CoinGeek Conversations: Recent Episodes
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CoinGeek Conversations is a weekly podcast update on the thriving BitcoinSV ecosystem - for beginners as well as those already deeply immersed in it. CoinGeek's Charles Miller meets entrepreneurs, technologists and businesspeople to ask about their work and their visions for the future. You don't need to be an expert in computer science or business studies. But you do need an appetite to learn about the most exciting new technology of our time.
Setting a festive mood with a holiday shirt to boot, Charles Miller kicks off the CoinGeek Conversations Christmas Special this year, sharing a bubbly toast with his guests: CoinGeek Reporter, Becky Liggero, and Osmin Callis, the Founder and CEO of Mode 8.
The two battled it out to the end in an exciting quiz covering topics, such as Bitcoin SV (BSV) companies, Bitcoin terminologies, entertainment, science, and a final odd one out round. Formulating the questions using ChatGPT, Charles marveled at how the language model came up with its responses, as well as abstract images for BSV companies, based on the very little information he gave.
The first round focused on Bitcoin SV companies, with Charles asking participants to identify BSV their names based on AI images. The next round shifted to general knowledge, covering topics such as the Olympic Games in London, planets, Komodo dragons, and Taylor Swift albums. The third round took a unique turn, presenting descriptions from Robin Kohze, CEO and Co-founder of Vaionex, with participants tasked to identify Bitcoin-related terms based on these descriptions. In the final, odd one out, round, participants had to pick the word or phrase that didn’t belong among four choices.
The competition was fierce as Osmin and Becky vied to answer questions, earning points for correct answers. At the end of the quiz, the scores were tallied, ultimately revealing the winner, with prizes, like the bubbly, ‘magically’ passed across the online connections!
To find out who won, you'll need to watch the show and perhaps test your knowledge by attempting some of the questions! Best of luck, and may you have a joyful holiday season from the CoinGeek Conversations team!
In the latest episode of CoinGeek Conversations, Charles Miller meets Michael Simeon, the Co-founder and CEO of VPD Money, a company which promises to create "The Bank of You."
"VPD" stands for "Virtual Payment Digital." Michael explains that they would have made their tagline, "The Bank of You," the name of the company but that there are regulatory restrictions on using the term "bank" in the name of a business.
Charles explores the user experience by signing up for VPD Money during the conversation. Michael guides him through the process, highlighting the flexibility in funding options, including transfers, card transactions, and unique codes like USSD codes, popular in Africa.
One objective of VPD Money is financial inclusion, particularly in underserved regions. Michael expresses his passion for empowering communities: "we let you build your home bank." He emphasizes the challenges faced by those in remote areas where traditional banking is a challenge. VPD Money aims to bridge this gap.
Michael highlights the strategic deployment of Point of Service (POS) machines, saying, "we have partnerships with all the places where we push out POS machines". These machines facilitate easy access to financial services, especially in areas where physical banks are scarce.
When asked about the company's progress, Michael reveals, "we have over 50,000 customers," categorizing them into global customers, SMEs, and the unbanked. He touches upon the future capability of international remittances, contributing to the financial inclusion of the global community.
Charles asks about Michael's entrepreneurial journey, referencing his previous venture, VoguePay. Michael explains a difference, stating that VoguePay is a payment processing company, while VPD Money is a comprehensive digital banking experience.
Michael discusses VPD Money's future plans, including personalized savings features. He shares a concept of saving customers 20 per cent of their earnings monthly through AI-driven insights and negotiated discounts.
Having extensive experience in the crypto space, Michael reveals that he was among the pioneers introducing crypto payments in Nigeria back in 2014. He acknowledges the unexpected trend of Nigerians using crypto as a store of value against their currency.
CoinGeek Conversations concludes its three-part Block Dojo mini-series with insightful conversations featuring innovators in blockchain technology.
In the latest interviews, Charles Miller meets three entrepreneurs completing the business incubator program: Robin Russel of Satva Trust, who discusses the use of blockchain to enhance emissions reporting in the shipping industry; Priyatham Varma of Back3nd, who explains his mission to empower non-technical individuals to create fintech products; and Luiz Adler of Smash Mountain Studio, who shares the journey behind developing the world's first Brazilian Jiu Jitsu game.
In the first interview, Charles speaks to Robin Russel, Co-founder and COO of Satva Trust, a company using blockchain technology to improve emissions reporting in the shipping industry. Robin stresses the importance of accurate data in an industry that releases around a billion tons of carbon dioxide each year, making up three per cent of the world's total emissions.
The current data on emissions is unreliable, creating problems for financial stakeholders like lenders and insurers. "It's really a question of visibility," Robin explains about having clear information to make informed decisions about business risks.
When discussing the market for emissions data, he explains that lenders and insurers pay for risk assessments using emissions data, along with shipowners who "would really like to showcase how well they're doing in that direction". However, unreliable data makes it hard for shipowners to showcase their environmental efforts.
The first step to producing more reliable data is to eliminate self-reported data from ships. Robin notes the importance of using satellite data, which includes weather, sea conditions, ship details, position, and speed, processed through AI.
Charles asks about the social and environmental motivations behind the venture. Robin asserts that "we're all interested in sustainability," acknowledging the team's commitment to addressing climate challenges.
As for the unreliability of data in the shipping industry, Robin noted, "It seems like a situation that needs to change. The technology exists now to make a change."
Next, Charles sits down with Priyatham Varma, founder and CEO of Back3nd and a former web developer and educator. He has a mission to empower individuals without technical skills to create their own fintech products.
As Priyatham puts it, "Back3nd is a no-code platform where anyone can easily build blockchain applications, especially for the fintech industry.” The platform is so simple to use that even those unfamiliar with coding will be able to build a business on top of blockchain, he says.
"Blockchain is an entirely new system and is rewriting the entire finance industry. You can be a beginner, but in two years, you'll be an expert in blockchain space.” Back3nd includes products like payment gateways, peer-to-peer lending platforms, and analytics dashboards.
Back3nd offers a range of subscription plans but as Priyatham explains, "if you don't want to subscribe, you can still use the free version, but we'll be taking a larger commission on every transaction. Subscribers enjoy reduced transaction costs and access to features like analytics dashboards.”
As for Back3nd's target users, Priyatham explains, “the first customers are entrepreneurs or innovators who want to build something on top of our platform, 60 per cent of the entire blockchain ecosystem consists of people who aren't coders but want to build something on top of it.”
Lastly Charles speaks to Luiz Adler, founder and Game Director of Smash Mountain Studio, about the latter’s journey behind creating the world's first Brazilian J
Charles Miller is once again exploring innovative ventures in the Block Dojo incubator program on this week’s CoinGeek Conversations. Rafaela Azevedo’s The Chain Academy trains developers for Web3; Kenneth Kelly's Revested streamlines real estate transactions; and Marcus Odubonojo's Motion Shield simplifies car accident reporting— all showcasing the potential of blockchain technology.
Kicking off our series of interviews, we begin with Rafaela Azevedo, the founder of The Chain Academy, who takes a unique approach to training developers for the rapidly evolving Web3 space. Rafaela’s journey into the tech industry is influenced by her tech background, as she explains that “all my family is in tech."
Her parents, both developers, played a significant role in shaping her passion for technology. Growing up surrounded by the world of coding, Rafaela embarked on her coding journey at a very young age. "I was coding when I was six years old with my dad. I just got really passionate about the idea and just went for it," she recalls.
The Chain Academy is an educational platform for developers entering Web3. The training program not only focuses on individual skill development but also aims to link developers with potential employers. “They are going to be skilled up to collaborative commercial projects where they can actually have their first experience and create a portfolio," she notes.
The Chain Academy offers a unique learning experience with a step-by-step approach, short videos and text, catering to individuals with varying attention spans. In addition, AI technology will be used to provide instant feedback to developers, assessing their strengths and areas for improvement.
The Chain Academy’s roadmap includes a commitment to addressing various blockchains, starting with Solidity and Ethereum and expanding to others such as the BSV Blockchain. As for the company’s revenue model, Rafaela says it will include a subscription model for developers and fees for businesses posting projects.
Next was Kenneth Kelly's Revested, a blockchain-based business that aims to simplify and expedite the process of buying and selling houses. Kenneth is keen to point out that Revested utilizes blockchain technology to eliminate old practices in the real estate industry. "The problem in the industry, going back to my grandfather's time, would be that one in three property sales fall through, and on average, it takes between three and six months. So, you know, huge problem within the space."
Revested addresses these challenges by streamlining mundane processes, especially with compliance and regulation. As Kenneth explains, "KYC when you come on to Revested is simple.. you enter your name, email, passport, and take a photograph of yourself. We then upload your property title deeds, which we can cross-check using machine learning against the land registry document."
Blockchain technology will be used in the digital exchange for property transactions. "We're building a custom layer two platform, essentially a digital exchange to connect a wallet dependent upon the currency and to be able to trade that currency in and out of the exchange."
Kenneth envisions a future where property tokenization enables instantaneous transactions. "You could be down in the pub on a Friday, and you could be selling your property in minutes instantly," he says.
However, Charles raises concerns about the potential risks and the necessity for a thoughtful decision-making process in real estate transactions. Kenneth responds by highlighting the role of machine learning in scanning title deeds for underlying issues, saying, "there's new machine learning models that are really pushing boundaries within the legal space."
When asked about the business model, Kenneth explains "we would take a percentage of transaction fees based o
The latest group of entrepreneurs to graduate from Block Dojo, the London incubator programme for startups building on the BSV blockchain, are sharing their ambitions on CoinGeek Conversations over the next three weeks.
In the first show, two founders describe their business plans. First, Ash Yarro’s Trackr HR is designed to bring technology, particularly AI, to bear on the inefficiencies of the highly-lucrative recruitment business.
Ash was already an experienced entrepreneur. But when he talked to his girlfriend about her work in recruitment, he was astonished at what he heard: “it became apparent that there were just so many complexities and long, laborious processes within being a recruiter.”
Ash realised he had found his next project. He contacted friends who work in recruitment and HR and asked to spend time with them at work to learn about their business. He says he discovered “so many problems in terms of fragmented systems, outdated practices and just so many spaces for top candidates to slip between the cracks”. Unlike in the working practices of lawyers and accountants for instance, he said, new technology was rarely being used.
So how is Trackr HR going to fix that? Ash says it will be a “multipronged solution”. AI will be deployed right from the first contact between the recruiter and their client, to analyse conversations that describe the role the client wants to fill and the kind of candidate they’re looking for. From that, AI will generate a brief.
Then throughout the process, AI will continue to improve efficiency by analysing applications and video responses by candidates, saving the recruiter time and allowing a more systematic approach. Ash believes the business is ready for innovation.
AI is also an important component of Kofo Are’s Thier idea. She describes it as “a mobile platform for the prevention of obesity and type two diabetes”. Her customers will be big businesses who want to improve the health of their staff - not least, Kofo says, because obesity costs companies $3,000 to $15,000 per employee per year.
The first part of the idea is to give users an app that will track the exercise they take and their food and drink consumption. This information will then be used to recommend interventions - anything from changing your diet to something more ambitious:
“We will match you with a health care practitioner who will offer interventions tailored to your specific needs. We'll also match you to groups on the platform because we plan to have communities where we group people based upon their risk. The purpose of the communities is because we believe in the power of peers: when you're in groups and you know you're suffering from the same type of disease, we tend to encourage one another to make the right choices around food, around exercise, around the hours of sleep.”
One of the benefits of Thier, in the UK at least, is that it would take some of the pressure off the National Health Service. Kofo agrees that would be a “great thing”. But of course, working with businesses, she knows she also has to incentivise them financially, by pointing to the benefits they’d enjoy with fewer staff absences and by slowing the growth of ever-increasing health insurance premiums.
Don’t miss next week’s CoinGeek Conversations, to meet more Block Dojo entrepreneurs.
In the latest episode of CoinGeek Conversations, Jack Pitts, founder of Slictionary, Brendan Lee, founder of Elas Digital and CoinGeek's Charles Miller delve into Zeke Faux's new book, Number Go Up.
Faux, a journalist from Bloomberg Businessweek, takes readers on a journey through the crypto world, focusing on characters like Sam Bankman-Fried of FTX, the cultural phenomenon of Bored Apes, and the mysteries of Tether's $68 billion valuation.
The book's format, a first-person narrative, fascinated Jack, who said he enjoyed the informal style. Faux's approach reflected the author's personal experience as he became a character in the story. Brendan found the storytelling engaging, describing it as an adventure that kept him hooked: “the author managed to get into the offices of several of these really high flying crypto executives. And I mean, it kind of reads like a bit of an adventure.”
Charles discussed the evolution of Faux's perspective from a seemingly innocent article about Sam Bankman-Fried to a more critical stance, especially regarding FTX's legitimacy. The conversation touched on the author’s initial portrayal of FTX as a “thought experiment”, later questioning its potential scam-like nature.
A discussion on Tether's central role in the crypto world surfaced, with Brendan raising concerns about Tether's backing and its potential impact on the overall economy. He emphasized that Tether’s $68 billion valuation should have corresponding funds in a bank account. They discussed the suspicions surrounding Tether's operations, with concerns about its actual reserves and its role in market manipulation. “I suspect and a lot of people in the BSV community as well, that Tether, there’s not much money there at all,” Brendan asserted.
Jack meanwhile argued that regulators should focus on auditing the trading practices of platforms like Binance and Bitfinex rather than questioning Tether's reserves. “What they need to audit is not what's backing the treasure chest. They need to audit how the treasure chest was obtained, which means they need an audit of Binance. They need an audit of Bitfinex and an audit of Tether to find out what trades were being made, how they were being made, and what dirty people they were trading with, and how they were manipulating prices to basically make themselves all that money.”
The conversation turned to the NFT craze, with Jack criticizing the quality of the digital assets. “I think the funniest thing about the NFT craze is the levels of ideocracy behind it. So first of all, the pictures themselves aren't even on the Ethereum blockchain. And yet the funny thing about these NFTs is they have to be really low 1980s quality pictures.”
Brendan brought up the exploitative nature of some artists profiting from NFTs. “I was reading about these people who were creating NFTs and they were paying the artists, like $10 to create all of this material and then going and making $10 million from selling them. It's not just lazy, but it's exploitative.”
They proceeded to discuss a section of Faux's book, which delves into the bizarre world of Bored Apes and how Faux risked $20,000 of his own money to purchase an Ape, with the goal of gaining access to an exclusive party and later selling the digital asset. The Bored Ape phenomenon represents the broader NFT craze, as discussed by the participants. They critiqued the low-quality, pixelated images of these digital assets. “I find the whole Bored Ape kind of hype cycle which I think really has largely ended now seems to be one of the strangest things that's happened in crypto,” Brendan noted.
A significant part of the book explor
VX Technologies Executive Director of Global Partnerships, Catherine Lephoto, is no stranger to the world of blockchain and digital innovation. In 2022, she sat down with Charles Miller on the sidelines of the BSV Global Blockchain Convention in Dubai to discuss VX Technologies and its blockchain-based solutions on CoinGeek Conversations. This time, Catherine is back to shed light on Alpha DAPP, the flagship product of VX Technologies, which has the potential to be a game-changer not only for Africa but for countries worldwide.
Alpha DAPP, as the name suggests, marks the start of decentralized applications (DAPP). As Catherine explains, Alpha DAPP which operates on the BSV blockchain aims to harness the power of blockchain technology. However, what makes Alpha DAPP truly exciting is that it offers a user-friendly experience. “On the face of it, does not look like it's blockchain. It still looks very much like what people are currently accustomed to. So when they interact with the platform, they would not even know that they are actually working on a blockchain platform,” she notes.
Catherine recalls the challenges of explaining the concept of blockchain, especially the process of managing a 12-word seed phrase to access a blockchain account. As she points out, people are accustomed to creating an email account with a simple password that can be easily retrieved if forgotten. Alpha DAPP has addressed this by making blockchain technology accessible to any average person. “When I interact with it, it's like I'm interacting with any other app on my phone or on my computer. It's simple,” she says.
Catherine is keen to point out that VX Technologies is committed to upholding data sovereignty, ensuring that users maintain privacy and ownership of their data. “Our company is all about data sovereignty,” she asserts. Unlike traditional centralized platforms where data is often controlled by third parties, Alpha DAPP users have control over their data.
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Alpha DAPP has made the whole process user-friendly and familiar. Users can log in using a simple email address, eliminating the need to download wallets or remember complex seed phrases. A blockchain wallet will be assigned to each user, and in the event of a data loss, Alpha DAPP provides an option to retrieve the 12-word seed phrase.
“The idea is the privacy still remains yours, the sovereignty of the data, the ownership is still yours. But now what we have done is we have created the interaction, essentially the bridge to the blockchain in a manner that is familiar, which is using a simple email address to log in,” Catherine explained.
Catherine also discussed Alpha DAPP’s potential impact on education and employment recruitment and the role it can possibly play in these sectors. With academic records stored on Alpha DAPP, graduates can present a QR code during virtual interviews, enabling employers to verify their credentials instantly. This streamlined process eliminates the need for graduates to travel long distances for interviews, especially in remote areas, reducing the financial burden and enhancing the efficiency of the recruitment process. According to Catherin, this approach can significantly address high unemployment rates in countries like South Africa.
Catherine also stressed that records must be issued by a credentialed authority to ensure trustworthiness. “With everything that we do, the record has to be issued by a credentialed authority,” she asserted. Students cannot simply create their own records, as this would risk compromising the integrity of the system. Instead, universities and educational institutions have a critical role to play in the issuance of records, which Alpha DAPP securely records on the blockchain.
Catherine highlighted the importance of the first customer and the value of reference
Headquartered in Dubai, Blockchain Smart Technologies prides itself as a global leader in “blockchain distribution”. The company set up shop in Dubai because of the city's early adoption of blockchain technologies. According to CEO Dr Eva Porras, this presented an excellent opportunity for the company to provide blockchain solutions across various sectors, starting with a particular project: "what brought us to Dubai specifically was our willingness or interest in helping the airport make better use of their runways," Eva noted.
Speaking on this week’s CoinGeek Conversations, Eva explained that her role extends beyond Blockchain Smart Technologies as she is also the managing director of SmartLedger. Despite offering similar products and solutions, she clarified that the two companies are separate entities.
"These are two independent businesses, totally independent," Eva said. Yet, as she points out, most partners are involved in both companies, sharing a common vision and passion for blockchain technology. For Eva, this allows for seamless collaborations on a range of projects and solutions while at the same time, building a robust blockchain ecosystem.
Blockchain Smart Technologies has developed a variety of consumer-focused apps designed to address specific needs and provide real-world solutions to users.
One of these, TicketMint, offers a service that issues tamper-proof tickets. "The customer is the owner of the event, and we provide the certificate that not only cannot be forged but can also serve various purposes for the event owner," Eva explained.
Eva and her team took a “horizontal” approach, expanding their solutions across different sectors.
Beginning with TicketMint, they developed various products and services, including wallets and solutions for artists' intellectual property rights.
Eva's academic background adds a unique dimension to her role as an entrepreneur. Her two-volume book, Bubbles and Contagion in Financial Markets, explores the dynamics of market bubbles, emphasizing the impact of value and contagion on market behavior.
Eva discussed how her academic perspective gives her an advantage in understanding market psychology and activities – particularly those of unscrupulous players in the ‘crypto’ market: "I can see them planning, setting their business to steal money from other people or to run these rumors that will confuse those who are less used to this type of scenario".
For Eva, the utility of blockchain technology is more important than the speculative price of cryptocurrencies. She highlighted the importance of small token values in promoting the growth of the blockchain ecosystem. Smaller token values allow for faster, high-volume transactions, making blockchain technology more efficient.
"I think this is the one technology that is going to allow the next revolution. Without these, there is no revolution," Eva said.
While some individuals in the Bitcoin SV blockchain community are hoping for an increased value of its token, Eva believes that the true wealth generated by blockchain technology comes from its utility and transformative power.
"I don't think they really understand the implications. The value of each token has to be the driver of the value that this token provides to the ecosystem," Eva noted.
Eva's vision for the future is to create solutions using blockchain technology. She expressed enthusiasm for projects that can make a profound difference in people's lives, such as identity verification and solutions for refugee camps. In these areas, Eva sees the potential to simplify and improve the lives of millions.
Chatbots have been a staple of the digital landscape for years, offering solutions to queries, performing tasks, and even providing companionship. But the game is changing. At the London Chatbot Summit, a gathering traditionally focused on chatbots, this year's focus was artificial intelligence (AI). CoinGeek Conversations host Charles Miller had the opportunity to delve into this transformative shift and interview two prominent attendees, Craig Massey and Professor Elizabeth Stokoe.
Craig Massey, a serial entrepreneur, previously the founder and chairman of Block Dojo, has now ventured into the realm of AI with his new incubator, AI Forge. He says Block Dojo had a significant impact on the blockchain industry, accounting for 24% of all blockchain start-ups in 2022. Despite this, Craig decided to embrace AI with his new enterprise: "we've taken all the learnings from the blockchain incubator and transposed them into an AI incubator."
Massey discussed the appeal of AI to corporates, emphasizing the differences in enthusiasm. While blockchain faced internal conflicts and scepticism, AI is met with eagerness. The AI technology complements blockchain in areas like content creation, rights management, and combating fake news, adding a layer of rigor. It also streamlines back-office processes within corporations, making them more efficient and less bureaucratic.
With AI Forge's commitment to business-to-business solutions, it's no surprise that they've been attracting corporate interest. As Craig Massey mentioned, "We had 324 applications into cohort one. We've already surpassed that for Cohort two." This overwhelming response demonstrates the growing interest in AI and AI Forge's initiatives, he says.
Massey's words also shed light on their rigorous selection process, with a final 30 contenders facing a judging panel that includes luminaries like the head of AI for Google and Meta as well as AI founders with successful exits. AI Forge's approach seems to be resonating, as Massey explains: “the applications we've had are clever, more product-oriented". The focus on productization and collaboration with interested corporates, signing letters of intent and pursuing proof of concepts, reflects AI Forge's proactive approach to creating solutions that could lead to quick acquisition, suggesting future trade sale exits, potentially in the range of £30 to £40 million.
Massey hopes that blending AI with blockchain creates a synergy that could redefine industries. As he notes, "for me, they're not like two separate technologies. They're a perfect marriage." This intersection promises a bright future where chatbots powered by AI become smarter, more intuitive, and deeply integrated into our daily lives.
Still at the London Chatbot Summit, Charles embarked on a quest to unravel the enigmatic world of AI-driven chatbots. Inspired by the potential of AI Forge's startups, he delved into questions that seems to hover over this dynamic field: can AI-powered chatbots ever match the conversational finesse of humans? Are these bots capable of rivalling human interactions?
