Ari Kuqi: Bitcoin Cash ABC protocol changes kill businesses

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Without a stable protocol for the Bitcoin blockchain, businesses don’t just struggle, they plain can’t operate. That’s an important takeaway from Ari Kuqi latest Medium post, “Personal accountability and bitcoin,” which details his life, his businesses, and his decision to support the original vision of Satoshi Nakamoto in Bitcoin SV (BSV).

Kuqi details three companies he founded, Cryptonize.it, Lighthouse.cash, and the CashPay Wallet, and how their reliance on Bitcoin Cash (BCHABC) was their ultimate demise.

His first company, Cryptonize.it, was a service that allowed customers to order anything with Bitcoin. After an exhausting, but exciting launch, the service seemed to be a success. Despite a small group of users, thousands of transactions created a nice profit. The hard fork of November 2018 caused insurmountable issues though. As Kuqi puts it:

“When I started to clash with the ideas of people like Paul Wasensteiner and Roger Ver, that community turned hostile towards me personally. The business wasn’t much affected; they kept buying stuff. It did hurt public perception because cryptonize.it no longer was mentioned and was being actively worked against on Rogers or Paul’s outlets.”

Although the service still works, it is no longer sustainable with the animosity coming from the BCHABC crowd.

Lighthouse, a crowdfunding app that removes the middle-man, is the biggest casualty of the BCHABC team, and proof of why BSV is needed. “[BCHABC] announced it was pushing through changes that would break it (CTOR),” he writes. The protocol change that introduced CTOR made bitcoinj, a code library for Bitcoin, unusable. As Lighthouse depends on that library, it also became unusable. He concludes, “To avoid further loss of investment, all development halted and projects running are left unfunded.”

Finally, he discusses the failure and rebirth of the CashPay wallet. Originally, it was built for BCHABC with a dependency on the Bitpay service. However, as Bitpay doesn’t support big blocks, the wallet was hamstrung from the start. It’s not dead and gone forever though. As he notes, “The CashPay wallet has now been rebuilt as a full SPV Bitcoin (SV) exclusive wallet. Because it’s design is much closer to what Satoshi outlined in the whitepaper, it scales unboundedly.”

He also talks about his next project, Sharkpool, which will help miners profit off of alt-coins with the goal of increasing the standing of BSV. He sees it as a non-violent method to Bitcoin maximalism.

The lesson of Kuqi’s story is pretty clear. His businesses suffered because of a lack of stability and opportunity from the BCHABC. What’s worse, they also suffered from attacks coming from the community they were built to serve. Businesses’ don’t have the time or money to suffer that kind of nonsense.

Kuqi later notes in a reddit thread about his article that he was only with Bitcoin Cash because he felt it was the original protocol, and that’s no longer true. That’s why he’s now firmly behind BSV, and believes the stability and massive scaling will lead to endless opportunities for his ventures. That’s a pretty good bet to make.

https://youtu.be/gBb9FSxfyVs