challenges to overcome, more work to be accomplished, and more code to be written. Where we are now in the timeline is we’ve just qualified for the competition, eCash is at the starting blocks, and the race for our freedom is about to begin.