Charles turned to the expertise of Professor Elizabeth Stokoe, an authority in the science of conversation. On the relevance of her field to the chatbot industry, Professor Stokoe stressed the need to analyse whether chatbots genuinely engage in conversations by leveraging research on human interaction.
When discussing her methodology, Professor Stokoe explained how conversation analysts like herself rely on recordings of real-life interactions, avoiding simulations or interviews. They focus on what unfolds in the actual interaction, including the moments of engagement and disengagement. She recounted a study that revealed the architecture of initial inquiry calls to community mediation services, highlighting key points t
Yves Mersch, a former governor of the Central Bank of Luxembourg and member of the executive board of the European Central Bank (ECB), recently shared his valuable insights on the world of cryptocurrency, its regulation, and the distinct significance of Bitcoin SV. In a candid conversation with Charles Miller on CoinGeek Conversations, Yves provided clarity on these complex topics in a straightforward yet insightful manner.
The Role of Central Banks
Yves began by emphasizing the important role of central banks in safeguarding a nation's currency. He stated, "as a regulator, the ECB has a mandate to defend a currency which is supposed to be stable." Central banks like the ECB are entrusted with the responsibility of ensuring the stability of their respective currencies and facilitating secure and efficient payment systems.
Embracing Technological Innovation
In the realm of financial innovation, Yves highlighted the positive stance of central banks. He explained, "the ECB has always considered innovation in the financial area as something positive because the ECB is supposed to work in a functioning market economy." The pursuit of technological advancement to enhance competitiveness and support economic growth has been a consistent focus for central banks.
Balancing Innovation and Risk
Yves pointed out that any financial innovation, including cryptocurrencies, is subject to careful scrutiny. "ECB has all the ways to analyze what are the potential benefits for society at large and for the institution, and what are the risks that come with these benefits." Central banks must assess the potential benefits to society and the institution against the associated risks.
Unique Risks in the Crypto World
Yves noted the distinctive risks posed by the crypto world. He stated, "you rely on the technology which is highly decentralized and where you have risks which are also risks that you find in the traditional financial world." Additionally, the crypto world introduces governance risks due to its lack of a clear liability structure. These governance issues add to the traditional financial risks inherent in any financial instrument.
Challenges in Global Regulation
Addressing the subject of global cryptocurrency regulation, Yves acknowledged the problems, saying, "unfortunately, this is very difficult." He explained that international bodies like the Financial Stability Board, G20, and others issue recommendations rather than binding regulations. Jurisdictions are encouraged to implement these recommendations in their national legislation but achieving a universal, comprehensive regulatory framework remains challenging.
Systemic Risks Posed by Tech Companies
Yves delved into the potential risks of major tech companies launching successful cryptocurrencies. He noted that these entities, due to their substantial customer bases, could influence monetary policy through their stablecoins. "That could distort the monetary policy transmission mechanism," Yves cautioned. Without direct access to central banks, these companies would rely on intermediaries for liquidity, potentially disrupting monetary transmission.
Role of CBDCs
The topic of Central Bank Digital Currencies (CBDCs) also came up in the conversation. Yves clarified that CBDCs are designed to complement existing financial instruments rather than replace them. They aim to provide central banks with a digital presence while retaining the fundamental attributes of cash in a digital form.
The Bitcoin SV Distinction
In the midst of this insightful conversation, Bitcoin SV emerged as a prominent player. Yves Mersch's perspective sheds light on the unique attributes that make Bitcoin SV stand out in the ever-expanding world of cryptoc
Elas Digital co-founder Mohammad Jaber is carving a unique path in the world of digital consultancy, leveraging blockchain technology to solve complex problems across various sectors. In a recent episode of CoinGeek Conversations, Mohammad shared insights into the Elas approach to business and his journey within the Bitcoin SV ecosystem.
As he tells Charles Miller, "Elas is a digital consultancy company that focuses on building its own proprietary technology, using blockchain to help businesses and governments of all sizes to leverage off this revolutionary technology, to solve problems that they otherwise could not solve with legacy technology.”
One example of Elas' work revolves around combating counterfeiting in the luxury goods industry. Mohammad explains the collaboration with Ali Beydoun, founder and CEO of Manufact, who approached Elas with an issue. "Manufact facilitates authenticity in the luxury goods market in a way that undeniably gives confidence to all stakeholders in the industry," Mohammad explains. Elas’ solution not only safeguards brands but also assures consumers of impeccable provenance.
A live demonstration at the London Blockchain Conference showcased how Elas is revolutionizing authenticity verification. While opening a sealed box of Vinyl Cigars, a boutique cigar manufacturer in Los Angeles, Mohammad demonstrated blockchain’s tamper-evident capabilities, coupled with digital twin pairing and the technology’s ability to record events in real-time.
As Mohammad recounts, "we leveraged off the existing hardware and processes and configured it to be able to also interact with the blockchain once a trigger was done, such as opening the box". This innovation not only enhances transparency but also records supply chain events onto the blockchain for future reference.
For consumers, accessing product information is a breeze. When Charles inquired, “You don't need any special downloads or anything to make this work?” Mohammad agreed adding, a simple tap, even before purchase, reveals a wealth of information—production date, country of origin, product details, and supply chain history.
Another noteworthy collaboration involves Tokneovate, a pioneer in voluntary carbon credit derivatives trades. "Tokenovate wanted to revolutionize the entire financial and trading world. They had some very, very ambitious milestones," Mohammad proudly announces. Elas is executing the first live trade using Bitcoin script and smart contracting on the blockchain - a monumental achievement in the carbon credits trading domain.
Despite the demanding workload, Mohammad is thrilled about Elas' growth. "We are attracting a lot of interest and engagement. It's very exciting," he says.
As for life in the business world, Mohammad says it’s "survival of the fittest." He acknowledges the challenging times but underscores the importance of providing value and maximizing opportunities.
Furthermore, Elas unveils a groundbreaking offering—a private ledger on the public blockchain. Mohammad explains, "We use the Satoshis on the Bitcoin network to create private compartmentalized zones." This innovation guarantees impeccable provenance, a crucial factor for governments and enterprises seeking unparalleled transparency.
"For certain types of customers, it is a recommendation that we will make," Mohammad adds, emphasizing the flexibility of this solution across diverse industries.
As an independent company, Elas is always on the lookout for opportunities and like-minded partnerships: "we're still rolling along, and the future's looking very bright."
Darren Kellenschwiler’s long BSV history runs from the tumultuous days of the BCH-BSV split to his current role as a technical lead at the BSV Blockchain Association.
On this week’s CoinGeek Conversations, Darren takes a trip down memory lane with Charles Miller, recalling the end of 2018 when he hosted Bitcoin meet-ups in London. It was during this period that the Bitcoin Cash (BCH) and Bitcoin SV (BSV) split occurred, resulting in heated debates and ideological divisions within the community. Darren recalled the atmosphere, when "everything was a little tumultuous, and people were taking different ideological stances. There were very strong arguments - over a beer! That's the sort of atmosphere at that time. It was the hash wars era."
Darren was on the Bitcoin SV side of the divide, firmly believing in Dr Craig Wright as the inventor of Bitcoin. As he explained, "I had made my mind up years before that this chap, Dr Wright is the inventor of Bitcoin. So I didn't really waste my time with the crowd that were somehow rebelling against him."
As Bitcoin SV emerged, Darren took “a leap of faith” despite the ongoing debates about Dr Craig Wright. As he says, “there wasn't a lot of public detail with respect to the evidence for Dr Craig Wright having invented Bitcoin." This period also marked the birth of the "Bitcoin protocol is set in stone" campaign.
One of Darren's notable contributions to the BSV community was Baemail, an email application integrated with micropayments. He explained his motivation behind it: "I don't like spam. I hate reading emails that are not relevant to me. So I thought, attach some value to it. We'll create ‘inbox economics’, where the highest in the inbox is the person who paid you the most for you to read it." While Baemail gained quick adoption within the BSV community, it faced challenges in achieving widespread usage due to limitations in BSV wallet adoption.
Darren's journey continued when he met Brendan Lee from ELAS Digital at a conference in London. Brendan bought Baemail and hired Darren, making him a co-founder of the company. Together, they delved into building Metanet applications and experimenting with hosting entire websites on the Metanet, a concept that was both groundbreaking and esoteric at the time.
Today, Darren serves as the technical lead of the utilization value stream at the BSV Blockchain Association. He described his role as multifaceted, involving contributions to various aspects of the BSV ecosystem. He also emphasized the Association's responsibility to ensure that the user experience and businesses built on BSV remain intact and thrive.
Darren also highlighted his passion for tackling complex challenges and his role in documenting, analyzing, and improving wallet architectures within the BSV ecosystem. He mentioned the importance of effective communication and collaboration with developers, including discussions with Dr Craig Wright, to advance the ecosystem's growth and development.
Darren Kellenschwiler's journey in the Bitcoin SV ecosystem exemplifies the resilience and dedication of individuals committed to the vision of a stable, scalable, and innovative blockchain. As Bitcoin SV continues to evolve, Darren and others like him play a pivotal role in shaping its future.
Swiss entrepreneur Bernhard Müller’s app, Centi, built on the Bitcoin SV (BSV) blockchain, is a platform that offers financial services which combine the revolutionary capabilities of digital money with the trust and security of traditional banks.
Centi's creation of the Centi Franc Stablecoin (CCHF), a stablecoin connected to the Swiss franc is a significant achievement for the BSV blockchain. According to Bernhard, the Centi Franc is a "stablecoin of a new category, which is fiat guaranteed". He stressed that this guarantee provides peace of mind, saying, "you know exactly how you can get your money as it is backed by a Swiss bank guarantee."
On this episode of CoinGeek Conversations, Bernhard details the process behind the Centi franc, explaining that for every token issued, the bank provides an equivalent amount of money as a guarantee in the event that Centi defaults. He outlined the steps involved, from contacting the bankruptcy trustee to the bank's role in collecting data and distributing funds. Bernhard emphasized, "you have this guarantee, which is quite unique".
Bernhard also points to the Centi Franc’s capability to handle micropayments, not just for trading between cryptocurrencies. "It's a direct-to-consumer stablecoin," meaning that users don't need to have large amounts of money to interact with it. Bernhard aims to get more people, including developers and businesses, to use Centi Franc.
Presenter Charles Miller suggested that the Centi Franc represents "genuine digital cash." Bernhard agreed and pointed out that when you use cash, you don't have to share your ID or leave behind any digital traces, as opposed to other financial transactions, such as with banks, where you need to share all sorts of personal information.
Centi does not rely on loans from banks, instead, it front-loads the money. This not only minimizes the bank's risk but also ensures Centi maintains sufficient reserves. The Centi Franc's real power is in its versatility. As Bernhard points out, "If you want to have a Swiss franc that's ultra-versatile and can be used for micropayments...that's not something you can do with money in a bank account because it's not cash."
Bernhard also unveiled Centi's merchant list, highlighting its growth. He explained that consumers can directly pay merchants, and Centi's competitive pricing is one of the reasons merchants choose to accept it. It’s also good to note that the absence of chargebacks and faster access to funds is an added advantage to merchants of Centi.
Furthermore, Centi has partnered with Centbee, a wallet provider based in South Africa focused on facilitating cash payments and remittances within Africa. Bernhard described their partnership as an opportunity to create a remittance product that fits well with Switzerland’s unique remittance landscape. Switzerland is a significant source of remittance payments, surpassing even the entire United Kingdom, despite its smaller size. This is due to Switzerland's diverse society, comprised of both locals and international workers, including refugees. Centbee, on the other hand, offers cash, bank payments, and mobile money services in sub-Saharan Africa, and now expanding to countries like Brazil.
Combining Centi's infrastructure in Switzerland with Centbee's offerings, the collaboration aims to create a remittance product that can meet the demands of the current remittance market.
Bernhard Müller's Centi combines the best of traditional finance with the possibilities of the digital age. As he notes, Centi offers its users the convenience of web3 technology while maintaining the familiarity of web2, making it an exciting prospect in the world of digital finance.
Musician-turned-tech-entrepreneur Shem Booth-Spain demonstrates his passion for revolutionizing the music industry through Blarecast, a music platform poised to empower artists and content creators by enabling them to own and monetize their data using the power of Bitcoin SV.
Shem's journey began in the world of music. From a young age, he immersed himself in creating music, from traditional rock and roll to electronic sounds. His experience as an independent, unsigned musician in London made him aware of the challenges musicians face in self-distribution. As he points out, blockchain's potential in the arts is still largely untapped, and he is passionate about leveraging technology to empower content creators. Shem believes that Bitcoin can play a significant role in this transformation. As he says, "Bitcoin is a medium, and our understanding is growing of what we conceive Bitcoin to be able to do."
His initial encounter with blockchain came when he and his band inscribed a message onto the BTC blockchain. He thought of storing more substantial data on the blockchain, however, as he points out, BTC had its limitations. It wasn't until the restoration of the original Bitcoin protocol on Bitcoin SV in 2019 that Shem and his team embarked on the "Data blast" operation, where they stored various data types on the BSV blockchain. This led Shem to realize that Bitcoin's potential goes way beyond data inscriptions. "I think that's actually a very interesting story of how we now understand Bitcoin in a lot bigger viewpoint than just inscribing little bits of information," he says.
Funded by venture capitalist firm Ayre Ventures, Blarecast is developing both iOS and Android apps, with a focus on ensuring a seamless and enjoyable user experience. Blarecast facilitates instant payments for music consumption, eliminating the lengthy delays often associated with traditional music distribution systems. As Shem puts it, "Bitcoin is a technology of empowerment," and Blarecast aims to simplify and streamline the payment process for both artists and listeners.
When asked about approaching big record companies, Shem says that the key lies in conveying the usefulness and applicability of blockchain technology rather than delving into its technicalities. The music industry has experienced challenges, from piracy to the emergence of streaming platforms like Spotify. Now, with Web 3 technologies and the introduction of peer-to-peer payments and NFTs, more business opportunities are coming to light. As he states, "it's about why this technology is useful and important to a prospective partner or a client."
Blarecast will allow users to make micropayments using a BSV wallet. However, Shem acknowledges the need for user-friendly payment options, "multiple tokens, multiple currencies, any fiat currency, so that whatever the consumer wants to pay, there's a seamless choice to do that." Blarecast will ensure a seamless payment experience for a global audience.
Currently living in Japan, Shem is optimistic about blockchain adoption in the country. He notes that past crypto speculative bubbles have tainted perceptions of blockchain technology, leading businesses and individuals to be more cautious. However, he believes that once a few businesses experience the speed and efficiency of blockchain technology, more will follow.
Blarecast's goal is to build a stable business that benefits artists worldwide, and Shem envisions a modular ecosystem that can adapt and evolve with emerging technologies. He stresses, "we're trying to build something that's got longevity."
In a recent episode of CoinGeek Conversations, Charles Miller sat down with Rafal Gelner, the co-founder and CEO of Zetly Fueling Sports, to delve into the exciting world of merging real and virtual experiences for sports enthusiasts, with a particular focus on football.
Zetly Fueling Sports is exploring various avenues to create immersive experiences for sports fans, incorporating elements like NFT gating and NFC (Near Field Communication), a wireless technology that enables devices like smartphones and contactless cards to exchange data when close together.
As Rafal explained: "let's say a user has a favorite jersey or sports jacket, that will be connected to the NFT. When the user goes into a match or an area where this can be scanned, you can have access to the areas to take part in reward programs". He emphasized the endless potential of this approach, comparing it to a ‘golden ticket’ that provides access to VIP areas and other club offerings.
Zetly is gearing up to launch a pilot sports metaverse in collaboration with Robert Rice’s Transmira and Omniscape. Transmira is creating digital replicas of entire stadiums through photography, allowing users to virtually explore these venues.
Zetly wants to make sports experiences more accessible to everyone. As Rafal noted, "Zetly gives access to the people that cannot afford to go to the real match or real stadium." Furthermore, users in the virtual realm will have the unique ability to interact with those attending the real event, and vice versa. This bridging of the physical and digital worlds enhances the sense of community for sports enthusiasts” and "if you've got a family member or a friend who's actually at the game, you can sort of be there with them - or at least see them."
Rafal envisions the metaverse expanding not only within the stadium but also encompassing an entire city, making the digital twin concept a tourism attraction. As he explained, Zetly's all-in-one platform will include NFT gating, utilities, sports quizzes, and support for sports clubs to tokenize and engage their fans.
BSV (Bitcoin SV) is Zetly’s blockchain of choice. For Rafal, BSV’s enterprise-level capability and ability to scale exceptionally allows for fast and cost-effective transactions. This choice to build on BSV not only guarantees streamlined transaction handling but also positions Zetly to easily accommodate substantial growth and adoption.
Rafal was enthusiastic to share news that Zetly will showcase their innovative solutions and pilot program in Seville, Spain, this month. This opportunity will give them substantial exposure to some of the world's largest and most renowned sports clubs.
However, Rafal acknowledged a challenge in blockchain education. "People like the idea but they don't understand blockchain," he noted. To bridge this knowledge gap, he emphasized the need for education and awareness, especially within the sports community.
Rafal Gelner's vision for Zetly Fueling Sports aims to engage sports fans through tokenization while giving a full-on immersive experience to users in the real and virtual worlds. With a focus on BSV's capabilities and a commitment to user-friendly subscription models, Zetly aims to revolutionize the way sports enthusiasts experience their favorite events. As Rafal says, "the sky's the limit," and Zetly is well on its way to soaring high in the world of sports technology.
Blockchain technology promises innovative solutions to long-standing problems across various industries. To learn about the work of a blockchain consultant, Charles Miller sat down with IBM blockchain specialist Agata Slater in this weeki’s CoinGeek Conversations. In the interview, Agata talks about her role, IBM's approach to blockchain and the implications for Web3 technology.
As a blockchain consultant at IBM, Agata focuses on helping enterprise clients design and implement blockchain solutions. This includes everything from identifying use cases and architectural design to the actual implementation and ongoing technical support.
According to Agata, IBM assists a diverse range of clients with varying levels of blockchain knowledge. Some approach IBM with a vision for implementing blockchain while others have specific problems they need to solve, with blockchain potentially being just one piece of the solution. Agata emphasizes that the primary goal should always be addressing the client's problems effectively, even if it means advising against blockchain when it's not the right fit.
Agata’s department, IBM Consulting, remains technology agnostic. This means they can propose solutions from IBM's software portfolio but are not limited to them. They can leverage existing solutions from the market or partner with technology providers to best address the client's needs. For Agata, this flexibility allows them to serve and support clients in the most effective way possible.
When it comes to selecting the right blockchain solution, Agata points out that many enterprise clients prefer permissioned blockchains like Hyperledger Fabric due to their focus on privacy, control, and compliance. She acknowledges that while permissionless blockchains have their place, enterprises often require a high degree of control and stability, which permissioned blockchains can provide.
Agata also discusses the concept of Web3 what she sees as its four pillars: identity, tokenization, traceability, and payments. She sees Web3 as a promise of what the internet could become and believes these pillars are essential enablers for realizing that promise. While solutions for these aspects already exist, she believes that Web3 can bring them together in a decentralized ecosystem.
Interestingly, Agata holds a Ph.D. in Linguistics from the University of Edinburgh, where she studied the language of the Caribbean. She explains how her academic background focused on language and identity, which involved ethnographic research and the analysis of grammatical features in vernacular speech. While her academic journey may seem unrelated to blockchain, she points out that understanding cultural nuances and effective communication are essential skills when dealing with diverse clients and communities in the blockchain ecosystem.
While Agata acknowledges the passion around the different blockchain technologies and protocols, she says she refrains from getting caught up in debates over which blockchain is superior. As for her thoughts on Bitcoin SV’s capabilities, she acknowledges its potential in terms of scalability. She anticipates that only when more enterprises with substantial scale requirements enter the ecosystem will BSV’s full potential be realized.
In the concluding episode of Coingeek Conversations' summer series, Charles Miller engages in a discussion with Amy Bowe, the entrepreneur behind Block Dojo's innovative blockchain platform, GHGBlaze. GHGBlaze is dedicated to assisting companies in obtaining precise assessments of the carbon emissions associated with their products.
As Amy says, the need for accuracy is gaining traction as companies are faced with mounting pressures to disclose their carbon emissions. With the growing mandate for these disclosures, there is a heightened legal liability linked to their precision, she points out.
Amy also draws attention to regulations implemented in European Union nations, which effectively impose taxes on the carbon emissions of imported goods. To determine the tax obligations for imported goods, a comprehensive understanding of their associated emissions is imperative, she notes.
Furthermore, Amy underscores an emerging commercial demand for low-carbon commodity products. To cater to this demand, she emphasizes, it is imperative to be well-informed about the emissions tied to the products one is marketing.
GHGBlaze aims to enhance operational efficiency by offering a centralized and standardized solution for the storage of emissions data. This centralized repository can then be accessed by relevant parties to extract the necessary data.
The primary source of revenue for GHGBlaze is anticipated to be derived from subscription agreements. As Amy explains, companies keen on accessing this data will be required to pay an annual subscription fee.
In addition, GHGBlaze plans to leverage the tokenization aspect of blockchain technology. Under this framework, each emissions data point will be assigned a value based on its perceived utility, thereby incentivizing companies to provide this valuable service.
Amy firmly believes that blockchain technology is a valuable component of GHGBlaze. As she points out, “the immutability aspects are valuable but when it comes down to these incentive payments and having effectively creating a market through tokenization, that can't be done with a centralized database," she says.
In summary, GHGBlaze, under the leadership of Amy Bowe, is poised to play a pivotal role in helping companies accurately assess and disclose their carbon emissions, while also aligning with emerging regulatory and market demands. Through blockchain technology and tokenization, GHGBlaze aims to revolutionize the way emissions data is stored, valued, and shared within the business landscape.
Carby is the first marketplace for future carbon credits, solving liquidity, scalability and transparency issues of the market. It’s CEO and Co-founder Mark Moores believes more carbon projects are needed to fight climate change. Speaking as a father, Mark tells Charles Miller on this episode of CoinGeek conversations, “when you have a child, you re-evaluate things and you think about the future and one thing you've got to think about is what type of planet are we bequeathing our children?”
With Carby, a platform that connects carbon projects with carbon credit buyers, Mark is addressing climate challenges by scaling the voluntary carbon market. The platform will help provide project developers with funding to overcome cashflow challenges while giving them access to liquidity solutions in the market. In effect, the platform will encourage project developers to increase the supply of carbon credits as buyers signal a future demand.
