I am Antony Zegers, CEO of Bitcoin ABC, Ask Me Anything!

Honestly that's kind of hard to say, as there's been many ups and downs, and pretty much all the positive things have been tinged with some downside. When I first got into Bitcoin, I did some calculations of what market cap could get to if it was successful (estimated $200K-$300K), and it's pretty close to that now, so that kinda validated the original thesis. But at the same time the actual real goal of the project, to create a cash-like sound money on the Internet, got totally off track. So Bitcoin isn't fulfilling that goal, and seems to have limited prospects now because of that. The creation of Bitcoin Cash was an exciting time, but again things didn't really pan out as we'd hoped due to various unforeseen complications. The eCash project has been satisfying in that we've made great progress on the actual technology, and that's very fulfilling. But at the came time it seems the market doesn't really appreciate that, so that aspect is difficult and frustrating. Completion of Avalanche Pre-Consensus was something that made me happy, and is a good achievement. Also the conference in Barcelona was an event that was lots of fun to see the other team members in person, which we rarely do, and just hang out and have a nice time.

Well the November Upgrade is already set, so there's definitely nothing else getting in for that now. The "UTXO Commitment" effort at this point is basically the "AssumeUTXO" feature which has already been added and works right now. The only thing possibly left is to make it more automated. AssumeUTXO a bit different from the old vision of UTXO Commitments, but accomplishes the same goal. With AssumeUTXO the UTXO snapshot hash is added to the source code, whereas the original "UTXO Commitment" idea was to have the miners somehow add the UTXO hash to each block. But from the user's point of view, ti accomplishes the same thing: to let a node start up faster and start working before downloading and validating the whole blockchain. This is a topic the PiRK knows more about all the details... maybe he should an AMA next!

That's a good question

I don't think there's any technical challenge left that's a show stopper to achieving the main goals of the project: fast, scalable electronic cash. On the scalability front, there's work still to do, but I'd say it's in the category of stuff where the solutions are basically known, even if it takes work to implement. I'd say the biggest "unsolved" problem is exactly how to implement Subnets using Avalanche. Again, it's a thing that we know is possible, but the specifics of exactly how to implement it haven't been decided. We know it's possible in concept because of how Avlanche works, and AVAX has subnets so it's clearly possible to implement. But the technical details of how to implement them on eCash haven't been nailed down yet.

Right now just dealing with the security work is basically tasking up all the devs' time. The change due to AI finding bugs is something that's important to keep up with, so we don't fall behind. It's hard to predict how long that will keep up for, but at some point we'll have to start running out bugs to find, and things should calm down. Also leveraging AI tools to keep up helps. After the security work, the next thing at the protocol level will be a bunch of enhancements that take advantage of Pre-Consensus, just to make the whole system work better and more scalably. For instance we can make improvements to the management of transaction in the mempool, in particular handling cases where blocks are full or near full. This touches on stuff like making transaction fees dynamic, and also potentially making the block size limit dynamic. Some of this is only noticeable at high usage rates, so wouldn't have a noticaeable impact right now, but is important for the future if the network is to grow. (Actually when someone was spamming the network a while ago, that made some inefficiencies noticeable, and we made some improvements to handle that better). But I'd also say that probably the base protocol isn't the most important area of the roadmap right now, but it's important for people to build products and services using eCash, such as FIRMA, and other businesses. eCash has great dev tools that help enable people to do this.

It's both internal and external. Roqqit did a bunch of auditing using AI tools, and wrote the Audit report, so that we extremely useful. (see it here: https://teamsocket.net/security/2026-bitcoin-abc-security-audit.pdf) We also constantly do internal checking of the code and looking for bugs. There's also many random external people who submit bug reports based on our bug reporting process (https://github.com/Bitcoin-ABC/bitcoin-abc/blob/master/SECURITY.md). This can help find some bugs, but it's also mixed in with a lot of noise and low quality reports that take time to sift through. Regarding other chains, yeah I think that any other project that isn't staying on top of this stuff is putting itself at risk. We've already seen exploits that harmed users, like the Coldcard hack, and the Liquid network exploit. As far as "Taking down a chain", I don't know the details, but sounds like that's what happened to Zano. Blockchains tend to be resilient, and I think they did some sort of rollback, but it still seriously harms the project. For "big" chains, I'd be suspicious of anything that doesn't have engaged and active development happening. Just check the Githubs and see if they're being actively developed.

Basically just looking for a Reddit username back in the day, I was studying Austrian Economics at the time, so tried some names related to economists such as "Misesian" after Ludwig Von Mises, and "Rothbardian" after Murray Rothbard, but both of those were taken. But "Mengerian" after Carl Menger was available so I went with that.

Another great question ✅, after Antony, I'll tell U my thoughts as a supporter also 😂 the answer is dead easy

Well just looking around at other projects, there's still nothing out there that's as good as eCash when it comes to the technical properties of being a good "Peer to Peer Electronic Cash". So I guess the motivation comes from the pride of building something good. We're very lucky to have such a good team (IMO), way better than one would expect for a project of this size. So it's nice to work with the team, and we can all take pride in building something high quality. It's definitely frustrating though that the market recognition hasn't kept up, and that's something we're trying to fix also.

LOL, I don't know what you're referring to. So if it's an Easter Egg it'll be a surprise to me also! Agreed that XECS and FIRMA are great pruducts.

