Fork dynamics

Eric Lombrozo

Thank you, Samson, for that great introduction and thank you for organizing this awesome event. It's great seeing everyone. A few years ago, the situation was extremely different. When Samson originally asked me to give a talk, I kind of thought a little bit about what I should talk about and I wasn't sure what's most interesting. A few years ago, it was much more clear about the set of things going on. I had something to say about those things. I guess now, I would like to broadly talk about some important areas of topics that we wouldn't usually talk about. I kept asking for a topic.

What I'm going to talk about is really what we've got ourselves into with this. People get into this space and they think we're really dumb getting into this. Bitcoin is really hard to explain to people what it is. One of the things I think is really unique is that you see people that really have higher pursuits they are going out to do, but there's basis level of human behavior. It doesn't appeal to human greed and other things like that... so in a sense we're trying to build something to improve humanity and rise above the current human condition and how people think about money, but at the same time people really want to make money.

The fork situation that we saw... when I first started working on bitcoin, I thought well this might be an interesting technology that would be a prototype for something but it would be replaced later. But then I looked into the social contract of bitcoin. When all the forks started to happen, I was initially perplexed. I could see that people want to add new things to bitcoin and make it do things it wasn't designed to do. But for me, having one killer use case is better than having it do many different things poorly. It's great to have an event like this where we can discuss more of the essence of it.

One of the things about bitcoin that is really key and really important is the idea of individual sovereignity. In most industries, people have a certain set of frameworks under which they operate and you have to expect certain protection from certain institutions. In bitcoin, there is nothing like that. It's just an acceptance of the network rules and hte network. This means we need to be more active in terms of our involvement. This has been a discovery as much about humanity in a fast forward kind of way, and I think a lot of us are learning or have forgotten because we have known it for so long, and now people have the opportunity to print their own money. There's really nothing new under the sun.

For the last few years, it has really brought to light how these social dynamics work where people propose different things and we see a lot of wild enthusiasm for these things, but I guess one can say that this space is really young and trying to think about ethics. It's a really fundamental thing. I can understand that people want to use this for purposes other than, but we need to have more compassion and better understanding of what it is or why it is that people want to do the things they want to do especially when it comes to all the-- all the people trying to create spinoffs of bitcoin.

Getting back to the fork topic, which is what I was expected to talk about I guess, a lot of people are proposing different things that could create divisions. I realize that as much as I want to focus on building better technology, it just seems like that if there was more coherence in terms of what people were talking about.... it's not really about technical, it's about priorities.

In any case, we have had such a crazy experience with the fork divisions. I had never experienced anything like this in my life. It totally blew me away. There's so many life lessons from this dispute.

Q: How did you get into Scaling Bitcoin conference?

A: Oh, the scaling bitcoin conference. Well, let's see. Pindar and Anton were working on organizing that. It was really good to see people making an effort in the community to get together and try to find the best solutions to the whole scaling problem. Some people wanted really quick growth, but this could turn cancerous.

Q: What about soft-forks and UASF?

A: Right, okay. I guess that's the topic that fits this discussion. The UASF was something, it's not a new idea. The first few forks of bitcoin were done more along the lines of UASF. It was just crazy how all these companies kind of pushed for particular changes to the network. A lot of the changes seemed to fit within a particular business model, trying to fit bitcoin to a business model rather than their business models fit to bitcoin. Soft-fork activation process in order for it to be smooth and for the network to ... . any kind of service, it really needs a process where we can see whether or not the network has for a particular change. And in the case of the UASF, people just got fed up with having to deal with this whole miner activation process because it just wasn't working the way it was meant to work. People started to interpret it as a political process, but it was never intended to be that. The time for bringing up objections was during development, not activation.

Q: What did you think when you saw the fork proposal?

A: Which fork proposal?

Q: The rollback.

A: Oh, the Binance thing? The cost of a rollback is a big part of the bitcoin security model. If the cost of a rollback is not high then I think people will want to do it. But the financial cost and political cost gets extreme very quickly, and really nobody stands to gain from doing something like that. It's a non-starter.

Q: What about Ciphrex?

A: Ciphrex is a company I started for working on key management. I wanted to work on multisig contracts and more sophisticated types of scripts and script templates. As much as it is important to protect bitcoin, if you lose your keys you lose bitcoin and it's your problem not the network's problem. But in the case of forks, it's the whole network. These days I am more focused on systemic issues for network functioning. I'm still interested in key management and Casa and things like that. There's a lot of good things happening right now. But I think that until people understand lessons baout what they are trying to accomplish this and how the system works, then it's something that--- ut that's a lot of other significant attacks that are more significant for most people.