Project developers will be able to sell NFT’s that represent a specific carbon credit in a specific future year. Attached to the NFT is an advance purchase agreement that gives project developers a legal obligation to deliver the carbon credit to the buyer once it's been produced.
CyberXchain looks to incentivize ethical hackers using blockchain technology
Cybercrime is a massive problem, says Jean Lehmann, Founder and CEO of CyberXChain, a marketplace that brings together ethical hackers and businesses.
As defined by Jean, “ethical hackers are essentially professionals, security experts, consultants looking to flag, fix and identify vulnerabilities in computer systems so companies can be better informed of the vulnerabilities and the steps on how to fix them.”
As Jean explains, “everyday brings in new headlines of cyber-attacks, we are observing a never ending cycle of cyber-attacks and the cyber arms race between the attackers and the defenders.”
Jean’s solution is to create a trust and economic layer between ethical hackers and businesses. With CyberXchain, ethical hacking is democratized, made more accessible and cost effective for both businesses and ethical hackers, he says.
The platform will have its own token that ethical hackers can directly be rewarded with upon job completion, through their digital wallet. According to Jean, using blockchain technology will improve operational efficiency and create economic incentives . “I look at blockchain as a way to create an economic policy, governance and technology ledger, which is going to bring various types of efficiency and benefits around smart contracts for rule based automation of security events,” he says.
After many years of working in cybersecurity, Jean realized that the service model to counter cyber-attacks is not scalable. For his part, CyberXChain will address the cybersecurity challenge while creating economic incentives, ultimately improving security posture.
Watch the full episode of CoinGeek Conversations’ third installment of its summer special series featuring Block Dojo entrepreneurs here:
On the second installment of CoinGeek Conversations Block Dojo series, Charles Miller speaks to two entrepreneurs who are looking to improve business efficiency with blockchain technology.
Sports Finex is a platform that enables quicker and cost-effective business deals between financial institutions and football clubs. According to its Founder and CEO, Nico Malgeri, the platform aims to streamline the tedious part of the dealmaking process. “We simplify the whole process of finding opportunities in the football market for financial institutions that want to invest in football,” he says.
As Nico points out, Sports Finex solves a recurring problem in football clubs. “When football clubs sell a player, they don’t get the money all in one chunk, usually in installments, this process involves many intermediaries and takes a lot of time,” he says. With Sport Finex’s invoice financing solution, both parties will be able to close deals faster and players will be able to receive payments seamlessly.
In addition, the platform will make use of an AI machine learning system to match financial firms to football clubs while also leveraging blockchain technology to validate stakeholders and store data. As Nico explains, blockchain will provide that extra layer of security to avoid leaking deals to the public.
Sports Finex will charge both stakeholders a subscription fee and take a small percentage in commission from both parties.
Similarly, BizCrunch facilitates deals but this time, between investors and the businesses they want to acquire. According to its Founder and Head of Growth, Alfie Lambert, the subscription-based platform offers investors information and an analysis of companies that are not listed for sale, but perhaps interested in selling.
As Alfie explains, the platform will use algorithms to find data that companies don’t usually highlight in their portfolio’s.
As for the use of blockchain technology, Alfie says “One problem is trust from either end, that’s where we want to harness the immutability power of blockchain.”
Currently in beta, BizCrunch plans to launch its platform in September.
On this episode of CoinGeek Conversations, two entrepreneurs from London’s incubator program Block Dojo speak to Charles Miller about their start-ups and how they can solve real world problems.
First up is Ditto, an AI-powered platform that aims to help people combat loneliness. “We are in a global epidemic of loneliness,” says James Kirk, Ditto Founder and CEO. Research suggests that over half the adults living in the United Kingdom experienced loneliness in 2022. The platform which focusses on companionship and mental well-being will utilize advances in AI technology, allowing users to have human-like conversations with Ditto.
The platform, which is connected to the internet, will have access to real time information, but unlike Amazon’s cloud-based voice service Alexa, it will proactively learn about its users’ lives. The platform will ask questions about the users’ likes and dislikes, store and remember this information and eventually match up users with other human beings with shared interests and experiences.
James is currently working with a team of experts which includes an engineer with expertise in AI technology and a professor working in the intersection of AI and healthcare.
According to James, there’s a role for technology in companionship. Some studies even show that people feel more comfortable speaking to a machine than a human being. As he points out, technology “is always there, it’s always going to say the right thing and it’s non-judgmental.”
On the second part of the show, Tristan O’Dwyer, Founder and CEO of Vymt, talks about his platform for social media influencers who operate in the gaming sector.
As he explains, today influencers receive all the revenue, leaving their followers unincentivized. Vymt takes a different approach by rewarding viewers with a blockchain-based token for discovering and following new talents.
A QR code will randomly pop up on the screen while viewers are engaged in a video. The viewer will then scan the QR code and be directed to either a multiple choice question, an opinion poll or a feedback survey based on the content. If answered correctly, the user will be rewarded with a token that has real world utility.
According to Tristan, the business model essentially allows users to move around the platform and find influencers. In turn, viewers’ attention is distributed equally and advertising revenue is likewise spread out.
Catch these Dojo entrepreneurs on the first of four CoinGeek Conversations Summer Special Episodes.
For James Belding, the co-founder and CEO of Tokenized, the launch of his desktop app just days ahead of the London Blockchain conference in June was the fruit of years of work, ever since he appeared at a CoinGeek conference with his self-funded team in Toronto in 2019.
Described as a “self-custodial and enterprise-grade digital wallet …for issuing, managing and holding digital assets including Bitcoin SV”, Tokenized boasts an elegant interface, an easy sign up process and an impressive range of functions.
Sure, it’s taken a while, James admits, but that’s because he wanted his product to be more than just “the hundredth wallet that wasn't that good and that didn't distinguish itself at all from anything else.”
Tokenized’s distinction lies in the wide range of what James calls “instrument types” that it supports. So in your wallet, you can have an eclectic mix, including bonds, tickets, coupons and loyalty points as well alongside fiat currencies.
Despite the name of the business, James plays down the tokens themselves, partly because he thinks people have a distorted idea about them from the hype around dodgy NFTs. The tokens are just “tiny, tiny pieces of the puzzle,” he says. “You just make a token on chain. Maybe it's a five, or twenty percent improvement over current things”.
It’s the rest of what blockchain can do that is key to what he wants to achieve with Tokenized: “the real unlocking of value - and where all the hard work is - in the smart contracts and all the implications that arise from those”.
On this week’s CoinGeek Conversations, James talks about the journey from initial idea to product launch, and explains why he thinks users will agree that Tokenized was worth the wait:
“We really put our blood, sweat and tears into it to make it as compelling as we could, as simple as we could. But right now anyone can download the app and they can use it as what we think is probably the best Bitcoin wallet or even crypto wallet in the whole industry.”
Part of that claim rests on the thinking that James and his team have put into security. By reducing Tokenized’s own custody of assets, they have put their users in a more direct relationship with the blockchain: “we saw a non-custodial approach [allowing] users to connect directly with the DLT [digital ledger technology] as intuitively very compelling from a security point of view.”
That has an additional benefit when trying to sign up customers, big business especially: he can tell them that they don’t need to put their faith in Tokenized being around forever - although he is confident it will be! But if the company were to disappear, the Tokenized protocol, which is open source, would still exist and continue to operate, and users could access their assets through alternative interfaces.
“I think that resonates very well” in discussion with potential customers, James says. “It's a really powerful message and we get a lot of positive feedback for it.”
So what are the prospects for signing up big business users? James is cautiously optimistic: “we're in active discussions with a lot of big players that are getting their heads around it. I wouldn't say we're at a stage where one of the biggest players is ready to drop everything, but we're basically at the point where I think a bunch of pilot projects are going to start rolling out quite soon”.
From BSV entrepreneur to start-up enabler, Kirsty Barany-Gibson is no stranger to the Bitcoin SV community. Prior to taking on a position at global investment firm Scale Facilitation, she was known to the BSV community as the founder of Clear Sparrow, an online dating app that utilizes Bitcoin SV technology. Today, Kristy heads Access New York, a program by Scale Facilitation, offering start-ups and small-medium enterprises access to New York City resources.
On this episode of CoinGeek Conversations, Charles Miller catches up with the BSV entrepreneur who passionately shares her thoughts on Blockchain technology, its most promising use cases and how she enables innovative start-ups and SMEs through Access New York.
“We have a very much diversified portfolio. We're looking into companies in biotechnology, healthcare, obviously blockchain, so essentially anything that is a high disruptor in established industries,” she says.
As an entrepreneur in the blockchain space, Kristy firmly attests to the countless benefits blockchain technology brings to a business. “You need it, otherwise you are going to be at a massive disadvantage,” she asserts. She points to blockchain’s ability to enhance process efficiencies through transparency while allowing companies to reduce liability and cost.
Thanks to Clear Sparrow, Kirsty speaks from experience. Her platform is unusual among dating apps in that it uses blockchain technology to store users’ information. It verifies a user’s background through checking government records as a precondition to the access of potential partners.
Kirsty is also keen to point out the superior power of BSV’s technology saying “the only blockchain that is able to handle the speed and the volume is BSV”. As head of Access New York, Kirsty is enthusiastic about onboarding companies that utilize blockchain technology. As she explains, “I see the BSV blockchain as a way of future proofing the companies that we invest in” she says.
Kirsty believes that the most successful companies of the future will be those that integrate blockchain technology at an early stage. As for companies planning to integrate blockchain later on, she says it is viable, but more expensive. “If you're able to capture real live data, immutable, you are sitting on a goldmine, that is where the value is, so if you would talk to me and say, well, we can do it today, make a small investment and build it versus well, we'll see in five years, then you're losing five years of these amazing value that you could have been tracking since the beginning,” she explains.
Furthermore, Kirsty alludes to the fact that there is an abundance of talents in the BSV community that can help companies integrate blockchain: “there's a group of amazing developers within the BSV community that have been devoting years to building the building blocks, so they are there - you only have to literally bring them into your business and open a whole new dimension to it.”
Kristy’s background in technology goes back to her childhood years. Her father was in one of the largest information technology distributor companies in South America. Kirsty also worked at a cybersecurity firm in the United States that serviced some of the largest brands in various industries. “I protected the oil industry, central banks. I was never the builder, but I always understood exactly how it worked so I could implement it in a very successful way,” she says.
With a deep appreciation for blockchain technology, Kristy continues her journey, hoping to find more use cases that can truly unlock the value of this technology. As she says, “there's a lot of very profitable business models out there that have never been touched just because there's never been that transparency in
The United Nations’ World Food Programme (WFP) has been using blockchain technology to deliver assistance safely and securely since 2017 through an initiative called Building Blocks. It’s a privately managed blockchain network which allows various humanitarian organizations to coordinate efficiently, while allowing people to simply access their essential needs.
As Houman Haddad, Head of Emerging Technologies at WFP explains, Building Blocks is “a humanitarian blockchain network which aims to, in a neutral manner, bring various actors together as hundred percent co-owners, co-operators and co-governors.”
On this episode of CoinGeek Conversations, Charles Miller finds out how multiple agencies use the private blockchain to enable a cohesive working environment while at the same time, allowing people to receive different types of assistance with less complexity.
As Houman points out, “by putting the people we serve at the very center, gaining a common visibility on who's assisting whom, we can coordinate that assistance to ensure more equitable outcomes and make the redemption process simpler for the people who are dependent on that assistance.”
Oftentimes, humanitarian agencies serve people who lack digital literacy or don’t have access to phones or connectivity. So how does the system work? As Houman explains, “the way we've designed our system is so that the people we serve don't need any of those things - or don't necessarily need any of those things - but we do need connectivity and a device at the point of distribution.”
In the current system, the UNHCR, which has a mandate for protection of refugees, collects documents (if any), biographic and demographic data, as well as biometrics from every refugee family who in turn receive an identification card that only contains a pseudonymous code. WFP then creates a blockchain account using the pseudonymous code for each refugee family. WFP’s onchain work begins as they deposit food tokens into a blockchain wallet associated with the family’s blockchain account. In effect, WFP will not have the refugees’ names or birthdates, therefore protecting every individual’s identity.
As for redeeming entitlements, an individual can go to a supermarket, simply select items and checkout using the UNHCR ID card. WFP then needs to authenticate the transaction through various methods, depending on a country’s limitations. “In Jordan, it's by iris biometrics. In Bangladesh, it was finger biometrics before COVID. But it can be anything. It can be a QR code. It could be a simple pin,” he says.
Houman envisions a future where individuals take complete ownership of their accounts by owning and controlling their own private keys. “At that stage, we won't simply hand them their private key, they will generate their own private key and we will transfer ownership to them,” he says.
Houman is also keen to point out that the use of a private blockchain ties in well with the United Nations “do no harm principle, at heart.” As he points out, “we store non-sensitive data on chain, although it's private and we protect it heavily.”
While the UN’s humanitarian initiatives make use of private blockchain technology, Houman admits that he favors the concept of a public blockchain for its self-sustaining ability, not dependent to any organization.
Despite recognizing the advantages of a public blockchain, Houman remains steadfast with the use of private blockchain for WFP. While working on a proof-of-concept initiative in Pakistan, backed by Ethereum technology, Houman and his team quickly discovered issues with speed and cost. He also wasn’t keen on the fact that the transactions, although pseudonymous, are publicly visible.
Times are changing, literally. The Nowatch wearable looks like a watch but doesn’t function like one. Instead of telling the time, the device’s main use is to register its owners’ biometrics. As MintBlue CEO, Niels van den Bergh points out, the watch allows its users to be ‘in the now’: “It doesn’t tell you the time, it only gives you time,” he says.
The BSV blockchain helps Nowatch to track a person’s vitals, breathing, heartbeat, steps, sleep cycle among many other measures. Similar to other smart wearable brands, the information collected from its user used to be stored in the cloud. But as Niels points out, “Nowatch really wants to pioneer and push boundaries in this field.” And so the brand aims to take smart watches to the next level by offering its customers the opportunity to own and monetize their own data with the use of blockchain technology.
As Niels tells Charles Miller on this episode of CoinGeek Conversations, every Nowatch user will own their own data. “You can do things with it that you can do when you are an owner: you can share it, you can sell it, you can rent it, you own it, you decide,” Niels says.
There are benefits to sharing your Nowatch data to your service providers. For instance, your doctor can access and monitor your sleep cycle after prescribing you new sleep medication or your gym trainer will be able to access your vitals and see how your body reacts to an exercise routine. With the data-sharing capability of Nowatch, people can receive better service.
As for monetizing from your data on the Nowatch, Niels says it’s possible, for instance, for a research organization to track hundreds or thousands of people’s heart rates during a football match. “That's cool information that research labs can use well, and imagine the machine learning algorithms that also can be fed with this information, it's truly authentic information that you buy from an owner,” he says.
Nowatch is one of the many clients of MintBlue, a company that offers blockchain services to businesses. MintBlue’s vision is to create a public protocol spec, not only for Nowatch but for competitor smart wearables that want to integrate the technology as well. As Niels says, “we are like the Yoda to the heroes, we help organizations reap the benefits of Web3, we make it very easy for organizations to just plug and play our SDK and APIs into their backend systems.”
MintBlue also wants to have all its use cases collaborate using BSV technology saying “the BSV blockchain is one global ledger for everything, for all use cases, so all of the clients that we sign up can interoperate.”
From a business perspective, Niels says it’s all about finding the right use cases, as well as focusing on marketing and sales. He believes personal connection is everything. As he points out, “business is still people talking to each other and trusting each other.” For Niels, at the end of the day, business boils down to people having a relationship.
For more than two decades, Giovanni Franzese has been working for the telecoms giant Ericsson where he served most recently as Head of Blockchain Business Development. As an engineer, Giovanni liked to experiment with different types of technologies, but it wasn’t until six years ago that he decided to use blockchain technology to develop a product solution.
The product, Ericsson Customer Acceptance is a big win for Ericsson. As he explains, “it's a big product, it's very successful, and we have we have a very vast adoption.”
As he tells Charles Miller on this episode of CoinGeek Conversations, innovation from within a corporation is extremely complex. “Innovation comes through acquisition, it's much easier: you buy a company which has a brilliant idea,” he says.
In Giovanni’s case, his idea to use blockchain didn’t happen overnight. He admits that transforming his idea into a viable product was a struggle at first, but he worked ‘under the radar’ and step by step: “it’s like Lego bricks buildings, the first one and then the second, and then it was a good building at the end,” he says. It also helped that he found an internal stakeholder to sponsor his idea.
Ericsson Customer Acceptance is backed by Hyperledger Fabric, a private blockchain technology. While building the product, Giovanni wasn’t aware of any public blockchain with secured scalability and high transaction rates per second. On top of that, he was wary of proposing the use of public blockchain which he colleagues might fear would potentially expose corporate data.
As Giovanni explains, the challenge continued as there was resistance to a product that had the word blockchain associated to it. As he points out, “at the very beginning nobody wanted it because it's not a secret that blockchain is still a little bit controversial, especially when we have such scandals like FDX.”
Despite the roadblocks, Giovanni’s blockchain-based solution was deployed to several Ericsson customers. At the end, he says “the benefits were so evident.”
Giovanni left his position at Ericsson to join nChain where he plans to expand the BSV-supporting global tech company into a consultant service company. Only a few weeks after taking on the role of nChain executive partner, Giovanni had the opportunity to speak at the recent London Blockchain Conference. He highlighted his experience in developing, implementing, and eventually providing blockchain solutions to big corporates.
In his talk, he shared a significant career-lesson to his audience: “I don't regret what I did and the decisions I took six years ago when I decided to embrace blockchain and use private, but my message to the audience today was, if you have to start now, then don't do it in the way I did with the use of public, use Bitcoin SV, because that is the right choice today.”
Giovanni is impressed with BSV’s capability to do 50,000 transactions per second and compares it to Ethereum which can only do an average of seven transactions per second, he says. He then compares the two blockchains to modes of transport saying BSV is like a Ferrari while Ethereum is like a little bike.
As for discussions on using private vs public blockchain, Giovanni says, “now is the time to go public.” He supports public blockchain by saying that private blockchains are for the most part centralized, costly and it don’t exploit the full capabilities of blockchain technology.
Former iOS developer Kevin Healy first found fame when he released a video on YouTube called “What is Ethereum?” Published in 2016, in the video, Kevin shows developers how to build on the Ethereum blockchain. Despite thousands of views and some revenue he received from the video, Kevin removed it from his YouTube channel as he was worried about some of the dodgy ads that appeared alongside it. It is now back on the channel, clearly labelled as out of date and “posted for historical purposes”.
Kevin is now part of the education team at the Bitcoin Association, a non-profit organization that aims to advocate and support the adoption of BSV blockchain technology worldwide. As he tells Charles Miller on this week’s episode of CoinGeek Conversations, his more general concerns about Ethereum grew after the spat between Ethereum’s Vitalik Buterin and Dr. Craig Wright broke out in 2018 at the Deconomy Conference.
In the midst of the controversy, Kevin felt the need to “pick a side”. Then he release another successful video. Again, it received thousands of views. But this time, Kevin explains why he believes Dr Craig Wright is Satoshi Nakamoto. Despite anticipating some negative responses, Kevin went on to defend the man he believes to be the inventor of Bitcoin.
At the start of his developer career, Kevin created apps for Apple’s App Store. His exposure to investments and technology while growing up led him to a career in technology:
“My dad is a wealth advisor - a portfolio manager - and so I've always been comfortable trading stocks. Part of the reason I was obsessed with Apple is because we bought a lot of Apple stock when I was young,” he says.
Kevin remembers owning his very first iPhone in high school and thinking “how do I learn to program this thing?”This thought process eventually led him to focus his studies on computer science.
Kevin says that his early obsession to Silicon Valley success stories drove him to use the same business model as Facebook and Snapchat while building apps. Looking back, he says “it was a silly thing to do.”
As the app industry evolved, Kevin realized the chances of making millions as a single developer became slim to none. As he explains, “in those early days there were people that were making millions as a single developer but as the app platform matured, then it was more companies and you needed venture capital, and the labor for building apps became really expensive.”
At present, Kevin speaks of the advantages of Bitcoin technology based on what is written in the Bitcoin White Paper. At the recent London Blockchain Conference, Kevin focused on how to solve problems using Bitcoin. As he points out, the ability of Bitcoin to do micropayments solves many issues we encounter on the Internet today:
“If you want to do small casual payments, then you can't do that with a trusted third party because they have to be able to reverse the transactions and they have fees. It's just too expensive to do it that way. If we want to do micropayments, then we need to get rid of it [third-party involvement] or we need a model without them.”
Kevin refers to a valuable takeaway he got from one of Dr Wright’s interviews where the nChain Chief Scientist spoke about mercantilism. After watching the interview several times, Kevin says he realized that “money comes second, it's the goods and services that really is the wealth of society.” He relates this form of economic policy to the Bitcoin economy saying “money gets people's attention and the fact that the other tokens have gotten so much money, they've gotten so much attention and there's something sad about that, but at the same time too, it's also been a great filtering mechanism because now everybody inte
How do venture capitalists make investment choices? There are many answers to this all-important question for entrepreneurs looking to raise capital for their start-ups.
Tokentus, a German publicly listed VC company is an early stage investor that focuses on the blockchain market. Its Investment Manager, Mona Tiesler says one of the top criteria they look at in a start-up is its founder’s strengths - including his or her background, mindset, commitment, knowledge of the technology - as well as the business use case and the product market fit. Another important aspect is the team behind the founder and whether are complimentary to his or her skill set.
As Mona tells Charles Miller on this episode of CoinGeek Conversations, Tokentus is focused on finding start-ups in the Web3 space. While the term Web3 varies in definition, for Mona it can be explained as a decentralized web with Web3 companies being those that utilize blockchain technology to create efficiencies.
Tokentus however is not aiming to add all types of blockchain-based companies to their portfolio. They focus on financial services in Web3 related businesses, as well as some consumer facing businesses such as those in retail payments. According to Mona, Tokentus favours infrastructure and applications that will essentially power the future internet.
Mona points out that Tokentus is blockchain agnostic. She believes that every blockchain is different and that each serves a unique purpose. In her opinion, BTC is the safest when it comes to store of value while ETC offers the biggest community with more potential in adoption opportunities. Mona believes that blockchain will continue to evolve:
“I don't think necessarily the landscape we see now is going to be the landscape we see in the future, but I do believe that there will be a myriad of different blockchains existing in the future, utilized for different use cases.”
