Amaury Sechet Makes His Exit from Bitcoin Unlimited
Bitcoin Cash developer Amaury Sechet is leaving his position with Bitcoin Unlimited. | Source: Shutterstock
Bitcoin Cash developer Amaury Sechet has left the Bitcoin Unlimited organization. He joined the company during the contentious days of 2017 because the Bitcoin Core fork was entertaining alternative implementations of Bitcoin, such as those with blocks larger than one megabyte.
Bitcoin Unlimited was founded initially along the same lines as Gavin Andresen’s failed Bitcoin Classic project, which sought to increase the block size through a standard hard fork.
Development Process Has “Serious Problems”
Bitcoin Unlimited maintains versions of both Bitcoin Core and Bitcoin Cash. However, its Bitcoin Core implementation has not been updated since 2017, indicating they’re never going to try and fork Bitcoin Core again. It has never been a dominant mode on Bitcoin, but it is one of the more critical projects in the Bitcoin Cash space.
Contributing to Bitcoin Unlimited was Amaury Sechet’s first public foray into Bitcoin development. He blames a development process with “serious problems” for the failure of Bitcoin Cash to gain the majority of Bitcoin nodes early on. Sechet writes that four critical vulnerabilities, one of which allowed Bitcoin Cash nodes to be shut down remotely, contributed significantly to the hard fork’s failure:
I decided to provide support on that front… I was met with resistance by opening a new pull request for a feature instead of addressing the feedback provided. Failure to address these problems led to a failure to activate large blocks properly on testnet and a series of four vulnerabilities to bring nodes down remotely, which ruined any chances for a majority big block fork.
Here, he refers to one of the vulnerabilities mentioned, which could have been solved if the original pull request had been debugged. Instead, a new pull request was created and the bug went live.
Mengerian Left, Now Deadalnix. Who’s Next?
In response, Sechet created Bitcoin ABC, which has backing from Bitmain. He maintained his membership at Bitcoin Unlimited, hoping things would turn around:
Eventually, Bitcoin Unlimited would improve, and who knows? Maybe even Bitcoin ABC would become unnecessary.
Last week, another prominent Bitcoin Unlimited developer left the project: Antony ‘Mengerian’ Zegers. Zegers says that he is quitting Bitcoin Unlimited as a result of a lawsuit brought against several Bitcoin Cash developers, including Sechet.
Bitcoin Unlimited currently plays host to numerous Bitcoin SV proponents. Zegers and Sechet feel that Bitcoin Unlimited should back away from Bitcoin SV. They also think the Bitcoin SV community should condemn these lawsuits. Zegers writes :
The event that really decided my opinion is the lawsuit against several people in the Bitcoin Cash community, including developers Amaury Séchet, Jason Cox, and Shammah Chancellor. These are my friends and colleagues, and using a frivolous lawsuit to target them with the force of law is despicable.
Sechet: Bitcoin Unlimited Should Condemn Bitcoin SV
Both Zegers and Sechet would have stayed on with Bitcoin Unlimited if they felt things were getting better. They’d like to see the group work towards eradicating Bitcoin SV support, as now two prominent anti-SV developers have left the project.
Before long, there is a likelihood that Bitcoin Unlimited will go full Bitcoin SV.
Near the end of his explanatory article, Sechet says:
It is important that the Bitcoin Cash community protect itself from people and groups attempting to take advantage of its cooperative nature and undermine the project. This means employing the principle of reciprocity, and detaching from those who are not willing to cooperatively reciprocate.
Sechet will continue to work on Bitcoin Cash as Bitcoin ABC lead developer. He is consistent in one area: he believes Craig Wright is a charlatan and that Bitcoin SV is a fraudulent chain.
