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3 posts tagged with "CHIPs"

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· 4 min read
Jeremy

I've been super inspired by the great monthly dev blog of A Fifth Of Gaming https://www.reddit.com/r/afog/ as a method for distributing news on the project & performing some public accountability, so I'm starting to also write a quick monthly summary of what I've been involved in.

This will help me stay on track as well as serve as a bit of a news bulletin & reminder for anything my audience might have missed the first time around.

BCH Podcast​

  • Released episode 133 & filmed & released episodes 134 & 135. All available on Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@BitcoinCashPodcast/videos
  • Wrote my first monthly accountability post, you're reading it!
  • The next Podcast FundMe will be starting this month as we've delivered on our last batch
  • Plan is to have 3 Podcast episodes in December, including the regular Christmas episode & then we're done for the year!

BLISS​

  • BLISS 2025 announced! 13-15th May in Ljubljana like last year. Announcement video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l8_oZaR9A1Q
    • Upgrading from 2 days to 3 days to fit in even more BCH action
    • Targeting the same initial 100 ticket release, but capacity to raise that if event is exceedingly popular which may happen due to massive community growth
  • Ticket sale starts: Jan 15th
  • We've also got a special surprise coming for Jessica holders on Friday! Ensure you have your Jessica held self-custodially on a P2PKH address (a regular q or z address) instead of on TapSwap or elsewhere to be part of it! https://x.com/bchbliss/status/1863640447970681336
  • Team has been working behind the scenes to get everything ready. Probably not too many updates to come between now & January but then a lot will be happening

Selene​

  • After some delays for various reasons, a new release of Selene is live in November for the first time since July
  • In December work is starting on the CashTokens integration, which is a big leap forward.
  • Selene is hitting new ATHs in Daily Active Users regularly, the latest high watermark at 145 this week with over 100 users basically every day.
    • We're targeting 1 000 daily active users by end of Q1 2025
  • Work has begun on some better Selene documentation & user support
  • If you enable either Prerelease or Experimental mode (do so at your own risk and forgive us any bugs or ugly UI!) by going into the Credits page (tap the version number at the bottom of Settings) and tapping 7 times rapidly on the Selene logo at the top, you can get a look into what is coming in the future with an expanded Explore page (helping users experience everything BCH has to offer) and an Assets tab (with full coin control & visibility, soon to host CashTokens & other advanced features)

Other​

  • Appeared twice on Fiendish's new Friday Twitter Space series Fiendish & Friends! The first 3 episodes have all been excellent, highly recommended to anyone in the BCH scene, I've been particularly enjoying his different interview style to mine. Best intentions to keep episodes to a quick 1 hour are already being tested! All episodes available here: https://www.youtube.com/@fiendishcrypto
  • Also, recommended to everyone to check out Cheap Lightning's FundMe campaign - a very deserving recipient: https://fundme.cash/campaign/17
  • Got loads of traction with my favourite fresh meme creation of the month. Zero surprise this kind of thing is resonating at the moment! https://x.com/TheBCHPodcast/status/1861895373951737994
Meme

Thanks for checking in, please let me know if you enjoyed this format, been a busy month & see you in the December update (likely to be posted in January)!

· 4 min read
Jeremy

The Bitcoin Cash Podcast is adding its support & approval for CHIP-2021-05 VM Limits: Targeted Virtual Machine Limits & CHIP-2024-07 BigInt: High-Precision Arithmetic, to lock in November 15 2024 & go live May 15 2025.

The VM Limits CHIP has been long desired & heavily requested by builders in the space. As any product manager knows, with limited resources it's important to build what end users (in this case, application developers) actually need rather than what the engineers (in this case, CHIP proposers & BitcoinCashResearch regulars) feel most excited about & the demand for these VM Limit upgrades is already well established among real world use cases. In fact, we're even seeing interest from OUTSIDE the BCH space - which to my knowledge is a first for BCH development before an upgrade has hit mainnet, let alone chipnet! This is a great vindication of progress in both the relevance & quality of upgrade work, as well as the messaging & productive discussion around it.