For some, the emergence of blockchain technology is likened to the onset of the consumer internet. Many companies formed during the internet’s early days failed to see it through, in effect, missing the opportunity to benefit from the technology’s success. But with blockchain technology now in the palm of our hands, the opportunity presents itself once again. And so, the question is: which blockchains will survive the test of time and which won’t?
Mona predicts “there will be some sort of consolidation process. I wouldn't say every blockchain I haven't heard of is going to be weeded out. I don't have a crystal ball. But there's incredible building going on, so maybe a big winner could be one we haven't even heard of yet.”
You can’t escape debates about AI at the moment. BSV entrepreneurs are as fascinated as anyone else - perhaps more so if they have experienced previous tech revolutions.
Jerry Chan has gone public with his cautious scepticism about the much-publicised dangers of AI, but in this week’s CoinGeek Conversations, the former blockchain infrastructure developer and Wall Street technologist says he also sees the potential of AI, and that it could have a role in his forthcoming Frobots game.
“I am impressed,” he says of his experience with ChatGPT, “it is effectively like Google search on steroids …But it doesn't know if what it's saying is true or false.”
It’s been suggested that what’s unique about generative AI (that is, AI which creates its own content in its responses) is the existence of emergent properties - higher order functions which weren’t written into the software but somehow appear, if not of their own accord then at least to the surprise of its programmers.
Jerry believes that these kinds of property don’t mean we need to attribute sentience to AI or to worry that it’s acquiring human abilities. You can think of AI as the “equivalent of saying somebody's brain has massive breadth but very shallow depth - they can know much more about many more topics than any one human brain and sort of overlay layers of meaning and see which layer of meaning makes the most sense. But at the end of the day, the thing that makes humans humans is we have our own internal volition - we don't have a program we're going by.”
To try to define what is unique about human beings, Chan points to Richard Dawkins’ book, The Extended Phenotype, which talks about how our genes are responsible not only for the physical manifestation of our bodies - the phenotype - but also for the ways in which we affect our environment too. That starts with the genes producing cells which act together, each cell ‘knowing’ whether it should be, say, a skin cell or muscle cell.
When the cells lose this ability to act together and can only behave independently, they become cancer cells, no longer a useful part of the being in which they live. So, says Chan, “we as humans have innately - down to our cellular structure - a notion of self, even cellular self, which aggregates …and AIs are nothing like that”.
Despite his mild scepticism about the dangers of AI, Chan isn’t saying that its developers should be left to do entirely as they please, because there are also potential dangers:
“Regulation would be good because if something comes out of regulation that says ‘let's put some checks and balances for whatever AI you create …Let's not plug it up into the nuclear launch code system, let's agree not to do that’. That would be a good regulation.”
More immediately, Chan is interested in AI as a part of the STEM education game, Frobots, which he is developing. The idea is to teach players computer programming, but AI gives another dimension to the idea: “humans could write programs to fight and AIs could write programs, and I'm not exactly clear whether it's certain that AI would win, because compared to chess or Go, which we know AI wins …the game is not well-defined. It's an open ended game”.
Calvin Ayre: Blockchain can make governments look good to their citizens
The London Blockchain Conference next week will be held at a prestigious venue in Parliament Square - no coincidence because its tagline is “Bringing government and enterprise onto the blockchain”. As conference creator Calvin Ayre explained in this week’s CoinGeek Conversations, the use of blockchain could benefit both governments and citizens:
“Governments can use this technology to manage data in a way that makes them look really good to their citizens. They're saving costs. They're being able to provide unique services that weren’t possible before.”
But the “honesty and truthfulness” of a government will also become more transparent to its citizens, which may not always be welcome, Ayre believes: “it's going to be interesting to see how this unfolds because we do know that a lot of governments don't like things that force them to be honest”.
The conference is “about solving big data challenges in a unique way with blockchains”. And although Ayre is a big supporter of the Bitcoin SV (BSV) blockchain - partly through his Ayre Ventures, which invests exclusively in BSV businesses -, he insists that the conference is not a BSV event: “BSV is just a tool. If someone else has another tool that wants to compete in that space, then the conference is open to them.”
Indeed, the conference advertised for participation by supporters of any other blockchain that had what Ayre considers essential to serve this market - unbounded scaling, the ability to make nano payments and a readiness to follow all existing laws - but nobody applied: “nothing came back. Not one person. And I found that shocking actually”.
Ayre draws a complete distinction between the work he supports and the rest of the ‘crypto’ market. He sees no future for crypto and backs the suggestion of a Select Committee of British MPs who recently recommended that crypto should be regulated under gambling laws rather than financial - as it currently is under the FCA (Financial Conduct Authority) in the UK.
“Innovation on blockchains will happen after the crypto nonsense is cleared of the way,” he says. And as a former entrepreneur in the world of online gaming he believes that crypto is “like gambling - only it's like illegal, unregulated gambling”.
On the current media focus on AI, Ayre believes that more important technological developments will be centred on the implementation of BSV and IPV6 - an internet protocol that allows greater scaling of IP addresses than the currently more common IPV4.
“You're not going to solve the challenges that the Internet has with artificial intelligence. You need what BSV does to make the Internet work better, for artificial intelligence to work better. They are things that will actually work together”. The BSV blockchain could provide a record of the provenance of data used in AI - an essential additional component to make its results more trustworthy.
On the question of Dr Craig Wright’s many ongoing court cases, closely followed in BSV circles, Ayre is a huge supporter of Dr Wright on social media, but admits “I'm not a fan of all his court cases. I actually wish that there was a lot less of that and a lot more focus on business.” Nevertheless, Ayre has no doubts about Dr Wright’s claims - “of course I support him because he's right. I just don't think that all that stuff needs to be proven right now”. He jokes that “everything looks like a nail to Craig and he's got a couple of hammers in his hands”.
The London conference will be the first of a regular annual event, Ayre says. From next year, he wants to expand it from this year’s two stages - focussing on business and technology - to three, and to extend th
Tim Malik, CEO and co-founder of Combat IQ, has come a long way since participating in the Block Dojo program in 2022 - the London incubator for start-ups building on the Bitcoin SV blockchain. His Combat IQ, which has since been with company accelerator, Techstars wants to be a game-changer in the combat sports industry with its AI-powered analytic platform.
Armed with investment, a vision and determination, Tim says his team exceeded their own expectations in completing their prototype and having the opportunity to conduct real-time pilots with sports leagues. The company now plans to scale their operational capabilities as they look to raise a seed round at the end of the Techstars program.
On this episode of CoinGeek Conversations, Charles Miller and Tim catch-up to talk about Combat IQ, how it uses AI to process data and how blockchain can play a role in resolving disputes in the sports betting industry.
Combat IQ is about delivering data while providing great benefits to industry participants. Fight promoters will be able to use the data provided to them by the platform to augment community-building on their websites. Rights-holders can maximize value as viewership increases and more sponsors advertise in their league.
As Tim explains, real-time data delivered during sports broadcasts allows viewers to engage more. “The world of sports broadcasting, sports viewership is changing dramatically. As the younger generations get in, they're changing the way people view sports, how they interact with it, and people are always looking for real time information in convenient ways. Fans want to see data points,” he says.
In addition, Combat IQ enables real time markets combat sports betting. As he explains, “we send odds to betting companies directly and they would put those odds on their marketplaces for people to bet with”. Until now, betting in play is mostly limited to UFC. With Combat IQ, he aims to enhance people’s betting experience by providing leagues with real-time data using cameras and motion tracking systems. The league can in turn use the data to educate and engage their fans in the same way blue chip leagues such as NFL and F1 do.
How does Combat IQ apply AI in data analytics? As Tim explains, an automated system works in place of a person who identifies certain components of a fight such as the number of strikes on the ground - which he says is impossible for people to track. Measuring factors such as speed of punches and kicks, which humans cannot do through the naked eye, are also made possible with Combat IQ’s system. Components are analyzed by a system that will determine which metrics have the greatest impact. Combat IQ will then provide the AI-processed data analytics to leagues for their own use.
How does blockchain fit into Combat IQ? Blockchain is utilized in the sports betting part of the platform. “When we deliver odds to sports betting companies, we actually publish those odds to the blockchain at the same time,” Tim says. “And that's how we create, an immutable record for dispute resolution, conflict settlement.”
Watch the full interview on this episode of CoinGeek Conversations.
Entrepreneurs Alyna, Jonathan and Dimitar found new and clever ways to improve the way people work, eat and conduct business. While all come from different backgrounds, together they share a common vision: using blockchain technology to leverage their business platform.
Pakistani entrepreneur Alyna Butt wants to revamp the overall work experience through Squadbond, an all-in-one workplace platform similar to a productivity management software, but with an added feature: a token reward system.
While productivity management tools help with efficiency, they lack the ability to reward workers for their achievements. As Alyna points out, employees want to be recognized for the work that they do. With Squadbond, she says “people can own their performance.”
As she tells Charles Miller on this episode of CoinGeek Conversations, the platform will includes a feature that would allow employers to track a worker’s milestone achievements and offer them rewards for a job well done. “The tokens are highly-customizable,” she says. “They [employers] can attach a monetary value to it or they could give a gift card or …give out equity.”
Having been on both sides of the spectrum, as an employer and an employee, Alyna believes that there is a disconnect between the two. According to her, companies spend about £2,600 a year on every employee to have access to productivity management software - only to realize that employees are challenged by having to use them. In turn, she says issues like improving retention and employee engagement remain unresolved. Alyna believes that an incentive system is a simple solution that would help connect employer and employee.
From bridging the gap in the workplace to connecting food producers to consumers. Gud Italia, an international ‘farm to fork’ marketplace is the brainchild of Jonathan Silvestri, an Englishman with an Italian father who worked as a chef in the UK. Having been exposed to the restaurant business at a young age, Jonathan knew that the high demands of the industry were not for him. He then took on several careers: as a food journalist, an actor and a civil servant in the UK.
It wasn’t until after moving to Italy fifteen years ago that he found his way back to the food industry. He met with some of the country’s artisan food producers and immersed himself in their stories, learning about the history of Italian food production. He later realized that there is a missed opportunity in the distribution of Italian goods to the UK. As he explained, artisan producers in Italy have a difficult time getting their products out to the UK. “The quantities required of them, it's too much, it's too heavy, they have other barriers, language barriers, logistical barriers, marketing costs, all those kinds of things so they often avoid selling to the UK altogether,” he says.
With Gud Italia, he aims to bring Italy’s artisan food products to the UK while utilizing blockchain to timestamp a product’s journey from production to destination, as well as the delivery timeline and temperature in which it was stored. As Jonathan points out, the system will not only benefit consumers by providing knowledge on their food’s history but it will also offer farmers and producers a chance to be known, be exposed and to build their brands.
From food to real estate. Dimitar Hadzhiradev wants to build trust between landlords and realtors through blockchain. Dimitri, a landlord himself, gave an account of his unpleasant experience with property managers while trying to rent out his property from overseas. As he explains, “it's always a pain to find a trusted partner who will manage my property. Of course you can go the traditional way to an agency, but agencies are inefficient.”
With Sprooce, he says all transactions
Ever wondered how books get published? It’s not an easy process says Arsim Shillova, co-founder and CEO of Libraro, a platform that will allow the general public to have access to unpublished books – and help publishers decide which to support. Arsim, an author himself, was disheartened after seeing first-hand what it takes to get a book published.
“I actually wrote a book and decided to try and get it published through the traditional way of sending it to a literary agent and to my disappointment, I never got a response,” he recounts.Out of curiosity, he decided to visit the publishing company to get a better understanding of the process.
As he tells Charles Miller on the latest episode of CoinGeek Conversations, “when I entered this office, I realized why I never got a response, because the office was full of manuscripts. Physically it was impossible to read that many. But technology should be able to solve this problem.”
Arsim says that authors like him stop writing after experiencing rejection through the traditional process. With Libraro, he wants to give writers an opportunity to get their work out to the public. As he explains, Libraro allows authors to write from scratch or upload their content onto the platform. Artificial intelligence will then provide a synopsis of the manuscript as well as offer suggestions for possible improvements. Once the content goes live, readers can access the author’s work with an option for both parties to engage with one another. “It's almost like another social community platform,” he says.
The platform utilizes blockchain in such a way that content on Libraro is recorded on the ledger: it is immutable and offers a layer of protection: “intellectual property rights are something of a concern to everyone out there who writes something,” he says. “We will use blockchain to timestamp the manuscript, so we know that there is a digital record and it sits in blockchain with your credentials.”
Libaro is currently in talks with the London Writers’ Salon, a writers’ group with twenty-thousand members. “The idea is we want to channel these writers to our platform,” Arsim says.
From books to sports. Next up, Charles speaks to James Hart, Founder and CEO of Rumblebox, a platform that makes use of NFTs to fund new sports leagues and events. As James explains, sports fans will be allowed to crowdfund through Rumblebox in exchange for benefits such as tickets, VIP access to the athletes, merchandise and monetary rewards.
James says their plan is to target the Gen Z. To start with, they intend to focus on emerging sports such as esports and YouTube boxing: “the younger fans that are more NFT-friendly, are more likely to have completely different tastes and in the way that they consume sports, for example, they like esports way more than football, and in some countries they like YouTube boxing over traditional boxing”.
Part of Rumblebox’s strategy is to partner with an athlete or influencer and to leverage their audience by having these personalities act as endorsers of the new sports league or event. As James explains, Rumblebox will work similarly to NBA Top Shots, a popular NFT marketplace that allows users to trade on the platform regardless of their knowledge of the technology behind it. Just like NBA Top Shots, which has a million users, Rumblebox will price its products in US dollars.
According to James, their objective is to create new sports franchises or sports leagues that will bring long term value: “the more profitable and more organic growth that they [athletes and influencers] get for the fan base for those leagues and events, the more valuable a season ticket or a VIP access pass is going to be.”
Watch Arsim and James talk
Solving lack of financial inclusion in Africa with Wleepay
Two-thirds of the African population don’t have access to traditional financial services, says Wleepay founder and CEO Lionel Bernard. Because of this, he started Wleepay, a company that offers mobile financial services to the unbanked in Africa. “The word Wlee is used by certain tribes on the west coast of Africa, it literally means money,” Lionel says.
Wleepay is currently available in his home country of Liberia and will soon expand to Sierra Leone, Guinea and Ivory Coast. According to Lionel, banks in Africa are scarce and target only high-end customers, leaving the average person with low income to the unbanked population.
Wleepay will address the lack of financial inclusion in Africa by offering its potential customers some attractive features. “Our fees are way lower than competitors. In some cases, our competitors are charging twenty percent in transaction fees. We're charging between two and five percent,” he explains. “The other thing we're providing is better customer service, which is something you can't get with others. We also provide a crypto wallet.” The mobile financial service company also plans to onboard small businesses such as street vendors and taxi drivers onto the platform to accept payment through Wleepay’s QR code.
Lionel left his software engineering career in the United States to pursue entrepreneurship in Libera. As he tells Charles Miller on this episode of CoinGeek Conversations, Wleepay allowed him to pursue entrepreneurship whilst also making a social impact. “The entrepreneur in me is eager to leverage this opportunity because I see the problems that exist and I believe that we can provide a better service to the unbanked in that part of the world. The social impact component of all of this is that a lot of unbanked folks that live in rural areas especially simply don't have an alternative. They're being taken advantage of in terms of pricing, in terms of quality of service, in terms of lack of better financial services that allow them to transact across borders,” he asserts.
Repolify: creating effective communication between government and society
Also speaking to Charles on the show is Artur Lucyk, co-founder and CEO of Repolify, a platform that also aims to solve a social problem, this time, in the democratic system of government. “Repolifyis a blockchain-based platform that will engage citizens in the political process,” Artur says. “It is designed to revitalize democracy and provide people with updates on the political process or political decisions on a national and local level.”
The platform allows users to see updates on existing laws, new and pending bills, as well as other developments in government pertaining to their topic of choice. A user can choose between topics like the environment, social welfare and taxation to receive updates on, after which, users are allowed to comment or give feedback on a specific issue. Additionally, users can access names of politicians in charge of government projects, which in turn can help voters make informative choices come election day.
Artur was keen to point out that Repolify aims to offer quality content. “We will have journalists and policy professionals supervise and oversee the quality of content and kind of the level of engagement, make sure this really works and provides value,” he asserts.
The platform will also use artificial intelligence to simplify and compress lengthy government documents for its users. “What we are trying to achieve is more simplicity, more understanding, and more awareness into what's going on.”
Artur, a lawyer by profession, had his share of experience protesting against the government in his home country Poland. He says there isn’t enough understanding of government policies within the country. With Repoli
As the world enters into the Web3 era, entrepreneurs are getting more creative, finding new ways to cater to the young generation with advanced technologies such as blockchain. A prime example is the startup founders at Block Dojo, the 12-week London incubator course where businesses are developed and pitched to potential investors.
Block Dojo participant Lena Rantsevich describes her platform as the new CV and the new standard for the future of work. “Reputy.io is a soul-bound talent wallet that helps people better express themselves and find better jobs and faster,” she says.
Soul-bound, a term coined by Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin means a token containing personal information that is validated. “It could be your medical history or driving history, anything that goes into your digital ID or digital passport,” Lena explains.
Reputy.io uses the Bitcoin SV blockchain to store information such as photos or videos that showcase an individual’s skill set. A feature on the app allows for verification of a skill or talent performed in front of an audience. As Lena explains, every “entry goes into a wallet, there is no scoring, no assessment, it's not traumatic unlike other reviews platforms.”
For jobseekers, the app is free, with an option to pay for premium access. Similar to LinkedIn, users will receive notifications when a new vacancy with a matching skill set appears. As for employers, a monthly fee offers the opportunity to search for talents that would best suit their needs. Lena also mentions an embedded marketplace on the platform that will provide users access to coaches, services and training courses.
Lena believes the platform will draw in the Gen Zs. As she tells Charles Miller on this episode of CoinGeek Conversations “there's playability of the social media - Gen Z will love it because there's a lot of creativity and customized interfaces inside.”
Also discussed on the episode is the future of travel. Alex Hurd’s TravelVRse offers a new take on how we plan travel. TravelVRse uses Web3 technology and lets users visit a destination without having to leave home. The new platform provides a travel experience in the metaverse. “You will come into a virtual world, you'll be able to pick a city that you want to go to, then you’ll be able to see a range of tours in that city that you can go with, and there’ll be themed tours,” Alex says.
As Alex points out, millennials are moving into virtual reality and web3. In turn, he says hotels, restaurants and art galleries are keen on investing in their platform to help keep up with the young market. “Hotels and landmarks are paying for this service, that is fully immersive, so you really get to feel what it's like in that local area, and then for the hotel, they want you to go and stay in the area and stay with them,” he says.
TravelVRse will use blockchain technology in its token reward system. Virtual travelers who complete challenges inside the metaverse will be awarded tokens that can be used in the real world - for instance, a free stay at a sponsoring hotel.
According to Alex, the TravelVRse app is available on the Meta store and will eventually be available in the Apple store. The first city tour launching in June will be in San Diego.
Lastly this week is CarStash, an app that will bring reliable blockchain solutions to the car industry. It’s co-founder and CEO Charles Feibel says “Carstash is basically creating a digital passport for car owners on blockchains so they can store all the history and maintenance records of their car.”
As Charles explains, they plan to onboard establishments that cater to the car industry first before releasing the app to users. After which, he says they plan to target car collectors, luxury car owners and the likes who wish to keep the value of their vehicle.
“You will basically receive a logbook wi
Julio Alejandro disagrees with much that’s said in the Bitcoin SV world. But he’s a rarity among its critics in that he welcomes the chance to debate the issues and he praises Dr Craig Wright - “an incredibly smart, capable human being” - for his willingness to engage in dialogue around contentious questions of government, money and self-determination.
As CEO of the London-based JADA consultancy, Julio provides public workshops and offers his services in private client work on blockchain and other leading technologies. Born in Mexico, he has also worked as a journalist which, through first hand experience, heightened his awareness of the problems of immigrants in both North America and Europe.
He believes in the power of blockchain to solve some of the problems of material inequality and unequal human opportunities through creating alternatives to the monopolistic power of the nation state - in its provision of passports and money in particular.
At the first of Dr Wright’s recent Masterclasses, in London, Julio challenged Dr Wright in the Q and A session, putting forward libertarian arguments for blockchain that he claimed could be achieved through the creation of DAOs (decentralised autonomous organisations). Dr Wright argued that the autonomous communities that Julio promotes necessarily exist under national laws and that opting out of those laws and the societies they exist in is not possible in the real world.
Speaking on the latest edition of CoinGeek Conversations, Julio follows up that discussion, questioning the Western-centric view of the world and arguing for the development of more autonomous, self-directed communities:
“Why do we believe within this Western vision of imposing on a group of people that this is the best system of thought? So when we say, ‘is this right wing or left wing or whatever wing’, my answer is: let other people, that are not harming someone else, create their own things - which can be a cryptocurrency or a country, a legal system. We should be coding and actually building those countries that demonopolise. That's a DAO. It eliminates the monopoly. If we're not eliminating a monopoly, we fail. If we're not eliminating the nation states, we also fail.”
He sees blockchain as a liberating technology that could spread the spirit of entrepreneurship and self-determination around the world - including to his own country of origin:
“The level of entrepreneurship in the largest Hispanic country in the world that has 130 million people - in Mexico and 40 million living legally or illegally in the United States - is a disaster. It's horrible. It's almost nonexistent. Bitcoin and blockchain, sadly, does not exist in Mexico.”
In the spirit of his desire to engage with Bitcoin SV rather than just attack it, Julio has already proposed starting an “Intentioned Community” for those who support the ideas of Craig Wright. In a new post on his LinkedIn profile, he outlines what he has in mind:
“Rent one building, let's move twenty entrepreneurs in. Craig's rules, choices, residents, and standards. We'll be 50, 300, and eventually 2,000 tech entrepreneurs in one district in London. Who's down for a #SatoshiVillage? Healthy, long-term, sustainable, tech-fitness oriented community.”
Sounds good - a bit like nChain, but healthier!
Blockchain technology is starting to impact other fast-developing tech fields such as AI and IoT. That was the message from two senior representatives of nChain, who are both organising conference events that will bring experts from the different areas together to learn from each other.
Owen Vaughan, Chief Science Officer of nChain Licencing and Alessio Pagani, Research Director of nChain were talking on the latest episode of CoinGeek Conversations. Owen is convening a workshop on Blockchain and AI at IEEE Coins 2023 in Berlin in July. And Alessio is doing the same in relation to IoT at the Global IoT Summit, to be held in October.
