CHIP-2025-03 Faster Blocks for Bitcoin Cash

That is an interesting, but false claim. I detect the coin’s age using some market characteristics and it is not true that the other changes did not influence the market’s perceived age of BCH.

“detect”. You yourself attribute market moves to your arbitrary concept of age. Other market participants have their own reasons for wanting to buy or sell, and I doubt they consider your “age” at all.

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Nonsense. I do not attribute market moves to “concept of age”. Other market participants have got their own reasons for wanting to buy or sell. Of course they do not consider “my concept of age”, they simply express their “sentiment” towards BCH in their buy/sell orders.

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What’s this supposed to mean then:

How would the market even perceive your “detected” age if nobody else uses this arbitrary method of detecting age?

I’ve had some arguments about 2009 vs 2017 as BCH’s birth year, but I haven’t seen anyone thinking that any later events reset people’s perception of age.

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Nonsense.

  • Everybody perceives some BTC age. I just average the effects on the market based on the available data.
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Actually, BCH is (one of) the market leaders. E.g. BTC is not a competition, virtually everybody here knows why. USDT is not a competition any more than USD is. Etc…

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Literally all of BTC, USD & USDT are BCH’s competition. All crypto & fiat currencies (in fact, all objects literal and figurative in existence) are competing to be the most accepted currency.

So we need to be as good as we can in that category, because there’s so much competition.

Funny. OK, a proof:

  • BTC has resigned on the media of exchange function. So, no, it is not a competition of BCH in the media of exchange competition.

  • USD is a competition, actually the strongest one.

  • USDT is not a competition, since by definition, it cannot survive USD’s defeat.

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Actually, the claim about economical benefits of cutting the block times is easy to falsify: It suffices to take examples of coins that have cutted their block times and check how it influenced their market capitalization compared to average coins not doing that.

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“X is responsible for price move” is not a falsifiable claim, we don’t have multiverses in which we can examine how just changing the blocktime and keeping everything else equal would play out. Everything else is not equal. How do you know it’s not something else responsible for mcap of those other coins?

Zcash had a 2 year bull run immediatelly following faster blocks activation. Can I prove that faster blocks were the sole cause? I can’t. Can you prove they didn’t contribute? You can’t.

Other coins are mentioned in the CHIP not to prove blocktime-mcap relationship but to falsify the claim raised by critics that changing the block time will break exchange & wallet support etc.

Reducing block time will improve UX for all BCH users, regardless of what the price does.

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Indeed.

Seems like we need a new name, perhaps “Price thinking” for this style of argumentation. As we gain prominence, we’ll get more BTC migrants bringing their “Price is an unqualified complete argument” ideas. Price is downstream of value delivered by the ecosystem, albeit it does loop on itself through liquidity increases & marketing hype (rising price is obviously good). But this subtlety escapes many and emerges in this simplistic price-based analysis.

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Although in my own personal opinion 1 minute blocks will help price, I think it is important that we refrain from any price arguments in regards to this CHIP.

Please keep it to technical arguments. No one actually knows or can know the effect on price.

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Confirmation time is so important that ETH L2s are trying to find ways to innovate from a 2 second block time down to a 0.25 second block time!!

https://x.com/Optimism/status/1972740279934546291

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We’ve integrated Flashblocks, built by the team at Flashbots, reducing effective block times from 2 seconds to 250 milliseconds.

So I assume these “FlashBlocks” would be something like Infrastructure Blocks, but on ETH? Also with PoS instead of PoW?

Did I get it right?

PoW L1 will always be limited by practicalities like orphan rate and non-pruneable overheads.
Still, if we have a reliable L1 then us too can experiment with some PoS L2 (stake BCH to some L1 contract to become validator on L2) for high frequency trading or bespoke L2 for a retail payment solution.
L2s have their own risks and trade-offs, and our L1 needs to be good enough to keep enough volume on L1, because our security and future depends on L1 volume. That’s why we still need 1-minute blocks even if we could get 0.25-second blocks on an L2.

