Did Amaury Séchet Leave Bitcoin Unlimited?

By Rishma Banerjee

According to recently published reports, Leading Bitcoin Cash (BCH) developer Amaury Séchet will be leaving the development team of BCH node software Bitcoin Unlimited and has already announced his departure in a Medium post published on March 25.

Séchet, in his post, criticizes the project management of Bitcoin Unlimited and says that it is not suitable for efficient development and unavoidable vulnerabilities in the code. He further says that when he was met with resistat when he had tried to address those issues. Séchet even provides an instance where he claims that, the feedback he gave on some code was blatantly ignored. He states that the consequences of such behaviour have been far-reaching:

“Failure to address these problems lead to a failure to activate large blocks properly on testnet and a series of 4 vulnerabilities allowing to bring nodes down remotely which ruined any chances for a majority big block fork.”

Though he admits that most software is built this way, he also says that such practices are incompatible with the healthy development of cryptocurrencies. According to the  post, the recent departure of Bitcoin Unlimited developer Antony Zegers has led him to reconsider his membership asawell. He stated that Zegers “was one of the first to join, and certainly one of the most important members BU [Bitcoin Unlimited] has had.”

In their departure announcements, Both Zegers and Séchet highlight the involvement of Bitcoin Satoshi Vision (BSV) supporters in Bitcoin Unlimited. Séchet also criticizes how the BSV community seemingly approves a lawsuit against BCH developers and how Bitcoin Unlimited Improvement Proposals (BUIP) have now been converted into “a sad joke, with proposals more and more absurd being voted on.”

Séchet cited two BUIPs, the first proposing to sell all the organization’s Bitcoin Cash (BCH) for BSV and the other to raise the block limit to 10 terabytes (10,000 gigabytes).