Neither conference is focussed on blockchain but these sessions will bring the expertise of nChain, the London blockchain development company, to a wider audience, as Alessio explained: “that's our role. That's why we are organising a workshop to help those experts in IoT to understand more about blockchain and also for us to have feedback about our research in that field and discuss with the experts - and hopefully share more about BSV and blockchain in general”.
In relation to AI, Owen says “it's a time when I think a lot of people are asking the question how can these two great advances in computer science in the twenty-first century talk to one another?” Owen’s conference, COINS, sounds as though it would be crypto-related but that’s just a coincidence. It’s been running since 2019 and COINS stands for Conference on Omni-layer Intelligent Systems.
Owen is confident that nChain’s work will be useful to AI developers - even if they are not aware of that yet. “They might not realise the technology we've developed could support what they're doing. I'm particularly interested in blockchain for data usage and auditability and things like that or identity management and decision making. And these things are very relevant in AI at the moment.”
With IoT, Alessio says it’s not just about remote sensors feeding back data from the field - traffic information, for instance, or from actual agricultural fields - but also the personal data that we collect on our phones. Use of the blockchain would remove the third party from that system. So instead of sending the information to one of the tech giants “it gives you back the ownership of the data and it allows for everyone to have access to that data - if you want”.
A blockchain system would allow for that kind of control of personal data - so, for instance, Alessio says, you could provide health data for research if you chose to, or restrict the level of detail you allow.
There is concern about the power of AI, but Owen says that incorporating blockchain into systems could help provide much-needed accountability - or ‘decision auditability’:
“so if an AI ever makes a decision, maybe it advises you to make a particular financial trade and you question that in the future it's very convenient to have an audit trail. Why did it make that decision? And this is a whole field of research now called AI Explainability. So I think the blockchain will be very useful in checks and balances …so that we can be sure why [AI) is making decisions and make sure it's compliant with legal, ethical and moral standards.”
MintBlue, a blockchain-as-a-service platform which utilizes the BSV blockchain, recently announced that it broke a new world record by making 50 million transactions on a public blockchain in 24 hours. The company’s co-founder and CIO Pieter Den Dooven tells Charles Miller on this episode of CoinGeek Conversations how they set up the challenge and describes the micropayment transactions: “all of them did a very small amount of money from one place to the other place and they also all had a little payload in it”.
Den Dooven says his team was confident they could break a previous record of 35 million transactions a day. “We aimed for 40 million, but overshot that with an extra 10 million and came at 50 million”. They later found out that a higher number of transactions had been claimed on EOS but Den Dooven is confident that mintBlue holds the record for a proof-of-work blockchain.
As far as sustainability goes, Den Dooven believes there is no such a thing as “too big” when it comes to adding data to the blockchain. He referred to a section of the Bitcoin White Paper which allows a developer to make adjustments. “You can remove certain parts of the data that you personally don't need and so there's this way of keeping track of the blockchain without keeping everything,” he says.
In the second half of the show, Den Dooven discussed mintBlue’s services and how it can benefit businesses. The company’s focus is on delivering blockchain solutions that can solve real world problems. Accounting and invoicing are some examples he mentioned that would greatly benefit from mintBlue’s API product.
Den Dooven was keen to point out that mintBlue’s software is for developers and entrepreneurs who want to build out a business. For €49 a month and €0.01 per kilobyte, mintBlue customers can easily write code on the blockchain, he says. “It's a no code and low-code platform which allows you to automate a lot of things without having to write code.”
mintBlue plans to add new features this year such as smart contracting and state machines— a feature that allows different companies to work seamlessly with each other.
After winning the BSV hackathon held in New York City in 2021, Den Dooven and his team went on to build mintBlue. Prior to the hackathon, Den Dooven worked at a consultancy firm that he founded doing mostly blockchain research and development projects for various companies and industries.
Den Dooven’s passion for bitcoin spans over ten years. “It’s been a long journey,” he says. As for his thoughts about the future of bitcoin? He says, “I'm particularly happy with how things are moving in the BSV space. We have a lot of solutions for today's problems. There's a lot of work to do, but for us that's a good thing, because we think we can solve a lot of the problems that are apparent in these times.”
As the Philippines embarks on a path to digital transformation, government agencies and various organizations are looking in to blockchain technology as a tool to help the country achieve its goal.
Shortly after Ferdinand “Bong Bong” Marcos Jr. was inaugurated as the 17th president of the Philippines last year, his administration announced its desire to streamline government services with the use of new technologies.
In response to the government’s call, the province of Bataan hosted its first blockchain conference on October of last year. The event was attended by local and international blockchain leaders, as well government officials from the Department of Information and Communications Technology— the agency tasked by the President to implement digitalization in the country.
With the aim of putting forward blockchain services to government and businesses, nChain, a global tech company that offers blockchain solutions and products, participated at the event. As Stefan Mathews, nChain co-founder and executive chairman tells Claire Celdran in this episode of CoinGeek Conversations, what followed after the event was a series of talks between nChain and the local government of Bataan that resulted to a memorandum of understanding between the two parties to establish a digital platform for the province to streamline current systems and procedures of government services.
“During the event and several meetings afterwards, I had some fairly deep conversations with Governor Garcia and Congressman Garcia and their vision for this technology and the application of it in government is second to none. I mean, they are very, very progressive thinkers.”
Bataan is poised to become the country’s blockchain hub due to its special economic zone status. Nonetheless, Stefan notes that Bataan’s freeport status is irrelevant to nChain’s objective.
“The reason we're there is the technology and the opportunity to do things with the technology that benefits the province but also benefits the country.”
Coincidentally, Stefan has been residing in Bataan for nine years. He believes Bataan is a natural fit for blockchain activity.
With the aim of forming partnerships and strengthening relations, nChain recently embarked on a series of meetings with government officials, financial institutions and a top university in the country. As a result of these initiatives, nChain has formed a partnership with Ateneo University in delivering blockchain education to its students.
“We will be working with faculty staff to train them on the delivery of blockchain courses, blockchain material.. we will be sponsoring or providing grants or funding projects for three PhD students at the university to extend their research in blockchain here in the Philippines, which also includes making available the entire intellectual property portfolio of nChain for students.. and finally, there is the internship issue, we want to provide internships both in our companies and in terms of what we're doing in Bataan for university students to be able to complete their education.”
On top of the work nChain is doing with Ateneo University, Stefan also announced the company’s plan to launch a Blockchain Dojo incubator in Bataan. Stefan says the initiative goes hand in hand with their aim to “foster Filipino innovation in the building of solutions on the blockchain that will be deployed domestically, but also potentially, internationally, it also allows us to contribute to possibly uncovering a Filipino unicorn.”
Perhaps one of the most memorable part of nChain’s recent activities was Stefan’s meeting with Philippine President “Bong Bong” Marcos. As Stefan says, the casual conversation which took place over lunch at the presidential palace covered a number of topics pertaining to the delivery of blockchain services in Bataa
Nathan Cropper knows all about the dark side of crypto. He spent eight years at Barclays, tracking down dubious account holders as part of the company’s Financial Intelligence Unit. He was in “a small team that conducted the first analysis of Barclays-wide crypto exposure”. So don’t try telling him that Bitcoin is untraceable.
His job was a little unsatisfactory because he never found out what happened to the individuals whose accounts he flagged up: the cases were just handed over to the authorities and were then out of his hands.
But this education in the murky side of crypto opened his eyes to its potential for legitimate business. On this week’s CoinGeek Conversations, Nathan talks about the intellectual and career path that has taken him from Barclays to his new position as Head of Business Development at the Vaionex Corporation.
His education got a boost when he caught a talk by Dr Craig Wright on YouTube. He remembers that what he learnt in that two-minute clip “answered so many questions in my head that …weren't able to be answered by the rest of this community in the world of crypto. I was like, wow, this guy just said something fundamental. I'm going to actually spend a lot more time looking at what he's talking about and also this thing that people are calling BSV”.
He was on his way to his next role, at TAAL, the mining and transaction processing company. That was two years ago. And now he’s moving again, to a Business Development role where he can make use of his knowledge and enthusiasm to make Bitcoin SV an integral part of the financial world that he used to be part of: “I have got so many ideas about how we can integrate and how we can connect in with the banking system,” he says.
Nathan stresses the importance of facing up to the regulatory hurdles that BSV must negotiate if it’s to realise its potential. That means passing a whole lot of tests to be accepted as financial market infrastructure: “MasterCard have done it. Visa has done it. The faster payment system have done it. There's a whole load of financial technology out there which have demonstrated that they can be considered financial market infrastructure.”
He explains the thinking behind the financial authorities’ careful scrutiny before they award the coveted infrastructure status: “if there's something wrong taking place on the Visa network, it would be absolutely terrible if everybody's card stopped working. That would be dreadful. They can't allow that to happen. So we need to be able to demonstrate that we have the same level of controls in the BSV network so that we can actually encourage big players to want to onboard the network and have people transact on top of it.”
But achieving that status won’t be easy, he warns: “there's a lot of hard work. And it's not simply going to be an easy road. It'll be a challenging one. It's one which I think collectively as an ecosystem would be extremely valuable for us to do.”
So business development at Vaionex is going to be busy - not only in attracting new customers to its multi-product offering, but also in working with other players such as the Bitcoin Association, in taking BSV’s financial utility to the next level.
Until now, the kind of people attracted to Bitcoin have mainly been developers, says Kurt Wuckert Jr. But that needs to change in order to create real Bitcoin businesses and convert existing businesses to Bitcoin.
“If we were better at sales and marketing,” Kurt believes, “we might not even be in the blockchain economy at all. We could all be selling solar panels or something and make pretty good money. So it really, I think, is largely a culture thing.”
Changing Bitcoin culture would mean bringing in experienced salespeople - and it wouldn’t matter if they came into the job knowing nothing about Bitcoin: “it's not that difficult to just hire good experienced people from sales, “ says Kurt. “I mean, there's there's companies that have SAAS [software as a service] salesmen or enterprise cloud computing salesmen. These guys could pretty quickly get up to snuff on selling Bitcoin SV solutions. Get them out there, get them knocking on doors, build leads, build clients, build business. It's formulaic. It's not that hard to do if you put the right people on the job.”
Kurt was speaking on this week’s CoinGeek Conversations, the second part of his interview for the show. This week he took a step back from discussing his day-to-day responsibilities as CEO of the mining business GorillaPool, and spoke in his capacity as Chief Historian of CoinGeek. With that longer-term perspective he stressed the importance of increasing the throughput of transactions on the blockchain to make up for the halving every few years of the ‘subsidy’ (the block reward payment in Bitcoin) that miners receive for adding a block to the chain:
“If you were just mining casually in 2009, you were earning 50 coins a block. And the average miner is earning less than seven coins a block right now. So there has been a - I don't know what that is - ninetyish percent drop off in profitability, really, if you're measuring in Satoshis. It's bad. And so we need to do better. We need to have massive blocks because that is Bitcoin's security model at scale.”
So the mining network - and therefore the continuing existence of Bitcoin - depends for its future on more businesses creating transactions to be processed. Kurt is confident that will happen, but says “we've got to hurry”.
The problem is that in the past few years, too much emphasis has been put on the extremely volatile price of coins rather than on their utility: “people kind of can't get it through their heads that there are other ways to make money with blockchain.”
If that doesn’t happen soon, there’s a doomsday scenario in which the whole Bitcoin economy grinds to a halt. People will look back on this time, Kurt speculates, thinking that “maybe blockchain was just a bad idea. And it's going to be real humbling in ten years [when] all of us are just doing something different because nobody actually got a real customer”.
But, ever the optimist, Kurt hopes the current depressed market conditions will actually prove to be just what Bitcoin needs: “this is actually what I love about bear markets,” he says. “They make people reassess that ‘Hey, maybe I've been wrong. Maybe I need to rethink the profit model of being in this economy’. And yeah, I mean, we just need somebody to get out there and seal the deal …or else.”
When you set up a blockchain mining pool, there’s plenty of complicated technology involved. And if it’s just you and a few colleagues and friends, when you switch it on for the first time, it’s not immediately obvious whether it’s working. Your computers have to compete with others on the network – the Bitcoin SV network in this case – to ‘win’ the next block on the blockchain. But are they in the game?
At the start of his GorillaPool enterprise, its founder Kurt Wuckert Jr. says, “we weren't even sure if we would build a block. We didn't know that we had it right. And then within about an hour of us putting it up, we found a block, which was our only indicator”.
It was the fulfilment of a long-held ambition for Kurt, CEO of GorillaPool, as he explains on this week’s CoinGeek Conversations; “I was very interested in doing some of these things that I've theorised in Bitcoin for a very long time and said, you know ‘what we need is an active public pool in BSV. We need a pool that is run for the sake of doing cool stuff …I really wanted to test theories and really push the limits of Bitcoin.”
A mining pool combines the efforts of a group of mining computers, sharing the rewards between members whenever any of them wins a block. GorillaPool is open to all: you can join up your own computer to the pool - but we’re talking industrial strength computers here, not just your laptop - or you can pay Kurt and his colleagues to set it up for you, renting the hardware and running it. It will cost you between $3,000 and $10,000 depending on market conditions, to put yourself into the Bitcoin business.
As to whether or not it is profitable, Kurt says that depends on timing: the price of the specialised ASIC chips that power mining computers fluctuates with the market price of Bitcoin - because everyone wants them when it’s profitable to mine. So Kurt’s advice is to buy your equipment when the market is low, and sell when it’s high:
“I've been in mining since 2013, and so this is now my fourth bear market. And what I've seen is that the people that really grow are the people that at the top of the bull market are selling their coins, but they're also selling off their fleet. They're selling their ASICs because they might have bought an asset for $2,000 at the bottom of the bear market, but they can sell it used for eight to $10,000. And it's going to be obsolete in the next cycle anyway …And so if you do that, I've seen a lot of people do really well.”
If you have faith in the long-term value of Bitcoin SV, would you be better off simply buying some when the market is low, and waiting it out? Kurt believes mining is a better option because it forces a kind of self-discipline, making you, effectively, invest regularly, in the form of electricity bills to keep your computers running, and reaping the occasional reward when the pool wins a block. No matter how you might intend to make regular savings, it usually doesn’t happen, but if you’re in a mining pool, it happens by default: “it really is the opportunity to just put it on cruise control, let it do the work and it's disciplined for you”.
On next week’s CoinGeek Conversations, Kurt talks about one of his other roles, as CoinGeek’s Chief Bitcoin Historian.
SLictionary, a dictionary platform powered by Bitcoin SV, wants to compete with traditional dictionaries to become the premier dictionary in the world. Similar to how Oxford English Dictionary was compiled, SLictionary uses a crowdsourcing method in collating words and definitions. However, SLictionary does not follow an authority like the OED does on who gets to decide on its content. On SLictionary, it’s the votes of the users combined with the machine’s learning algorithm that fills in for the traditional editorial experts.
On this episode of CoinGeek Conversations, SLictionary co-founder Jack Pitts tells Charles Miller “we [SLictionary] are just the platform provider for the real keepers of the English lexicon, and the real keepers of the English lexicon have never changed, it has always been the English [English-speaking] people.”
SLictionary introduces features never seen before in any word-defining platform. For instance, a ‘celebrity auction’ that allows users to own and monetize word definitions created by an individual who invented the word or is considered expert of the subject. As Jack suggests, these bespoke definitions will set SLictionary apart from other dictionaries.
For as little as a penny, Jack says users can immerse themselves in a unique and entertaining dictionary experience. “We make it not only easier for you to get a great definition but you get one that you really engage with where there's a picture or a video or a celebrity,” he says. These features are expected to enhance every user’s experience and entice more people to use the platform. “If there's a bit of entertainment in the dictionary, along with the kind of factbook nature of it, I think a lot more people would really enjoy using the dictionary,” he notes.
Jack was also keen to point out that “the English language is fluid and it's going to suffer from all kinds of changes.” With the help of blockchain technology, SLictionary will be able to document the evolution of a word based on how people view it at any given time. As Jack says, “that's what the blockchain is all about.. blockchain is about preserving things in posterity so that we don't lose them.”
Jack offers advice to Bitcoin entrepreneurs, saying “if you're thinking about starting a business because of Bitcoin, I think you're not really doing the right thing, I think you have to start with your passions and find something that you wish to fix in the world.”
Despite Jack’s extensive background in finance, it’s his interest in vocabulary building that prompted him to create SLictionary. At present, approximately 2,000 word definitions, all coming from the BSV community, can be found on SLictionary. Jack plans to market outside the BSV community in the next year to onboard celebrities who are known to be inventors or experts on particular words.
Jack believes that by doing so, a level of intrigue among word nerds and geeks will take shape and entice them to join the platform. “I think once we get going and we show students in colleges, universities and high schools that they can make money defining words in a competitive environment, I don't think there's any stopping it, really, I think this is happening, it's just a question of how fast.”
Dr Craig Wright is looking at a screenshot of the early Bitcoin website which someone has posted on Twitter. It’s from January 3 2009. He remembers what was going on at that time: “first launch of the code, making sure everything ran. The first set of problems shortly after that week, when it needed to be restarted.”
Dr Wright, who signed himself “aka Satoshi Nakamoto” on the previous week’s CoinGeek Conversations, this week reminisces about how it all began. He was testing his systems, with the transaction in question being one he was sending to himself between two of his own computers.
He is happy to admit that the Bitcoin website “demonstrates my lack of design skills”. There were other features he would have liked to have added but it was early days and “you can forgive me for not having everything perfect”.
He says he would probably have been making this particular transaction in the computer room he’d constructed in one of the outbuildings of his Australian farm, some hours drive from Sydney. It would have been a very techy scene: “computers, printers, more computers, screens everywhere. And me in the middle with roller-type chairs so I could get back and forth between the sites.”
So it must have been a big moment when the Bitcoin software was finally working? “Having it actually run, yes, it was good,” he says, adding with a smile, “having it crash shortly afterwards wasn't”.
A Eureka moment in fact? “Yeah, I'd say that would be the way you would look at it. I mean, I had been working on trying to find a solution to micropayment problems since 1997. So yeah, it was nice to finally have something that worked.”
To devise Bitcoin as a technical and economic system, Dr Wright had studied in a wide variety of fields: “Bitcoin is really a combination of computer science and economics and game theory and by having a background on all of these topics it makes it much easier”.
On the question of who knew that he was Satoshi Nakamoto back then, Dr Wright says that it was more widely known than he realised at DeMorgan, the business he founded to exploit blockchain opportunities. He didn’t tell his staff that he had invented Bitcoin “but I found out later that they all knew anyway”.
It seems that the staff were keeping a secret from him, rather than the other way round, as he discovered when he questioned a colleague: “‘So you guys know that I'm Satoshi?’ He went,’well, yes’. ‘All right, so why didn't you talk to me about this earlier?’ He went ‘well, we didn't think you wanted to. Obviously you wanted to be private, so we just didn't tell’.” As to why he hadn’t told them himself, Dr Wright just says “I didn't think there was a reason.”
There may be a chance to hear from some of those who knew Dr Wright at this time when he calls witnesses to the appeal hearing in Oslo later this year in the case which he is defending against Magnus “Hodlonaut” Granath. The appeal follows the original case heard in September 2022 at which several character witnesses gave evidence on his behalf. In the re-run, Dr Wright promises there will be “more” such witnesses talking about his work on Bitcoin.
The UK government has announced a consultation on crypto regulation. Dr. Wright believes that rather than new regulations, the priority should be to enforce existing financial laws because crypto is not outside the conventional financial system: “I mean, we should just actually start applying the rules and the argument that it's new, that it's online... It's really not.”
As far as Bitcoin SV is concerned, new regulation should be welcomed, and probably won’t require changes: “it'll just make our life easier as everyone else has to now start doing things that we've been doing already.”
On the first of a new series of CoinGeek Conversations, Dr. Wright defends his sometimes aggressive style on social media. He admitted that “some of it” might be seen as the digital equivalent of yelling, but insisted that was “usually only when there's trolls and you want to shut them down”.
On a recent YouTube interview he’d had some harsh words about Binance. On CoinGeek Conversations he backs up his view by describing an experiment he’d conducted to demonstrate how someone could make use of it in a way that could allow money laundering:
“I set up in one day 10,000 email addresses and registered 10,000 accounts on Binance from the US, both in the US and the foreign Binance where I had a two BTC limit. And in theory, their argument is that they have AML provisions, but that's $40,000 an account. So that's $400 million a day that I could transfer. And I could have added more accounts.”
Another way of showing that the ‘crypto’ sector isn’t operating as it should – if further proof is needed for anyone reading the news recently – is that there are more Bitcoins in total that are claimed to be on exchanges than the 21 million that will ever exist.“I mean in some of these like FTX and Binance together, there were over 40 million Bitcoin being sold…And even when you account for the same thing being sold in multiple exchanges, like some people argued, it's still too much Bitcoin.”
As for selling blockchain solutions to industry, Dr. Wright believes there’s a big marketing job to be done by nChain and others: “if there's no one telling them, then how do they know?” He compared this phase of developing the blockchain sector to his experience of the early days of the internet, when there were “big, massive conferences, multiday events” to which he was invited. “I went to parties by Cisco [and] from Sun. I got flown around the world when I was young because of Digital Equipment Corporation.”
In that spirit (without the free air travel), the London Blockchain Conference is coming up from May 31 to June 2.
In a second CoinGeek Conversation show next week, Dr. Wright discusses the origins of Bitcoin and explains how he set it going from his farm in Australia.
**To celebrate the end of 2022, the team behind CoinGeek Conversations brings you a festive special edition: the CoinGeek Conversations Christmas Quiz.
Diddy Wheldon from Women of BSV, Becky Liggero from CoinGeek and Alessio Pagani from nChain were all put through their paces by CoinGeek’s Charles Miller.
The contestants’ knowledge was tested on subjects including music, Bitcoin SV and former CoinGeek Conversations guests.
It was a competitive affair as there could only be one winner, so the guests had to be ready to ring their buzzers as quickly as they knew the answer.
Please watch and find out how you score. Thank you for tuning in to CoinGeek Conversations this year, happy holidays and we will see you in 2023 when the show returns for its next sparkling season.**
On this week’s episode of CoinGeek Conversations, Charles Miller meets three entrepreneurs from the Bitcoin SV incubator Satoshi Block Dojo, each developing a new platform that could change the way we live and work.
Do you want to create an NFT but know nothing about blockchain? If so, listen up! With HQNFTs, you can create artwork on the blockchain without having to write a single line of code. As HQNFTs CEO Divya Prashanth says “it’s a one-stop shop NFT ecosystem.”