For Subnets, the basic technical capability isn't that difficult in concept: You just need to give the Avalanche Peers a way to manage sub-quorums of Peers. Then, in concept, anyone could start a project to build their own Subnet, and only have to get some proportion (not all) of Avalanche stakers to run it. Personally though, I'm more focused on them main XEC chain, and making that work even better, and building apps on the main XEC chain. Just looking around at other projects, it doesn't seem like having the feature to build subnets, sub-chains, sidechains, etc has really been something that adds a huge benefit, and often it seems like it fragments the core community of a project (I think AVAX had this problem to some extent), so it probably makes more sense to focus on after the project becomes more popular with a large community of devs working on it. So I think it's better, for now, to focus on improving the main chain, and building cool apps on the main eCash chain. That said, Subnets are cool tech, way better than alternatives like Drivechains. And the core tech to enable them (Avalanche protocol) is in place and working on eCash, so it makes sense to leverage that at some point.

Well SLP was already a decent token protocol that worked pretty well and had some uptake on BCH. The main problem wasn't the protocol itself, but rather the tooling around to support it. They had USDT on SLP on BCH! But then it basically got neglected by the community (Chris Troutner did work to support it, but seems he was alone in putting in effort to support it). Everyone focused on the shiny new idea of Cashtokens, and basically forgot about SLP, and eventually Tether dropped support for SLP on BCH. This seems totally crazy to me! Obviously have USDT token on the chain is super-valuable, even of the token protocol had some limitations, so it would have made way more sense to do the work to improve support for that rather than chase the CashToken unicorn. In any case, ALP is just an evolution of SLP. It starts from the same basic idea, which we knew worked well, and then fixes the problems that people found with it, and added improvements that allow some more features. On eCash (XEC), because we have the Chronik indexer in the node, and because Chronik indexes SLP and ALP, this addresses the main problem that SLP had on BCH, which was just lack of infrastructure support. So it's easy to create and use tokens on XEC. Overall, I'm happy with the approach we've taken. The main difference with Cashtokens, is that they are "miner validated", and the main consequence of this is that it allows 2-way DEX. IE, with ALP on XEC, you can create sell orders for tokens, but not buy orders. It's only a 1-way market. But this limitation can be mitigated with token servers that provide liquidity on the buy side, so it's not clear this is even a major issue. (Eg, just look at XECx and FIRMA. In practice this model works fine and people have no issue buying and selling them using the Agora DEX) (continued in next reply)

Honestly I don't really know too much about this. I'd be pretty surprised if elliptic curve cryptography was broken, but I'd also monitor the space to see if breakthroughs are made on that front. For wallet, something where you hold the coins on fresh unused P2PHK addresses is safest from elliptic curve vulnerability, and the pubkey is hidden behind a hash. So something like Electrum ABC on a non-internet connected laptop is pretty safe.

We rarely have "team meetings" be we have lots of impromptu calls with two or more of team, usually around some particular issue we're working on. In the past we've tried regular weekly meetings, but we found that they weren't that productive, and it's often inconvenient to schedule as we're spread across multiple time zones. Remote teams can work well, but you need to get used to communicating in an "asynchronous" way as much as possible. Ie, send messages or requests that are self contained, and contain all the needed info without need back-and forth comms. Then it's still necessary to periodically synchronize via calls. Then main time we have a full team call is at the bi-yearly upgrades. The Conference was also great, hopefully we can do another in not too long.

Yeah, you're right that it seems in most cases crypto projects are sold as a way to quickly profit via speculation. in our case, we have a clear mission statement, to make "Cash for the Internet", so that keeps everyone aligned and pulling in the same direction. That said, if we're successful, the price should also appreciate to reflect that, so there is also room for speculation.

That would be great to be able to pay for stuff with eCash in person. My guess though, is that the first major adoption will probably be something Internet-native, because that's where the cash-like properties of XEC are more unique. I already find FIRMA very useful, for example. but I'm imagining something where a new business model is enabled that wasn't previously possible. I know AI agents paying each other isn't an original idea, but that's the kind of thing I'm thinking of, and eCash would be ideal for something like that. Another example I can imagine is BitTorrent clients paying each other small amounts of XEC to be able to download pieces of files. Basically anything that needs "Cash for the Internet". XEC is basically ready to go, and we have the tools that makes it easy to develop on it, so it's well positioned, but not totally obvious in advance what application will take off.

I personally use a Linux computer. It's the most useful for working with code, compiling the node software, etc. It also works fine with everything else I need. I wouldn't give anyone investment advice. XEC price is speculative, so people have to decide for themselves what makes sense for them. The features that interest me the most are things that enable the use case of "Cash for the Internet". eCash is already very capable as a protocol, so I'm looking for things that leverage these capabilities, like services of products that can use small scalable payments. Proof of Writing is a good example! Or I can also imagine uses like AI agents using XEC, or for example BitTorrent clients that pay each other in XEC for seeding rare files.

Two that are pretty close are: 1. "UTXO Commitment", which as I mentioned in another reply will actually be the "AssumeUTXO" feature ported from Core. That one is already partially implemented, and the remaining part is straightforward. We'll likely just wait for Core to finalize it, then port what they do, as they are putting the energy into it. 2. "Adaptive Block Size" is another that could happen relatively soon. Now that Avalanche Pre-Consensus is implemented, that unlocks the ability to use it for other stuff like dynamic transaction fees and adaptive block size. These things all tie together with how transactions are handled in the mempool, and how the mostly-full-block conditions are handled. All these things work together to make a system that scales and handles exceptionally high load gracefully.

Well for complicated technical projects it's not really possible to know in advance how long development will take. We do prioritize what we think is most important, and try to move a fast as possible.

I like our latest slogan "Cash for the Internet" as I think that's the simplest and most accurate encapsulation of the goal of the project. To promote to developers, showing that we have great tooling and app libraries, and that eCash is really easy to quickly develop a working product on should be appealing. Devs also want a project with lively active dev community, and and the coin to have high value helps, so it's a bit of a chicken and egg problem. Activities like hackathons could also help to expose new devs to eCash and showcase what can be developed quickly on it.