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This brings to mind the very insightful story of the technical guy that did marketing, he explained all that was awesome about his product and, as he is technical, noticed the problems in his explaining of how awesome the product is. He added that in the next release those issues will be fixed, however. It could be easy to overlook the fact that the product was indeed by far the best on the market.
The predictable result was that the people didn’t buy the product. Only very few got sold because the would-be customers ended up waiting for the next release. The end result is that the company went bankrupt.

The story illustrates that product quality and market share are not at all the same thing.
Being the best doesn’t lead you to be ‘market leader’. And vice-versa.

This is all a long explanation of how Jeremy is utterly wrong about the above quoted conclusion. In a very dangerous and destructive way!

The way to get Bitcoin Cash marketshare to increase is based on first determining what your market is (how do you measure market share). Do you want to optimize for high price, or for lots of people using it as cash?

Most important step here is to realize that Bitcoin Cash is already actually technically superior over the vast majority of its competition. Which, as soon as you accept that, leads to the obvious question: but why are we not leading in those measurements we set ourselves as goal? In other words, why are we not market leaders?

This is when you really can get stuff moving, realizing that the product as is (the coin, the consensus rules, the community) is healthy and strong.
Then we can move to try to sell it to real people. Find out what needs work. Block waiting time is obviousy an annoyance, but not having repeat payments is a bigger one. Not having a 1000 different features that the banking system offers companies and users today are really quite a big more important to the sales-pitch than sometimes needing to wait.

Because at the end of the day, the competition is what people use already. Which is the banking system using fiat. Which is the products the banks and card companies ship. The apple pay / google pay / 𝕏 pay. What do they have which the bitcoin cash experience lacks? Can that work be done in services and wallets? Or does it REALLY need to be the coin that is changing?

The focus on “changing the coin” is misguided. The product is easily better than most (all) of the competition. If you don’t believe that, what on earth are you doing here?
If you DO believe that, go out and sell it. Go out and improve the wallets and the services to be able to do what people expect from a financial system.

Stop trying to push technical debt into the core of the coin because you think that helps you sell it easier. That’s just lazy.


ps. as an aside, the term “market leader” derives it’s name from the leader being the first. Not the most successful. The market leader is very often the first to market and gains the most as a result. Dictating the market as a whole.
This also answers why market leaders are actually quite often NOT the technical best. Are often not the ones with the most features.
This further illustrating the point in bold at the top of my post.

Here is take in another context; first mover is extremely strong way to get a big market share. While often actually being the weakest technically.

This ties back to the bad take that in order for BCH to rise in price, it needs to technically be improved. This bad take is extremely damaging to our self-confidence, rating our technical-capabilities based on market value is not a good idea at all!

Lets make the rest of the world aware of what we already can do with the bitcoin cash chain. :heart:

Why not do both?

When I came back into BCH the ABLA upgrade had just happened and I was super excited to see all the technical advancements that happened while I was not paying attention to BCH.

People will slowly trickle in, when they do show up it is a great strategy to have all the technicals in place so they can fully switch to BCH as it will be capable of everything, and doing it well.

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Protocol upgrades are not paid by the people that decide they want to have them. They cost “us” all. They are a one time tax that companies have actuall stated are a reason for them to not support Bitcoin Cash.

The cost is mostly invisible to the many people discussing it on this forum, as they are not business owners, they are not node maintainers or infrastructure maintainers. The many people here discussing things like ‘faster blocks’ are essentially arguing for free cool stuff that “somehow” happens with nothing more than them saying loudly that they want it.

But changes are not free to many others. Those maintainers, devops, designers, testers and many others need to put time and effort in it while getting mostly nothing in return.

And we are doing that, there are quite a lot of upgrades planned for 2026. Some more planned for after.

The cost/benefit of such changes is something that needs balance.

Heads up that Tom is desperately trolling for attention. He’s not going to make any logical arguments, he just wants someone to reply. He’ll say whatever he can to try and bait someone into asking him about it. He wants it so badly he was replying to his own posts to try snag someone & unfortunately you bit.

Just be aware of this pattern for future interactions.

At this time there’s no indications mods will put a stop to it, but it seems mostly everyone has learnt to avoid it regardless.

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