With the platform, Divya blends her passions for art and technology. While she believes that NFTs bring awareness of blockchain technology, she says most artists are still disenfranchised. “When I talk to my artist friends, it's become very evident that the biggest blocker is blockchain itself …there’s only a few hundred thousand blockchain developers when compared to about 18 million web developers and the costs are way too high,” she explains.
Divya thinks that the art industry should follow companies around the world in adopting Web3 and blockchain technology: “if brands and companies do not take Web3 seriously they will probably be left behind.”
The idea is simple: “we are the Wix of NFTs - it doesn't matter what the utility is, it could have no utility or it could have a utility, you can just come in onto our platform, create an NFT collection and spin it off onto your own contract." HQNFTs currently uses various blockchains. As Divya states, “we love all blockchains.”
Bomi Mosuro’s heart was set on building music software since his teenage years. And he’s turned his dream into reality through his company The House of Sounds.
The House of Sounds is developing a number of platforms that can assist artists in the music industry. One such platform is Beat Lab – a project management tool for an organized music-making process. It helps collaborators work seamlessly together while creating a song or a soundtrack. “It basically synchronizes people …the tool helps them get in sync,” Bomi says.
Beat Lab allows it’s users to communicate, send messages and exchange files all in one platform. Some have likened the platform to Trello, a tool used for managing projects and tracking workflow and tasks. But unlike Trello, Beat Lab will have other special features such as a social platform where users can discover other collaborators in the music industry.
A rapper by profession, Bomi shared his strategy in song writing. His use of sound mimicking is incorporated into another software he is developing called Fluid Flow. Bomi describes Fluid Flow as “a songwriting tool that is powered by artificial intelligence.” Aside from the mimicking, the software will offer other features that will help ease the pressure on songwriters.
Payments infrastructure platform Intrasettle is onboarding multiple CBDCs into a single ledger allowing cross-border payments and other kinds of financial exchange. “The idea here is very simple,” says its CEO Kumaraguru Ramanujam. “We want to have multiple central banks issue central bank money in this platform so that we could encourage instant settlements and cross-border payments on one platform.”
How does it work? As Kumaraguru explains, the money issued on Intrasettle is “basically a representation of the CBDC, so it's a tokenised cash on our platform for them to get the benefits of having multiple CBDCs in one.” The platform can be likened to a foreign currency exchange for CBDCs except that it can also be used for securities settlements, bonds settlements and anything to do with cross-border cash.
Kumaraguro admits that there are several projects like Intrasettle undergoing pilot testing at the Bank for International Settlements. So what makes his platform unique? He plans to use Bitcoin SV technology on
On this episode of CoinGeek Conversations, Charles Miller hears from three tech entrepreneurs who are completing the Satoshi Block Dojo incubator programme. Before they pitch their Bitcoin SV business ideas to potential investors, Charles gets an exclusive account of their plans.
First up is Michael Olagunju. His platform, AirMaths, provides school students with access to quality maths and STEM education. The business idea came from Michael’s own experience at school, when his parents couldn’t hire a tutor to boost his grades - which he needed for a ticket to a top university.
Luckily, they discovered Exam Solutions a platform that offered free bite-sized videos to help students like him achieve their academic targets. With Exam Solutions’ help, Michael won a place at university and achieved a first class honours degree in Maths - from which he went on to a trading career.
But Michael then returned to his passion for education by acquiring the Exam Solutions business after quitting his trading job. With the help of Satoshi Block Dojo, he plans to take the already-busy platform to the next level. As he explains, “the idea is to be able to understand the true learning experience of a child, but also their true skill level”. Identifying these factors will assist them by providing the student with precise learning targets. It’s much like trading he says, “it’s all about trying to understand the true value of the market.. and from that, you can inform your decisions.”
AirMaths will be launching a subscriptions model that will target schools and students between the ages of 15 and 18. For as low as £10 a month, he says, students will be able to access the platform’s features and receive payouts in exchange for entering their test scores. He notes that having access to students’ test results helps the platform verify their learning programmes. “It's quite a data-dependent process where we constantly need to compare our model to the their real grades - and in order to get their real grades …we're incentivising students with payouts.”
As he explains, “being able to make those payouts to our clients via the Bitcoin SV blockchain as a micropayment is cheaper than doing it via, say, PayPal.”
Next up is Annie Siara, founder and CEO of Lunique, an online retail platform that aims to bring the luxury shopping experience into the Metaverse. Just like a high end retail store, Lunique offers a VIP shopping experience for its targeted young affluent consumers. The personalised experience includes an avatar who will assist each consumer in a customised fashion.
Annie believes that new technologies such as blockchain can help solve real world problems. In this case, it’s a matter of improving customer service – in the context of a looming recession. “Luxury brands cannot decrease their prices because it decreases their brand value, so they need to increase the value that they provide consumers,” she notes.
High value goods purchased through Lunique will be given a ‘birth certificate’ that will be stored in the BSV blockchain. As she points out, the certificate “acts as a proof of receipt as well as proof of authenticity for that product.” This would allow consumers to resell the product with confidence as data from the purchase is stored in the ledger and cannot be changed.
Finally, Borja Burgillos talks to Charles about 5tars, a platform that gives football enthusiasts a chance to predict the outcome of a real game and earn from it. He wants to take casual gaming to a whole new level by using Web3 and blockchain.
Every participant who wishes to join must pay a fee to enter a virtual arena that is connected to an actual game taking place in the real world. A participant is now able to place their bets based on their predictions. A participant’s earnings will depend on the total community of people who p
The capability of the Bitcoin SV blockchain to power a new internet will be realised when consumers see just how efficient the technology is, according to Jack Davies, Senior Researcher at nChain.
Jack believes that mainstream adoption of complex, blockchain-based technologies, like Web3 and the metaverse, will ultimately be driven by a killer application or implementation that will make using the internet easier for ordinary people.
“At the end of the day, the nuts and bolts of the problem will come down to how do you get this in the hands of everyday people and users, how do you get them to see the value that we’re talking about.”
As he tells Charles Miller on this week’s episode of CoinGeek Conversations, this is a subject he understands deeply, thanks to his work on the Metanet, a protocol developed by nChain’s Chief Scientist, Dr. Craig Wright.
Jack sees the Metanet as a perfect example of how to build interoperable websites and systems using the BSV blockchain. He says that while the idea of putting data on the blockchain might seem commonplace now, when he first joined the company in 2018, it was “quite niche.”
One of the features of Bitcoin SV that Jack thinks is most valuable is its capacity to conduct peer-to-peer transactions. This creates an internet of value – a network where assets and money can be transferred over the internet between peers without the need for trusted intermediaries.
This combined with Bitcoin SV’s scaling ability will allow for the easy application of micropayments, which Jack believes will be game changing in allowing people to monetise content on the internet.
He says that allowing customers to pay tiny amounts online to read articles or watch videos they’re interested in is more efficient and appealing than traditional advertising or subscription-based models.
Jack says that this incarnation of the internet, where users can communicate and transact directly with a native monetary system is what’s so appealing about concepts like Web3 and the metaverse and all stems back to the Bitcoin White Paper, which first appeared in 2008.
He is a big believer in a regulated digital asset industry and points out that another advantage for retail customers is that Bitcoin SV is much more pro-regulation than other digital currencies, especially BTC.
“It’s a good thing that people will see through some narratives. Like the idea of BTC as digital gold has clearly not played out particularly well in the last year. I think it’s down by some very large percentage right, again, not good for retail consumers.”
Indeed, BTC prices have been highly volatile this month following the collapse of FTX, one of the largest digital currency exchanges, and it has seen a nearly 70% drop in value since its all-time high last November.
This is disastrous for any retail customers who have put their faith in BTC and demonstrates exactly why Jack is right to say that stricter regulation is necessary to build a strong and reliable BSV ecosystem.
When you’re asked to do a survey online, what is your reaction? For most of us, it’s an eyeroll and clicking through the questions as fast as possible. But what if you were incentivised for taking part? That might make a difference.
That’s the idea behind CoinSurvey. The company, which took part in the second cohort of the Satoshi Block Dojo, wants to use rewards to help survey creators get more responses from their customers.
Ole Knutli, CEO and Co-founder of CoinSurvey, explains that the start-up is using the scaling power of the Bitcoin SV blockchain to allow clients to offer varying amounts of money to those who take the time to answer questions.
“Using the blockchain we can make incentives really, really cost-efficient, so you can add incentives as small as a cent, you can add incentives across every question, or you can change how much you want to incentivise them for different questions.”
One of the reasons that clients might want to have different rewards for questions is to remove bottlenecks in the survey, by ensuring more difficult or time-consuming questions are better rewarded.
Ole is also keen to diversify the incentives on offer to respondents, for example enabling tree planting as a reward as he believes that this will help entice a varied range of people to take part.
Ole explains that his background working as a consultant for several large municipalities in Norway has helped him to understand the importance of having accurate customer feedback.
While he didn’t work within the survey industry, he did rely heavily on customer feedback data and therefore appreciates just how vital it is for clients to know that actual customers are doing their surveys.
“If you want to do a survey about who made a purchase, you want to make sure that those answering the survey are actually the ones who made the purchase and today it’s a little bit all over the place and we think blockchain could be a very good way to tackle this problem,” he says.
CoinSurvey hopes to compete with industry giants like SurveyMonkey by focusing on this tracking element of the business, as the level of accuracy and transparency provided by using the BSV blockchain will set them apart from other companies.
The business is run by Ole, his brother, and a friend of his from college who he has partnered up with before to build a Norwegian crypto exchange called Bitruption, that is still licensed and in action today.
They joined together to take part in the Satoshi Block Dojo in the latter half of 2022 and since then have been focused on launching the product and working with clients.
But there are also plans to expand the business and introduce an audience panel that will allow users to sign up to the website and get paid for recording responses to general surveys, improving traffic to the site and facilitating BSV onboarding.
Bernhard Muller, General Manager and Founder of BSV payments processor Centi, thinks the key to creating a popular, scalable product is ensuring that anyone will be able to use it, not just people who are interested in Bitcoin.
“We really want to design a product for everyone, my mum, my brother, my uncle, everyone who doesn’t know about Bitcoin, who doesn’t care about Bitcoin even,” he says.
He believes that Centi’s simplicity will be its USP and will enable it to be rolled out to a range of different customers who haven’t necessarily used Bitcoin or integrated it into their business model before.
For example, he tells Charles Miller on this week’s episode of CoinGeek Conversations that he is purposefully targeting the media and events industries, through the launch of Centi’s ‘space concept’. This feature will allow merchants to customise pages on the app so users can buy tickets and merchandise quickly and easily online.
“For example, if you want to sell a consumer a hamburger at the event, you can basically purchase the product digitally, directly in the app and then you just need to go and collect it rather than standing in line somewhere.”
The peer-to-peer nature of Bitcoin helps to ensure that transactions are extremely quick and direct, and if both customer and merchant have Centi enabled, the funds go straight from one to another, without travelling through any custodians or middlemen.
So far, there are three onboarded merchants who are using the service commercially; one is a bar, one is a ramen noodle store, and one is a clothes shop, but Bernhard hopes to have at least a thousand merchants by the end of 2023.
While this might sound ambitious, he explains that they already have strategies in place to work with other partners who already have a long list of customers.
He also hopes that the straightforwardness of the product, thanks to a recent redesign, will prove to be a winning combination for commercial clients. But, just in case that wasn’t enough to attract new users, he’s incorporated a faucet into the app.
This means that anyone using the Centi app can receive 1 Swiss Franc (approximately 1 US dollar) just for signing up. Bernhard explains that faucets were big in Bitcoin in the early days and are aimed at getting people to experience the product without needing to connect their finances to the app.
He’s excited about the potential he sees for getting outsiders involved in Bitcoin SV and references the BSV Global Blockchain Convention as an example of how much opportunity there is, especially in comparison to how it used to be.
“The first conference we had in London after this whole split ordeal between BSV and BCH happened, I mean, it was a tiny group of people, I don’t know maybe a hundred, two hundred people that were there and now this has grown substantially with all these ambassadors and Block Dojos’ and Citadels.”
Many farmers in Africa are unbanked and may not even have access to the Internet. But the tech startup E-Livestock Global is offering a blockchain solution for such customers that makes use of an RFID system to trace cows’ histories, enabling buyers to learn about a cow’s health records among other valuable information.
For a subscription fee of just $2 US, a cow is implanted with an RFID tag and its history is updated throughout the animal’s lifecycle. The electronic ID system adds value to the livestock, says company CEO Chris Light.
Chris, a technologist whose background is in the international development sector, tells Charles Miller on this episode of CoinGeek Conversations, “by getting health care and having it through our system, we're offering [farmers] healthier cows and reduced mortality.”
Chris says the platform is designed with the farmers’ digital and financial inclusion in mind. As he points out, “some of the pilot farmers, they don't use technology and they're not in the banking system… but they don't need to have a cell phone to use our system, they just need to be enrolled in it.”
With the use of blockchain technology, E-Livestock Global delivers an identification system for livestock much as humans can be identified through passports and ID cards. With the use of their service, buyers will be able to purchase cattle remotely and not have to fly to Africa to inspect the animal in person. They simply need to check the data recorded on blockchain.
“We use the blockchain for provenance,” Chris says, “so you can't fudge the record - which wouldn't happen with the paper systems.”
A pilot study tested their platform in Africa with ten thousand animals. But as Chris reveals, they have access to a market of livestock of up to 25 million to date and plan on branching out to four countries. And it’s not just cows that their system can help with. He says it also works with sheep, pigs and goats: “our system is ready to do all that.”
The company is hoping to make a public announcement in the near future about the work they are doing with the London-based blockchain development business, nChain. “I think we will get into payments ...we're going to be a little less supply chain but a little more of value add,” he notes.
With E-livestock Global’s digital system in place, not only will the animals benefit but so will the company’s customers, says Chris. “We envision as we get to scale that we're going to have different customers, we're going to have commercial farmers, smallholder farmers, governments and large organizations.”
At present, cows have ear tags to help farmers identify cattle for their records. But with E-Livestock’s vision, these may not be necessary in the future. So MOOve on over ear tags! Blockchain RFIDs might be here to stay!
The Bitcoin Association should be focused on advancing and improving the way Bitcoin SV works rather than just trying to sell the technology, according to Jad Wahab, the Association’s Director of Engineering.
Jad believes that the role of the Switzerland-based non-profit organisation is to act as a middleman and establish connections with different partners in the space, with a view to making the system as functional to the outside world as it can be.
One of the partnerships that the Bitcoin Association has formed that Jad is particularly excited about is the work that it’s been doing with nChain and the IPv6 Forum, as he discusses with Charles Miller on this week’s CoinGeek Conversations.
The three organisations have been working together to integrate Bitcoin SV with IPv6. IPv6 is the updated version of the internet protocol, which was created in 1998 because the original internet architecture (IPv4) was due to run out of IP addresses, which ended up happening in 2011.
Jad explains that by using IPv6, Bitcoin can become truly peer-to-peer in the way it was originally invented to be, as there are enough IP addresses for every device that is connected to the internet.
“If you don’t have a unique address then it’s not a direct peer-to-peer, it’s not going directly from me to you, it has to go from me to the central hub to your central hub, that’s where the peer-to-peer aspect is missing,” he says.
Another project that BA has delivered that Jad is confident will have a positive impact on the digital currency space is the software Blacklist Manager, that was released at the beginning of October 2022.
Blacklist Manager is a listening tool that can be run by miners to enable nodes to add digital assets identified in a court order to a freeze list. This means that lost or stolen Bitcoin can now be recovered through a legal process, a potentially game changing development which will bring digital asset technology within the remit of the law.
“We live in this world where you’ve got law and legal systems in place, you know, Bitcoin doesn’t magically create a new world that lives outside of the purview of existing legal systems that we have right now,” Jad says.
Jad believes that it is projects and partnerships like these that will make Bitcoin appealing to outsiders and will lead to its widespread use in the world. He says that he can see Bitcoin SV being more easily deployed in developing countries where traditional systems of money are less widely accepted.
For example, he talks about his hometown of Beirut, where the currency has lost more than 90% of its value and citizens no longer use credit cards because they don’t trust the banks, saying that he thinks that the lack of financial infrastructure and confidence in legacy systems will make it easier for new technology, like Bitcoin SV, to fill the gap.
One of the biggest challenges for companies looking to start out on their own can be a lack of demand for a product or service and this is what the Block Venture Studio has been created to solve.
Venture studios are organisations which help founders build start-ups based on what corporates need. They help businesses come up with an initial idea which will suit the market and assist with product development.
This differs from incubators which are meant for entrepreneurs who already have an idea for a business but need support in getting it off the ground.
“The start-up itself is built for the corporate so the corporate is the shareholder, the corporate is the one that’s funding it,” Ari Kuqi, Director of Research and Development at Block Venture Studio, explains to CoinGeek’s Charles Miller at the company’s launch event in London.
The studio is the new division of the Satoshi Block Dojo, the successful global blockchain incubator which has taken the Bitcoin SV world by storm since it was set up in 2021 by Craig Massey.
And like the Block Dojo, it recognises the power of using Bitcoin SV to build out solutions. “We think that Bitcoin SV is the only blockchain that actually offers the utility that are promised by so many blockchains,” says Ari.
Charles meets some of the corporates that the Block Venture Studio are engaging with about potential solutions, including Kim Dingler, CCO at ITV Studios Entertainment, who is exploring ways that world-famous brands can be monetised using blockchain technology.
She tells him about two projects the channel has been working on recently; a partnership between culinary reality show ‘Hell’s Kitchen’ and The Sandbox Metaverse and NFT artwork based on the classic TV show ‘Thunderbirds’.
Another interested executive is Rose Tighe from Sky Labs, who is looking at blockchain technology with a view to beefing up the company’s approach to piracy and copyright protection. And while she’s excited about the opportunities presented by blockchain technology, she’s also aware of the challenges that come with it.
“I will say loudly and clearly that a lot of consumers are already struggling with everyday technology within their homes and what I would hope is that whatever we do is usable and accessible by everybody,” she says.
Rose has come to the right place to find a simple solution that suits her organisation, as the Block Venture Studio has been built for exactly this purpose with products designed to be as functional as possible, showcasing the simplicity of blockchain technology.
“It should be about actually providing value instead of some random blockchain that’s more used for marketing or just to make shareholders happy that you’re innovating in blockchain,” says Ari Kuqi.
Overall, the launch event was an exciting chance for major corporates to discuss their needs with the Block Venture Studio and network with budding entrepreneurs, and we look forward to seeing the fruits of this new venture.
If you already know that when a computer goes online, it has an IP address - whatever that may be - then you are half way to decoding the mysterious acronym IPV6. The other half is easy: V6 is “version 6”.
You may even have more familiarity with IP than you had realised if you are vaguely aware of TCP/IP - which is the way computers communicate, through “Transmission Control Protocol/Internet Protocol”. So, yes, IP is “internet protocol” - not to be confused with IP as in “intellectual property”, the main difference being that the latter provides far more work for lawyers than the computer kind.
I was lucky enough to have an explanation of IPV6 on this week’s CoinGeek Conversations from Alessio Pagani, a Senior Researcher at nChain, the London blockchain development company. Dr Pagani also has a PhD in Information Technology and is an IMI (Institute of Mathematical Innovation) Industrial Fellow at the University of Bath.
Alessio explained that although IPV6 has been around for decades, most networks still use IPV4 - version four. (The other versions - 1, 2, 3 and 5 - which nobody has ever heard of, were test versions and never extensively used.)
IPV4 has worked well ever since it was developed in the 1970s. But Alessio says that a problem is emerging that was not foreseen back then: the IP address format relies on a 32 bit address - in other words, 2 multiplied by 2 32 times, which produces 4.3 billion possible addresses. And that’s just not enough for today’s connected world:
“We are seven billion on this planet. We have a lot of IoT devices. I read recently a report saying that by 2025 we will have more than 30 billion devices connected to the internet. If you think about smart watches, you think about TVs, everything is now connected to the internet. The problem is that we don't have enough space for that. So we need a larger address space.”
And that’s where IPV6 comes in, with a vastly increased capacity:
“This could be done with IPV6. Now we have 128 bits, which means 340 trillion, trillion, trillion addresses.”
Unfortunately, changing to IPV6 isn’t just a question of flipping a switch, since new network hardware is required, which is expensive to buy and to install.
Whilst there are good reasons for networks and businesses to switch to IPV6, nChain is interested because of the additional features it can offer for Bitcoin SV businesses - allowing direct micropayments between users in a way that was not completely secure on IPV4:
“In the first node software implementation, there was actually a feature called IP to IP payments. Then this was removed because it was not safe. There were some techniques to steal payments and now we are trying to re-enable it, thanks to IPV6. There are some tricks to send payments using IPV4 …the problem is that this is not efficient. This could pose some security issues, so it's not easy to do it on IPV4. That's why we are focusing on IPV6.”
In that sense, IPV6 allows Bitcoin to fulfill its original vision, as headlined in the White Paper, which was headlined: Bitcoin: A peer-to-peer electronic cash system.
Do you know how public and private keys are generated? Would you be able to verify a digital signature? If your answer to either of those questions is no, there’s no need to feel embarrassed as you are not alone! For all the articles and opinion pieces on the internet about Bitcoin, there is still a distinct lack of understanding around how the technology actually works.
Indeed, a YouGov survey from last year found that 98% of respondents didn’t understand basic crypto concepts.
This week Charles Miller has re-enlisted the help of Brendan Lee, Training and Development Manager of the BSV Bitcoin Association to help him get to the bottom of a few key concepts on this week’s CoinGeek Conversations.
When the two last spoke, back in February 2021, Brendan covered what really happens when a transaction is made on the Bitcoin network and how exactly coins move from one wallet to another. This time Charles wants to find out what a digital signature is and how it can be used to verify ownership of a Bitcoin address.
First, they discuss public and private keys, with Brendan explaining that the two keys exist as a pair, with the private key generated first and the public key produced cryptographically from the private key.
The conversation then moves on to Bitcoin wallets, where an individual’s private keys are stored. Brendan says that Electrum, a wallet software that has some additional features, is a good way to allow users to demonstrate their ownership of keys by using those keys to sign messages and create digital signatures.
Brendan explains that to prove ownership, a user needs to first pick an address and type in a custom message to generate a signature. Once this signature has been created, any other user can decode and verify the signed message provided they have the custom message, signature, and public key.
While the technology might seem complicated, Brendan says that the mathematics used to generate signatures and verify keys were not anything new when Satoshi utilised them in Bitcoin software.
“He wasn’t doing anything significantly new; he was just taking something that existed already, was well-tested, very proven, highly trusted as a technique and then applying it as a digital cash system,” he says.
