S17 E19: Deadalnix (Amaury Séchet) on Forking Bitcoin & Ecash

Lively post‑mortem on the block‑size wars, forks, and technical tradeoffs — from CLTV and Schnorr to Avalanche‑backed eCash — practical lessons for scaling and governance.

Key Takeaways

The block-size wars collapsed from coordination failures, politics, and activation design, spawning multiple forks (BCH, BSV, eCash) and long-term ecosystem fragmentation.
Consensus changes face game-theory barriers: soft forks are easier but can block hard forks; miners avoid doubt, so activation needs clear incentives and coordination.
Practical protocol upgrades—CLTV/CSV, SegWit, Schnorr, CTOR, OP_CHECKDATASIG—fixed malleability, enabled time-locked contracts, multisig, and improved scalability and hardware-wallet safety.
eCash uses Avalanche for two-second finality, Cache Fusion for mixing, and added scripting/opcodes and 32MB blocks to enable faster, post-consensus upgrades without hard forks.
Privacy improvements (Cache Fusion, coinjoin approaches) trade auditability for fungibility; Monero-style techniques scale poorly — designers must separate auditable and obfuscated components.
Prepare for cryptographic risk without panic: hash-based and lattice signatures offer quantum resistance but dramatically increase transaction sizes; plan protocol and block-size tradeoffs now.
Blockspace scarcity drives custodialization: ETFs, custodial Lightning, and large holders centralize custody; scaling choices will shape whether Bitcoin remains permissionless or becomes reserve-oriented.

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