This isn’t breaking news, this visit happened in 2016. I am writing about it now because this was very significant to me from many different standpoints. I had the privilege of speaking with this gentleman for 2.5 hours one afternoon. Here are the details of this meeting:
Adam was in Atlanta because he had a layover flying back to the UK.
I think the only reason he stopped in was because he was shilling for his company’s Liquid product. That is not a bad thing.
He was very quiet and thoughtful in his conversation.
We talked a great deal about Ethereum, Bitcoin fungibility, core developer influence and the Lightning Network.
Surprisingly Adam’s attitude, then, was that Ethereum’s engineering choices seemed strange, if not, naïve. Specifically, the computer science around creating a brand new, largely untested, virtual machine to evaluate, equally new, Turing Complete languages. One of the most battle-tested virtual machines on the planet, the JVM, is constantly patching, so why wouldn’t you leverage something “off the shelf”?
My questions revolved around Bitcoin’s fungibility. We need censor-resistant money. His answers surprised me. Although he had recently did a Let’s Talk Bitcoin podcast with Andreas Antonopoulos and spoke frankly about the need for true anonymity on the Blockchain, his stance on the need for government surveillance for more hawkish. Ok, nobody’s perfect.
When the topic came to the Lightning Network, however, he was clearly critical of the current state of the design. He clearly told us that he didn’t think the LN would be a real answer to scaling Bitcoin because the liquidity partners couldn’t borrow from one another as part of the design. In other words, the LN needed a technological answer to the repo market.
On the issue of the core developers that he came into contact with at Blockstream and the ones that were external, he really made a point to say that these people were their own breed. He used the phrase: “like herding cats”. There was far more disagreements between developers than you might think. This made perfect sense to me because this is exactly what I experienced at BitPay. Ultimately, there were a few people that would make the final call over a pull request or a design goal. It was this that really got me thinking about how, in practice, changes were actually made to Bitcoin. In life, just as in Bitcoin, there are the way things can work in theory and the way they work in practice. In theory, anyone can submit changes to the core protocol. They can submit those changes for review and possibly get the changes into the next release. In practice, you are only going to get changes into the release if and only if a small group of people approve of what you are trying to do. Of course, you can always fork the project, make your changes and as long as you aren’t changing anything that would be incompatible with the consensus mechanism, you don’t need anyone’s approval. But, alas, the consensus library is the most important. The end result is that Bitcoin has gatekeepers because certain parties on the network allow the gatekeepers to exist. If you don’t like this, you can start your own coin. His characterization of certain people contributing to Bitcoin was very satisfying to me. Blockstream, like BitPay, was moving from a loyalty culture to a super star culture. In other words, the company started with people who were there because they believed in Bitcoin and its power, but after some time, those people left and were replaced by employees who were there for other reasons, not necessarily because of main problem domain. The new hierarchies evolved and the best practitioners were now the super stars and everyone else filled in support roles.
I want to stress in this post that Adam Back is a very important person to the world of cryptocurrency. His persona on Twitter is just not the same as it is in person. What I do know is that Twitter is just not a good way to learn about people’s real thoughts and motivations. In my opinion, some of the people that are held up as important people in Bitcoin, in real life, might have a more nuanced opinions than you’d think.