Charles and Brendan also do a practical demonstration on Electrum, showing how it can be used to prove ownership over a specific set of private keys. This is particularly interesting given the fact that this was how Dr. Craig Wright demonstrate his control of the Satoshi keys to Gavin Andresen in 2016.
Is Bitcoin just another kind of money? An undergraduate module dedicated to Bitcoin at the University of Exeter sheds light on the question by delving into the history of money. The module, called Bitcoin, Money and Trust was launched in 2018 after a high demand from students to learn about Bitcoin.
Dr. Jack Rogers, a senior lecturer in economics at the University of Exeter launched the Bitcoin module as a precursor to an MSc Fintech course which he leads. He says participation increased ten fold in recent years - from less than 50 students when it launched to 700 this year.
Despite the impressive turnout, Jack believes that “probably the big number is partly driven for the wrong reasons - all the various hype and sense that you could get rich from this.”
On this week’s episode of CoinGeek Conversations, Charles Miller talks to Jack about the University of Exeter’s Bitcoin teaching, the evolution of money and the role Bitcoin plays.
Jack points to the emergence of central banking as a step change in history. He quoted Felix Martin, the author of Money: The Unauthorized Biography, whom he recalls speaking of a “compromise power structure” between the central bank and the government. For the first time in centuries, a decoupling between money and the state is happening before our eyes, Charles suggests. Jack agrees, saying “a new technology that allows people to potentially pay each other without using existing fiat-based systems” has indeed raised fundamental questions. He pertains to the author’s view on cryptocurrency and how it’s lead to a disruption in the payment system which central banks have been in control of for a long time.
Jack believes the disruption in central banking was inevitable eventually: “I think this stuff, central bank, digital currencies and things that you see now, maybe it was coming anyway… I think the emergence of Bitcoin and all the hype and everything has kind of brought that forward.”
Based on Jack’s comments, it’s safe to say that the future of money will depend on the outcome of the competition between blockchain-based payment systems. For now, he admits no-one is certain as to where Bitcoin is heading.
“One of my students did a great dissertation on this, speculating that in 20 years time, will there be loads of different types of money? What does it look like? I mean, no-one can really say.”
Dr. Jack Rogers is co-authoring a textbook alongside Brendan Lee and Neil Smith. The book will be out by the end of 2023.
Mark Zuckerberg and his Harvard room-mates launched The Facebook (as it was called in 2004) with a new idea. It wasn’t to let people post messages to each other online - because messageboards had been doing that for years, long before the World Wide Web was invented.
What was new was the way Facebook wanted to tie the user’s online identity to that of the real person who was posting on the site. At first they did that by only allowing people with Harvard emails to join - since Harvard required your email address to contain a version of your real name. Today anyone can register for Facebook but the intention, at least, remains to tie your Facebook presence to your real persona. And that, as it turned out, was exactly what advertisers wanted, making Facebook one of the most profitable businesses in the world.
But arguably something was lost in Facebook’s ideas about identity online and off. Almost 30 years later, a new social media business, My2cents, is rediscovering the virtues of those old messageboards which Facebook helped consign to history. And it brings something completely new to the model thanks to the powers of Bitcoin SV.
On this week’s CoinGeek Conversations, I spoke to Dr Maximilian Sinan Korkmaz, the founder of my2cents, about his project, which was launched earlier this year.
To register with my2cents, all you do is invent a user name and a password. That’s it. Then you can start posting. It changes the emphasis from most social media sites, BSV or otherwise, from the person posting (because on my2cents, they could be anyone) to what they have to say. That creates a whole new dynamic, in which celebrities have no more clout than nobodies and a first post gets as much traction as one from someone who’s been posting on the site for years. There are no “followers” or “following” of people - only of topics.
The service is powered by Bitcoin SV, and in the world of BSV social media it is revolutionary in a different way. Far from using BSV to escape from business models that rely on advertising, my2cents will take ads and it invites you to view them, although you can choose not to, in return for sharing the ad revenue that my2cents generates.
Each user’s ad share is calculated by a subtle measure of that person’s contribution to the site in which various metrics are combined to create their “user score” made up from things like how much they have posted or commented.
Finally, when you sign up, you are given a BSV wallet. But you don’t need to transfer money into it in order to start using the site. You can simply start posting and when someone likes (which my2cents calls “pluses”) your contribution, a small BSV transfer will be made to your wallet.
So what about the perennial problem of BSV social media sites - that everyone is happy to be paid for their contributions but, except for purely altruistic reasons, why would anyone want to pay other people? Well here, as mentioned above, your “pluses” count towards an improved “user score”. So if my2cents prospers, and its ad revenue grows, even though you’re paying out in the short term, you’re investing in your share of future profits.
My own brief experience on my2cents was positive. I found people talking about much more than Bitcoin SV (an inescapable subject on many BSV-powered social media apps) and I earned an impressive $0.25 or so from two or three posts. I even proved to myself that it was real money by sending it to my Centbee wallet. I was impressed.
So that’s my two cents about my2cents.
On the fourth and final installment of CoinGeek Conversations Special, we’ll hear from individuals whose companies’ ESG or environmental, social, and corporate governance initiatives are achieved through blockchain technology.
While it seems like blockchain is not usually associated with ESG, these companies are making strides in proving how the technology can play a vital role in the industry. Joe Holles de Peyer of Gate2Chain and Daniel Keane of Predict Ecology talk about the integrity that blockchain provides while recording data on the environment; Dave Perill of Compute North talks about how blockchain provides efficiency in data centers; and Bryan Daugherty discussed his project, Proof of ESG and explained why blockchain will make the world a greener place.
On the third installment of CoinGeek Conversations Special, we take a look at some of the most interesting contributions about venture capital from previous episodes of the series.
We hear from Craig Massey and Osmin Callis from the London BSV incubator Satoshi Block Dojo. Craig talked about how investors and start-ups profit and benefit from the incubator process; Osmin focussed on what went on during the program and made interesting observations about the participants; Pacer Ventures co-founder Gbemi Akande talked about the adoption of blockchain technology in Africa; and Paul Rajchgod, managing director of private equity at Air Ventures stressed that there's a lot more to venture capital investment in a promising new start-up than simply handing over a cheque.
Join me, Claire Celdran next week as we revisit episodes that focus on companies whose Environment Social and Corporate Governance or ESG initiatives are achieved through blockchain technology.
In the second of four CoinGeek Conversations special episodes, we take a look back at some of the best moments from the last season, featuring the biggest and boldest personalities in the Bitcoin SV ecosystem.
We hear from Mandeep Singh, musician and qualified doctor, on how Bitcoin can revolutionise the relationship artists have with their fans; Nick Numas, Founder and CEO of Genuine Retweets explains theimpact his social media company is having on those in the developing world; the Women of BSV discuss why they decided to carve out a space for themselves; and Adam Hawley and Yuriy Porytko explain what the NFT they launched is doing to help people in Ukraine.
Join CoinGeek producer Claire Celdran next week as she highlights some of the most insightful conversations from past shows on the theme of venture capital.
In the first of four CoinGeek Conversations special episodes, we revisit some of our favourite conversations from the last season, on the subject of Bitcoin SV’s relationship with the global economy.
We hear from Eswar Prasad, Tolani senior Professor of International Trade Policy at Cornell University, and author of ‘The Future of Money’, on why competition in the digital asset industry is a good thing; Patryk Walaszczyk, blockchain solutions expert at IBM, discusses the burgeoning relationship between BSV and IBM; Owen Vaughan, director of research at nChain, talks about the role Bitcoin could play in political economics; and Bryan Daugherty, public policy director of the BSV Blockchain Association tells us about his work for the US Department of Defence.
Join me, Sarah Higgs, next week as I take another journey down memory lane, picking guests from past shows for an episode featuring four personalities of BSV.
Pacer Ventures, co-founded by Gbemi Akande, is a venture fund that is focussed on Africa, but not exclusively on blockchain projects. “However,” Gbemi says, “we’ve taken a lot of interest in blockchain businesses in the past few months because of the growing opportunity we see there.”
Speaking on this week’s CoingGeek Conversations, Gbemi says there’s a growing population of young technical talent in Africa which makes the continent “a good place to explore what blockchain can do in solving societal problems and business problems.”
But it’s not just the young, educated population that encourages Gbemi’s confidence: “even governments are catching on right now to understand it as a technology themselves, to develop policies around the technology, which has also helped the markets to grow faster.”
Exposing ordinary consumers as potential investors to the bewildering array of cryptocurrencies, many of which are built on dubious claims, could have dangers, but Gbemi believes that ultimately, the process will produce positive results:
“It's been a learning curve for the population. However, I'm quite confident in the fact that while there's a lot of cryptocurrencies, for example, with a lot of success stories, but also failures and lessons learned, the learning rate of this young population will actually more than compensate for that.”
As for Bitcoin SV’s role in future business opportunities for Pacer Ventures, Gbemi sees one of its core strengths as the potential for “huge transaction volumes”. Micropayments and remittances are “a big deal in Africa”. That makes BSV “a well suited protocol that can help absorb the volume of transactions that's needed to be done in Africa”.
The whole crypto market has experienced a serious downturn in recent months, but Gbemi says that could have a positive effect in the long run: “this particular period will filter out the noise and allow the protocols and the solutions with substance to actually be well known and well used. So I think it's an opportunity to recalibrate, to come down and ask the tough questions about what works best for society and for businesses.”
Gbemi mentions several sectors for BSV startups that he believes are likely to do well in the short to medium term: supply chain logistics, education and media content. In addition, the streamlining of government services presents big opportunities.
The fund is open to new applicants and Gbemi issues an invitation to entrepreneurs to contact him: “we are out there looking for ideas to work with entrepreneurs. We go beyond just writing a cheque. We work very closely with founders …If anyone out there has some interesting solutions that use the BSV protocol, approach us.”
Startup investment is part of Pacer Ventures’ bigger vision for Africa: “we really want to work with businesses that are moving the needle, that are creating employment, that are solving societal problems within the continent.” In three or four years’ time, Gbemi says, “we really are hoping to be able to work with companies that are pushing the envelope in that direction.”
Almost fifty years ago, four boys became school friends in Poland. Today they are working together to revolutionise the music industry with a BSV-powered startup called Soundoshi. It’s not their first collaboration: they previously created a software development company together which is still in business.
But now, as Michał Scisłowski explains on this week’s CoinGeek Conversations, their focus is “100 percent on Soundoshi”. The opportunity, as they see it, is to improve the business model for both music producers and consumers.
“Even if you are generating a few million streams, then you can't really make a living from Spotify,” Michał says. That’s because revenue is shared between artists on a strictly proportional basis. So if smaller artists have a certain number of plays, what they earn depends on whether or not a big artist happens to release new music and win a large share of Spotify’s total plays at that particular time.
Soundoshi’s solution? “In order to make it fair again, we need to have the same flat payment for each stream, for every artist on the platform. So they all have the same terms and they are competing with each other.”
In building a system like that, “BSV is made for the task”. It will allow the creation of music NFTs so the consumer will own the music they buy - as opposed to simply being given access to it in return for a subscription.
Artists will be free to set their own prices per track - anything from very cheap for a mass audience to more expensive and as limited in numbers as they choose for a highly exclusive product. All the music will be stored on the BSV blockchain. “In this way we want to avoid any kind of manipulation or censorship.”
The artist would likely have to pay something to have their work put into the system, but “we are exploring the options of maybe having split payments for this. It's just a few dollars and maybe we can reimburse that from what we are earning on commissions.”
From the consumer’s point of view, Soundoshi is a pay-per-track model. Instead of subscription there will be a top up mechanism to keep your account in credit but in other respects, “everything will be very similar” to the experience on Spotify.
Just as Bitcoin users can send money to each other, Soundoshi’s customers will be able to transfer ownership of the tracks they have bought. As well as this being a new economic model for the music business, psychologically, it’s a return to an older mode: one of music ownership. As Michał explains:
“We want to reintroduce ownership of the music to the fans, so they will be able to collect their favourite music and build their collections, as we were doing 15 years ago before streaming arrived.”
As to whether Soundoshi plans to destroy the music industry or provide a service to it, Michał is clear: “you always have two choices. You can go for revolution or evolution. And as much as I would love to see the revolution, I understand that we need to go the evolution way.”
That means working with the music industry and talking to music publishers: “we want to offer this industry a new revenue stream.”
CoinGeek followed the inside story of Soundoshi and the other startups who were part of Satoshi Block Dojo’s first cohort, for a CoinGeek Originals film, How to Build a BSV Business.
Have you ever wanted to call BS on something you’ve seen online? For most of us the answer is a resounding yes. That’s why Errol Hula is building a system that allows users to mark whether information on social media is accurate or not.
His application, called NOBL, includes a BS button which users can click on if they see something online that they know is not true. They can also add external links to posts to prove that material is false.
Errol says that by aggregating all this information the system can display which posts can be trusted and whether a user is trustworthy or not. He believes that this will solve the problem of identifying misinformation online, while still allowing people the freedom to speak their minds.
“We won’t get rid of loud voices but what we’ll hopefully do is be able to, rather than just shouting at one another, hopefully have more reasoned discussions.”
Errol tells CoinGeek's Charles Miller that the other issue he aims to tackle is the lack of privacy in social media. Instead of making money from harvesting user data and selling it on to third parties, as so many leading technology companies do currently, NOBL will use a micropayment system.
This will allow users to monetise content where they see fit and allow readers to tip writers or posts that they find interesting. “The goal is to generate enough revenue from the subscriptions and the tipping and that micro economy that it can actually fund the free use for others.”
Due to the Bitcoin SV blockchain’s high scaling capacity and low fees, micropayments are possible in a way that they are not on other blockchains.
Users will also be able to control their newsfeeds by adjusting a slider, which Errol calls ‘the BS filter’, meaning people can choose what they see online rather than being at the mercy of whatever algorithm is put in place by social media companies.
Errol explains that he was motivated to build NOBL to solve real world problems, such as the proliferation of fake news online and the concentration of power that big tech currently enjoys.
The impact that these issues are having on democratic society became increasingly evident in the Donald Trump era, with the former President banned from Twitter for spreading misinformation about the 2020 US presidential election and the part his tweets played in the 2021 United States Capitol attack.
Errol hopes to transform the future of social media by harnessing the power of Bitcoin SV, but he stresses that the digital asset will be just the ‘plumbing’ that underpins the product and not the main attraction.
“The fact that it uses Bitcoin SV is not going to influence whether someone is interested or not. If it’s a product that’s going to succeed because it solves a problem, investment will follow.”
When Bitcoin was first invented, many hailed it as the solution to inefficient cross-border remittances. But because of the high fees associated with transactions on the Bitcoin Core network, it has never been able to live up to its full potential.
That’s why Kumaraguru Ramanujam has chosen to build on the Bitcoin SV blockchain instead. His application, MoneySwipe, aims to bring down fees for sending money abroad from the current global average of 7 percent to just 1.5 percent.
He explains to Charles Miller on this week’s episode of CoinGeek Conversations that the company is aiming to tackle the UK –India remittance corridor first. This makes a lot of sense as India tops the list of countries receiving personal remittances. According to a 2022 World Bank Report, a whopping $83 billion is sent back to the country each year in payments.
Ramanujam’s plan is to work with regulators in India to create a cross-border payment solution without high costs. He explains that the Reserve Bank of India (RBI) has set up a regulatory sandbox with the intention of finding companies using blockchain to bring efficiency to the billion-dollar remittance industry.
The sandbox originally opened in 2018, with a company using Hyperledger Fabric selected, but it has now reopened, and Ramanujam is keen to show the RBI the power of Bitcoin SV.
“We first show the regulator that BSV’s better than Hyperledger then we show them, okay, yeah, transfer of value can also happen.”
The introduction of an efficient remittance system like this would be a gamechanger for the Indian economy. If costs could be brought down to 1.5 percent, this would mean over $4 billion could be saved and go straight to the recipient, instead of being lost in fees. This would also benefit the government as it would receive more foreign exchange reserves.
“It’s a win-win and it’s a stated aim of the United Nations’ sustainability goals to bring remittances down from 7 percent to 3 percent,” Ramanujam points out.
While the application is powered by the Bitcoin SV blockchain, stablecoins have been enabled so they can be used as a bridge asset, to ensure liquidity and comply with regulation.
The final application, which will be launched by the end of the year, will be informed by how MoneySwipe engages with regulators. The hope is that by working closely with them, the final product will be innovative, relevant, and risk-free.
The focus for now is India and the corridor with the UK, but once this has been developed, he intends to turn his attention to other regulators to create remittance solutions that work with governments across the globe.
Ramanujam believes that being able to show experience working successfully with one regulator will make it easier with others.
"We want to work with the regulator who’s open with their policies right now, rather than us telling them this is how things have to be done - so we are looking at countries that are open right now with sandboxes.”
If you haven’t heard of the metaverse, it’s likely you’ve been hiding under a rock for the last couple of years. Hailed by many, including Facebook (which even changed its name to Meta in October 2021) and Microsoft, as the next generation of the internet, the technology provides a way for internet users to connect online within a virtual world.
One person who is bullish on the technology is Lou Yu, head of KuCoin Labs, the investment and incubation arm of cryptocurrency exchange KuCoin. She believes that the metaverse will be the place to be for the next generation of entrepreneurial internet users and is putting her money where her mouth is by investing in several metaverse companies.
She explains that a lot of people are drawn to the metaverse because of the freedom it offers. “We can do a lot of things that we can’t do in the real world, for example flying, throwing things in the ocean which is very unethical in the real world but in the virtual one you can do it and it’s not a mess.”
One thing that many people can do on the metaverse which they might not be able to in real life is buy property, which is a cornerstone of Bloktopia, one of the companies that KuCoin Labs has invested in. Bloktopia is a metaverse which consists of a skyscraper, made up of 21 levels where users can become virtual landlords, earn revenue, play games, and build networks.
“People are purchasing lands like empty places in the Metaverse to lend to people and to build their own things so they can build a building or a space or a pool,” Lou explains.
Lou tells CoinGeek’s Charles Miller that she believes the social aspect also plays an important role in the popularity of platforms like this, with many younger users signing up during the Covid-19 pandemic as a way to connect online.
She says that one game KuCoin Labs invested in that saw an influx of users during the pandemic is Cryowar, an NFT multi-player arena, which is very popular with young people.
“They’re making money with it, they’re happy with it, they can socialise with it, they can help their parents with it, they can help themselves buying a lot of things that they like with this money. So actually, young people they need things like that, and they need those kind of economic aspects.”
Both Cryowar and Bloktopia have their own tokens, which are currently not worth very much. Lou sees this as a positive though as it means that players are happy to spend and trade within the game without worrying too much about losing money, as they might with an asset like Bitcoin.
She believes that this traction will gradually bring more attention to these communities, allowing developers to build up more mature token systems as the ecosystem develops.
This is a positive for investors who will see return on their investment as the metaverse gets busier and the coins get more valuable. But it’s also a good thing for young gamers who will be given the chance to exchange coins and educate themselves about how marketplaces work, without losing real money.
This is imperative for the survival of these games and for creating much-needed trust in the industry.
GameFi, a cryptocurrency company that brings gaming to the blockchain aims to make cryptocurrency accessible to everyone through playful means. Incorporated in Zug, Switzerland, the company offers its users a three-tiered cryptocurrency ecosystem that allows players to evolve from one token to another. The PIKA coin currently running on the Ethereum network is GameFi’s initial cryptocurrency. METRA is its second token offering that can be used to either stake or evolved into the third and rarest GameFi coin, Ki.
Speaking to Charles Miller on this episode of CoinGeek Conversations, company chairman Ajaypal Pama says GameFi is a one stop hub where users can enjoy the ecosystem in more ways than one— as a gamer, an investor or an NFT trader.
GameFi provides its users with a deflationary model design wherein PIKA, METRA, and KI are predicted to become scarce commodities creating significant wealth generation for investors. Ajaypal noticed that with other blockchain games, rewards start to decrease as more players join in. For this reason, GameFi is limiting the amount of users who can play GameFi’s play-to-earn games. Ajaypal says this will allow the value of their NFTs to increase due to its limited quantity.
Currently, GameFi’s blockchain games are built on the Ethereum network but as Ajaypal explains, Ethereum’s gas fees are too high, making it difficult to onboard new users. “The entry barrier for people getting into crypto is way too high and that's what BSV is solving, that's why we're choosing BSV - BSV can do micropayments, Ethereum cannot.”
Ajaypal is looking to have a feature within their ecosystem that will allow users access to BSV. “We would like to have a bridge available that the user can bridge their different tokens over to the BSV,” he says. With Ethereum, gamers have to pay $10 in gas fees to get $5 in rewards, and new users have to pay a $30 network fee to buy $100 in cryptocurrency. “That doesn’t make any sense,” he says.
Before joining the Bitcoin space, Ajaypal was an electrical engineer who began trading stocks and forex with the guidance of Capital Hungry, a platform that offers fundamental and technical market updates and analysis. Originally trading stocks and forex, Ajaypal made the switch to crypto trading and made his first investment with the Pikachu coin. Unfortunately, Pikachu’s original developers decided to abandon the project, he says. Pikachu coin owners were stuck with a 95% drawdown and didn’t know what to do.
Ajaypal decided to reach out to the Pikachu community and convinced them to trust him and his team with a new project. “We asked them, send in your old tokens, we will drain the liquidity pool, we will launch a new token which is ours, Pika, and we will use the liquidity pool to fund our new project - and that's how Pika came to life.”
The project has since evolved after a series of ups and downs. Ajaypal and his team managed to increase Pikachu’s market cap to $100 million from its previous $35,000 mark. However, after a series of changes that resulted to Pika, many of the users have lost interest. “There's too many changes happening, first, there's a swap from Pikachu to Pikka, now there's Pikka V1 and there's Pikka V2, they sort of lost faith in the project.”
Pika’s market cap is now valued at $4 million. Despite the significant drop, Ajaypal is confident that the coin will rise above its previous $100 million market cap. “The thing is, we're here to prove the people wrong, but, you know, we're still here, we're still developing… and we'll take it $1 billion this time.”
Ajaypal who was in attendance at the Dubai Global Blockchain Convention is impressed with what he witnessed within the BSV ecosystem. “I love it here everybody is so keen to help each other.”
As far as what to expect from GameFi, Ajaypal mentions an NFT marketplace that has already launched on Polygo
Ayre Ventures invests in ground-breaking businesses powered by BSV technology. Its Managing Director, Paul Rajchgod says he receives a stream of business proposals through platforms such as LinkedIn and through the CoinGeek and Ayre Group websites.