The amount of work done on VM Limits is very impressive, producing a thorough analysis & also additional reusable tooling for testing the BCH VM. This level of rigour and engineering excellence is typical of BCH CHIPs, helping to set us apart from our competitors (particularly as the cumulative effect snowballs over time), and I feel this CHIP has continued that tradition.

In reviewing the CHIP, it was also obvious to me (as Jason had explained to me on the show) that the new limit selections contain very few "choices" - instead they are the logical result of engineering analysis for an optimal value. This is a good indicator that the work is fundamentally valid & unlikely to need revisions.

Although the Big Ints part of the process did operate slightly unusually, I am not concerned we're taking an excessive / serious risk or setting a problematic precedent in approving it for this November 2024 for the following reasons:

  1. The quality of the CHIP on its own is very high (taken together with the VM Limits references).
  2. In my own observation, I have seen overwhelming community support for a 2024 lock in (community discussion channels, Podcast listener survey, other statements of support, my own personal conversations etc.) instead of a delay.
  3. Consensus appears certain on the concept of (Big) Big Ints & intended working of the CHIP, therefore I feel even in the unlikely case of an unexpected issue the community will similarly be able to find agreement on a solution. Contention over fixing "bugs" tends to occur in cases where the initial change was not well understood or desired (as with BTC Taproot Inscriptions), and I don't think that's the case here.
  4. Of anyone requesting somewhat of an exception for this specific type of scenario, you couldn't find a better candidate than Jason Dreyzehner. Previous CHIP author, technical aficionado, conscientious BCH contributor over many many years. Attempts to argue for future changes to happen similarly not only will need to provide evidence for the similarity of the surrounding circumstances, but also the credibility of the proposer.

With these mitigating factors in mind & given the sizeable lost opportunity cost of delay, I think it clear that the best choice is to activate both the VM Limits CHIP as well as accompanying Big Ints this year.

I look forward to the activation of both CHIPs on chipnet next month & the flow on effect of increased app development & community momentum.

Final note: The ABLA Explainer video from last year received an incredibly positive community response. Building on that success, I will also be working with Jason & others to produce promotional/educational material for the BCH community and broader visibility around the importance & impact of these 2025 upgrades. If anyone has any particular suggestions or ideas in this regard, I'm always open to discuss it.

Jeremy

Further reading:​

FAQ on Bitcoin Cash governance

· 2 min read
Jeremy

The Bitcoin Cash Podcast wholeheartedly supports the November lock-in and May implementation of:

I have reviewed the CHIP documents in some detail. A full breakdown and discussion will be done on an upcoming episode of the show, perhaps after the St Kitts conference.

BCH has several areas it is underperforming competing cryptocurrency projects, but its protocol level development is not one of them. There is industry leading thought, care, discussion and engineering skill being carefully added to Bitcoin Cash.

This bodes very well for the next few years. Momentum is a hard thing to capture but an overwhelmingly powerful force once attained, and momentum in Bitcoin Cash is building. Important technical improvements smoothly implemented at the protocol layer are the foundation of that progress and should bring much excitement to the BCH community for the resulting user-facing apps and innovations they will undoubtedly facilitate. In some cases, changes reduce technical debt or improve security and, though invisible to end users, are essential to the continued resilience and effective development of the blockchain.

In addition, the high quality of CHIPs is matched in the quality of the CHIP process itself. Creating decentralised agreement is very difficult, but BCH has earned an effective methodology through many hard-won lessons. The CHIP process is accruing a proven track record and trust by the community over time. In the past, and possibly in the future, BCH has become clouded and delayed by unconstructive arguments, chain splits, recriminations and turmoil. I think it's worth taking a moment to reflect on the absence of such division this year, and to commit internally to helping that continue for next year.

I am very pleased to contribute to the smooth running of the CHIP process via my stakeholder statement in this blog post. I encourage all readers as active members of the BCH community to make their own statements or begin discussions around these CHIPs, to amplify the strength of the consensus forming process.

Much gratitude to CHIP authors bitcoincashautist, Jason Dreyzehner, Tom Zander and Jonathan Silverblood along with everyone else involved in supporting or contributing to the debate, concepting or code for these improvements.

To a smooth May 2023 upgrade!

Jeremy

Further reading:​

Jason Dreyzehner's Blog post on 2023 CHIPs

FAQ on Bitcoin Cash governance