Paul stresses that for Ayre Venture, completing a deal with a new business is just the start of the relationship. “We have frequent meetings with the company, we make lots of introductions to other companies, which is one of the things that VCs are meant to be used for - it's not just a blank cheque.”
Paul says that Ayre Ventures carries out extensive due diligence before investing. “We need to go into the forecast and understand why the company thinks those numbers are going to pan out.” The process is carried out by an investment committee, which also acts as the deciding body who makes the final push towards granting a company the funds it needs.
On this episode of CoinGeek Conversations, Paul talks about companies under Ayre Ventures that are making waves in the bitcoin space. As he tells Charles Miller, MintBlue, a BSV “ground-up company” that uses BSV technology in their accounting software service product, reported hitting two million transactions on the blockchain in the form of digital invoices. He also mentions RAD NFTV, a live-streaming platform that uses BSV as an added layer to its NFT offerings. Paul is keen to encourage existing enterprise companies in the growth stage to explore the opportunities offered by BSV.
As a venture capitalist business that exclusively supports BSV technology, Paul points out Ayre Ventures takes a dim view of companies in their portfolio that don’t develop their BSV projects – however successful they may be in other respects: “I'll just say that where a company has not delivered by choosing not to go to BSV for whatever reason, we find that unacceptable. It's a breach of our contract and we look to exit.”
Paul would like to see more enterprise software companies approach him. And he’s not saying that existing businesses can’t continue their involvement with other blockchains at the same time as with BSV. He reverts back to RAD NFTV: “Rad is saying we'll continue to sell Ethereum NFTs and whatnot and we're going to use BSV internally to manage everything… that is a unique business.”
Many would have you believe that Bitcoin and the environment don’t mix. But that simply isn’t the case according to Daniel Keane, co-founder and managing director of Predict Ecology.
Blockchain is actually a real asset to the environmental industry because its immutable ledger technology means there is a permanent and reliable record of data. “In 100 years’, time, you’ll still have that string of numbers, they will still be written to the blockchain.”
This is particularly important when it comes to monitoring and predicting ecological changes, which is Daniel’s area of expertise. He explains that it’s essential to collect and analyse data to see the effects human development is having on biodiversity so future projects can reduce their impact.
This is something that Daniel has experienced first-hand in his time working as a consultant for the mining industry. Mining companies are required to rehabilitate and repair the ecosystem once mining has ceased, and it was Daniel’s job to check they were doing a good job.
“I’m a botanist, more specifically, and oftentimes I was validating and assessing the rehabilitation that they had planted back, comparing it to the reference ecosystems that they were trying to achieve,” he says.
Daniel tells CoinGeek’s Charles Miller that it was when he attended a start-up weekend in Queensland with Paul Chiari, founder of WeatherSV and MetaStreme that he realised how useful the Bitcoin SV blockchain could be for his purposes. This is when Predict Ecology, an environmental and ecological consulting firm with a focus on real-world data and predictive modelling was born.
Predict Ecology starts off by gathering data using a mobile data collector. The data is then validated and verified using traditional field survey techniques. The combined datasets are then loaded to the BSV ledger using the MetaStreme transaction processor, allowing the data to be indexed and retrieved in a self-serve “pay-per-view” framework, open to researchers and modellers worldwide.
Daniel explains that by inputting data onto the blockchain, the risk of any damage to the information is eliminated. This is reassuring for clients working with large volumes of data over many years.
“I might have gone out of business, I might have had a server fire, I might have lost my notepad. There’s a whole heap of variables there so that peace of mind for the long-term check that’s where it really comes into play.”
Daniel says he wants Predict Ecology and MetaStreme to be the ‘plumbing’ that works behind the scenes to ensure clients can utilise the power of the blockchain. This means that customers without any technical or ecological knowhow can interact with the BSV blockchain to easily record data and keep an eye on their environmental footstep.
His aim is admirable: a network of long-lasting and high-quality data that will help companies monitor and model biodiversity. It’s also a powerful example of how blockchain technology can be used in the fight against climate change.
When cases of Coronavirus escalated in countries around the world, governments and health officials scrambled to develop and distribute vaccines. But how can individuals demonstrate their vaccine status?
Catherine Lephoto, executive sales director at VX Technologies, is on a mission to help transform the health and education sector in African countries using blockchain technology. While heading a Covid response program, Catherine saw an opportunity to utilize blockchain to create a system of record keeping for vaccinated individuals.
Her company’s product, VXPASS, verifies and authenticates an individual’s vaccination status using the BSV blockchain. It operates through a QR code which can be stored in a smartphone or printed on a piece of paper.
As Catherine explains, an individual can show their proof of vaccination by presenting their VXPASS code. The establishment checking the code will then be directed to a VX verified website which shows the individual’s personal information. The individual will also present a valid ID allowing the overseer to match the individual’s identity.
On the question of securing an individual’s private details, Catherine explains that that technology “is meant to only marry the personal identifiable information with the record at the time that you as the owner of the record give the key”.
Catherine points out that VXPASS is not only focused on the Covid 19 vaccination verification process. She says it could also help with the digitization of childhood vaccination records. Medical practitioners’ current two-step process entails noting the vaccine on a piece of paper that is given to the patient, followed by manually inputting the information into a computer database. She sees a problem with the system, saying “half the time that [software inputting] never gets done, so later on when I come back, nobody has me on the system having received the vaccine that I have a paper record for …it's just inefficient.”
Catherine is the only VX Technologies executive based in Africa. As she tells Charles Miller on this week’s CoinGeek Conversations, she feels blessed with the opportunity to help articulate the needs of the African people.
“We always talk about Africa as a land of opportunities, for entrepreneurialism and big business …How many of those companies are actually spending time on the ground to understand what the needs are and develop solutions to address the needs?”
Another issue she plans to tackle is Africa’s education system, saying employers should be able to access a student’s academic achievements through a trusted system. As she explains, students who are unable to complete their studies and get a college degree may still be eligible for work as long as they’ve completed a series of courses.
“I should be able to find a way that I can verify that this young person has actually gone through this many courses at this college. Yes, they may not have yet graduated, but if they have the right skills that I need as an employer, I’m happy to give the right job.”
Catherine’s insights which she imparts to VX Technologies often derive from her own personal experience. As she explains, Africa’s financial resources are limited, and so BSV’s low cost is a perfect technical solution to address its needs.
Catherine hopes that Africa will embrace new technology. She is optimistic that governments will appreciate and adopt blockchain believing that it will leapfrog the existing technologies that are less affordable.
“At the end of the day, we're trying to develop sustainable products …it's really about being forward thinking in addressing what the needs are.”
For Joe Holles de Peyer, co-founder and COO of Gate2Chain, his ‘eureka’ moment came, as so many of the best ideas do, from his experience of a real-world issue.
When he was living and working in Mallorca, the Port of Palma set up an IoT sensor infrastructure to measure the air quality of the island’s capital. Despite a regular influx of pollution-causing cruise ships the data that was presented claimed the air quality was perfect.
Joe says that as he knew this wasn’t the case and he lost trust in the data. With IoT, he says, “there are so many steps in the process, so many things that can go wrong, from not cleaning a filter to actually manipulating the data when you put it on your computer.”
As he tells Charles Miller on this week’s CoinGeek Conversations, this was when he and his team started experimenting with implementing blockchain with IoT devices and discovering the power of the technology to prove data integrity.
He found that using blockchain, he could program devices to behave in certain ways dependent on real-time information, while also certifying the accuracy of data through a signing mechanism.
The ‘eureka’ moment, he explains, is the realisation that “the blockchain allows us to send, to share, to store information and value on the same protocol. On the old internet we were just sharing information and now thanks to the blockchain we can also share value and attach value to information and share it on the same protocol.”
Joe originally chose the Ethereum blockchain to build on but switched over to the BSV blockchain when he realised the former wasn’t fit for purpose. Gate2Chain is now utilising the power of the BSV blockchain through two sets of products. The first is an easy-to-use developer suite which allows users to connect new or existing apps, websites, games, or any other system to the blockchain.
The second service, which is currently in development, is called Minta. “It’s a one-stop shop, it’s a wallet, a bank account, it’s integrated also with a conventional bank so you can actually have your euros, your dollars, your dirhams, it’s an NFT minter, it’s a marketplace, it has a messaging app in it, it’s a bit of everything.”
Joe explains how a service like this can provide real-world value, giving the example of a freelance photographer. Instead of using a third-party system to send photos and a separate payment platform to receive the money, this could all be handled in the Minta platform.
Photos would be uploaded in the form of NFTs and shared with a client with a value already programmed in. The money could then flow directly from one account to another, removing any need for trust for both parties.
Minta is being built to be user-friendly as Joe wants to ensure that Gate2Chain’s services are accessible for everyone, not just for those with technical knowhow. “It’s about making blockchain easy,” he says.
The easier the products are for people to use, the more appealing they will be to the everyday user and the wider adoption is likely to be. This will bring Joe one step closer to his goal of revolutionising the internet and creating a digital world better suited for the people using it.
IBM and SmartLedger’s Certihash are working together to develop a BSV blockchain-based product that will reduce the costs and time associated with cyberattacks.
Speaking on CoinGeek Conversations, Patryk Walaszczyk , a blockchain solution expert at IBM Consulting, says that most of IBM’s blockchain projects have until now been built on Hyperledger.
Working on this project that uses a public blockchain like Bitcoin SV expands IBM’s knowledge. “We are trying to experiment with a public infrastructure like Bitcoin SV, we see the potential of this information and the possibility to enter the web3 ecosystem.”
Patryk says IBM typically develops software using the so-called waterfall method, which means approaching a project stage by stage. Certihash, in contrast, practices agile development. He acknowledges IBM’s intent to learn from Certihash. “To learn to be agile, you have to cooperate with the companies who truly understand how agile works.”
IBM and Certihash are in the process of creating and developing the Sentinel node, a suite of tools on the BSV blockchain that aims to improve cybersecurity. Patryk describes the sentinel node as “a product which could potentially be identified as a second layer security tool …dedicated to data breach detection.”
He alludes to ‘permissionless’ blockchain technology such as BSV, saying “we've been experimenting already with the public infrastructure, and we know how it works.” However, he says that verifications will be required to validate the efficacy of BSV at an enterprise level. “We'd like to test it and get knowledge whether it works similarly to what we have done on the permissioned ledgers”.
Patryk recognizes BSV’s potential in creating enterprise grade solutions. After experimenting with Ethereum and BTC, he believes in BSV’s ability to deliver a high quality performance with low transaction fees. And from a technical perspective, he says “we believe that the foundation is solid, the white paper is solid.”
Despite BSV’s capabilities, the question remains as to whether enterprises will consider using a public blockchain. According to Patryk, permissioned blockchain is viewed by many companies as a safe option. “You are in control of your data, you decide who will see it …a public blockchain is completely different because whatever you are going to put into a blockchain will be publicly available.” He says public blockchain solutions may always be a hard sell to companies in the financial and capital markets. “I don't believe the public blockchain infrastructure will be utilized by all companies in the future.”
After attending the recent BSV Global Blockchain Convention, Patryk is convinced that BSV companies are focused on finding solutions to real business problems rather than using BSV for financial speculation. “I think that's a good thing from a business perspective …to justify using this technology instead of focusing on which is going to be the best choice for future earnings.”
Patryk also expressed interest in working with other BSV companies saying, “if there would be any company interested in our services, we are keen to start cooperation.”
Tech philosopher and entrepreneur Somi Arian envisions a society that is free from the shackles of tech companies like Meta and Google. Her advocacy is to uphold human integrity by allowing individuals to own their data.
While studying political philosophy at the University of St Andrews in Scotland, Somi expressed her political grievances through music, as the singer in a death metal band. “The interest in heavy metal music is an indication I'm an anarchist at heart …I've always been against governments, I've always been against authority of any sort,” she says.
When Somi first learnt about blockchain in 2017, she says she knew in an instant that the technology would disrupt Amazon, Facebook, Google and the likes. For her part, the decentralization aspect of blockchain is the solution to data-ownership issues. As she explains, “blockchain technology is really interesting because of the possibility of self-organization …minimizing the impact of governments.”
Apart from speaking in international events, in 2018 Somi released an award-winning documentary called The Millennial Disruption which discusses how digital natives are changing ecommerce. She’s dedicated most of her work in educating people to issues concerning technology and its impact. As she explains, “the type of life that I'm inviting people to live is going against the grain of how you are being programmed by Meta and by the governments.”
On this episode of CoinGeek Conversations, Somi is keen to point out to Charles Miller how countries like China disadvantage their people through the government and the corporations working together:“we have now got a problem of nation state and then we have the problem of the corporate state, they're both as bad as each other, so I don't necessarily think that nation state is our guard against the corporate state and vice versa.”
In her view, decentralization is a hedge against the system and she is adamant about educating people about it. She wants people to realize that that CBDCs are not the type of cryptocurrency that are decentralized, nor are the tech giants. If people understand this, they can extract themselves from these systems.
Somi’s company, InPeak, aims to educate individuals about the ownership economy in the next generation of the internet. “In” stands for ‘inspire’, ‘in this together’ and ‘inclusive’. The company offers its customers a subscription service that primarily educates individuals about bitcoin and blockchain. Soon, the company will offer an NFT option for membership. As for the benefits of doing business in Web3, Somi explains that unlike Web 2.0, Web3 allows anyone to own their content and get paid directly without going through third parties such as banks.
Somi spoke at a panel discussion at the BSV Global Blockchain Convention in Dubai where she made a keen observation about Apple and Ethereum. She says, “if Ethereum is like Apple, there's room for a Microsoft and it is yet to be determined who is going to be that Microsoft… so maybe BSV could fill that gap.”
Fake degrees are a growing problem worldwide and can cause serious issues for employers and recruiters. While the practice may not be new, the advent of the internet has made it easier than ever to get hold of fraudulent qualifications.
It’s difficult to work out how many fake degrees are in circulation, but George Gollin, a member of the Council for Higher Education Accreditation estimates that over 100,000 fake degrees are sold each year in the US alone. Globally, the numbers are likely to be in the millions.
Dr. Mohamed Al Hemairy, head of the Technology Transfer Office at the University of Sharjah, is confident that he has found the solution. His team have partnered with the BSV Blockchain Association to build an academic certification and accreditation platform using the Bitcoin SV blockchain.
He explains to Charles Miller on this week’s episode of CoinGeek Conversations that the plan is to build a network which academic institutions can join and use to authenticate students’ qualifications. Before joining, the universities will be verified to ensure their legitimacy. Once that is done, they will then be able to validate students’ certificates.
“Once it’s there, it’s immutable, it cannot be changed, it cannot be manipulated, and it has the trust by the community that are joining the network that this is a valid certificate issued by this institute.”
Dr Al Hemairy explains that the team intend to roll out a beta version of the service in the UAE as a case study, looking for feedback and improvements before they expand worldwide. The platform will be open source and available for institutions to join for free.
A project like this would have a real impact, he says. Customers could quickly find out if their lawyer or doctor is legitimate and for employers, it would save time and money as they wouldn’t need to hire people to do background checks: they could just check the Bitcoin SV blockchain.
“It’s built on BSV blockchain which has more features and advantages than any other blockchains available in the market. It is scalable, it has very low transaction fees and the BSV Association is supporting this project to be open for the whole world.”
Dr Al Hemairy is confident that the platform will catch on and “in three to four years will be widely used and adopted by nearly every institute in the world.”
He explains that there’s a lot of innovation like this taking place in Dubai due to a governmental push for blockchain development. For example, the UAE government recently launched the Dubai Blockchain Strategy, an initiative that aims to help Dubai to become the first city in the world to operate fully on blockchain technology.
The upcoming BSV Global Blockchain Convention in Dubai from May 24 to 26 will be an important event for anyone with a “sense of history”, says Calvin Ayre, founder of Ayre Ventures and CoinGeek.
“It’s like Woodstock coming to these conferences, that’s how influential this technology is going to be and it’s going to change so many things and it’s going to touch everything,” says Calvin.
While attendees of the Convention might be dressed in suits rather than flares and sunglasses, the comparison to the iconic, late 60s counterculture festival, will resonate for those in the Bitcoin SV space who understand how revolutionary the technology could be.
Calvin is particularly excited about links between Bitcoin SV companies and big consultancy firms like IBM Consulting, which has recently been developing Sentinel Node in association with Certihash.
“I hope we educate these big consulting companies so that they understand what this technology can do so they in fact become evangelists for us when they are brought in to solve technical problems in big data.”
Another organisation that Calvin is pleased to see teaming up with the Bitcoin SV community is the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) – the world’s largest association of technical professionals.
This connection came about when Latif Ladid, founder, and president of the IPv6 Forum and an IEEE influencer, came across Bitcoin inventor Dr. Craig Wright’s blog after reading about his victory in the Kleiman v. Wright trial in Miami last autumn.
When Latif learnt that Bitcoin SV had been built to integrate IPv6, the most recent version of the internet protocol, he reached out directly to Dr. Wright, who has now become a keynote speaker in the IEEE conference series and is publishing information about the technology in the IEEE newsletter.
Calvin believes that the Kleiman case has opened people up to Dr. Wright’s work in a big way. “The fictional cloud of fraud has been removed off of Craig’s shoulders, and as a result, the serious engineers who have been studying Craig’s technology feel that the reputational risk has also been removed and people have been reaching out to Craig and our community and we’ve got a lot more serious people directly involved, publicly.”
On the subject of Dr. Wright’s lawsuits, of which one more was announced last week, Calvin admits he wishes Dr. Wright didn’t have to spend his time on them and could instead focus on other things.
"Craig’s going to go down in history as one of the largest filers of patents in the world, if not the largest, and all the while doing it while he’s being attacked and forced to deal with this massive litigation overheard and continuing to do multiple university degrees at the same time.”
Despite this distraction, Calvin is clear that the main goal for the Convention is education. “All my focus is on educating people that can actually use this technology to solve big data challenges,” he says.
FloatSV and RelayX founder Jack Liu has proved to be a forceful presence in the Bitcoin space. Armed with a fintech background and almost a decade of experience in digital assets, his thoughts and ideas about the bitcoin ecosystem offer both substance and, at times, challenges to entrepreneurs building on Bitcoin SV.
Contrary to belief of the majority in the BSV community, Jack thinks the price of BSV matters significantly. As he tells Charles Miller on this episode of CoinGeek Conversations, his attraction to Bitcoin is partly due to its incentive design: regardless of wealth and stature, any individual has a chance to raise money using the network. “A small business is able to raise five dollars of money the same way as a larger team can raise …billions of dollars. That levels the playing field and that's ultimately the value,” he explains.
RelayX seeks to build businesses on chain in a way that is free of patents and NDAs, as well as products that are interoperable. Jack’s goal is to preserve one powerful aspect of Bitcoin: that it is global. “Anyone can join. What you don't want is to leverage that ledger and build a closed system on top, no matter how nice it is because then as developers and users interact with the closed economy, then you lose a lot of the power of the base layer bitcoin,” he asserts.
In today’s society, dependence on finance is significant. As Jack explains, this has to do with individuals earning in a fiat currency then investing and speculating with that money. He envisions a world where people will be able to be more financially independent. “If people were earning, spending, consuming and producing on a single ledger that itself had a deflationary money supply, then basically people would no longer use finance as a necessity, it becomes an option.”
Unlike fiat currencies, Bitcoin as a system does not have a central authority. Jack is keen to point out that Bitcoin removes power from money and that in itself is liberating. But how do we know how the system is doing? Well, price is one way of gauging Bitcoin’s performance. Jack believes that innovations and building good utility for the ledger will help increase Bitcoin’s price. As he points out, building applications that allow users to monetize instantaneously is the way to go. Users tend to overlook transaction fees if they are able to earn in heaps.
In terms of transactions volume in the BSV network to date, Jack thinks there should be magnitudes more. As he says, “if you have 5 million transactions on Cryptofights per day but it's being done by like a few hundred users, that is not growing the price, that's not growing the economy.”
Jack advises entrepreneurs to come up with a product that Bitcoin holders want instead of building a business based on their own likes and interests. He says its best to monetize their business even as early as inception days. He advises entrepreneurs to raise as much BSV as possible for their business without having to worry too much about failing to return the investment. Bitcoin cannot be outperformed due to its limited number, he says. As he explains, investors will benefit not by getting a return of their investment but by allocating a percentage of their Bitcoin holdings towards a project that contributes to increase Bitcoin’s velocity and utility and in turn increasing the price of Bitcoin. “That is a healthy ecosystem,” he says.
IPv6 at the BSV Global Blockchain Convention
There’s been much focus on the IPv6 or the Internet Protocol version 6, an upgrade on the current IPv4. Compared to the latter, IPv6 is known to increase security and privacy functionality on the internet. It’s no surprise that IPv6 will be an expected buzz word in the upcoming BSV Global Blockchain Convention in Dubai.
On this episode of CoinGeek Conversations, we’ll hear nChain chief scientist Dr. Craig Wright discuss the combining power of blockchain technology and IPv6, as well as the founder and president of the IPv6 Forum, Latif Ladid as he explains why BSV is the only blockchain capable of handling IPv6’s transactions volume.
CoinGeek Conversations: A Look Back at CoinGeek Conferences
As we patiently await the upcoming BSV Global Blockchain Convention to be held in Dubai this May, Claire Celdran takes a look back at some of the highlights of CoinGeek Conferences past.
Listen in on Jeff Baek’s presentation of Peersend and how it allows users to send and receive money seamlessly on the internet. Watch personalities from the gaming industry including Haste Arcade, HandCash, NFTY Jigs and Built by Gamers discuss how users can monetize from playing and participating in games. And witness all over again BSV Technical Director Steve Shadders’ live demonstration of terranode!
On this episode, we brought back Patrick Thompson’s interview with TAAL CEO Stefan Mathews and Financial Cryptographer Ian Grigg on the premiere broadcast of CoinGeek TV where the two revealed stories of their initial encounter with the Bitcoin White Paper and Dr. Craig Wright.
Lastly, get inspired with the keynote speeches from the distinguished economist George Gilder and nChain Chief Scientist Dr. Craig Wright at the 2020 CoinGeek Conference in London.
Rad CEO Tony Mugavero knows a thing or two about big entertainment brands - just look at the list of the company’s content deal partners, which includes Disney, NBCUniversal, Fox, Showtime, Warner Brothers, Sony.
And he knows about cutting-edge tech. Rad’s current focus on blockchain follows pioneering work in VR, in which he also partnered with big entertainment brands.
But Tony is happy to admit that for Rad and for many others a couple of years ago, the VR revolution didn’t quite happen. Back then, Rad was a VR streaming company - offering 360 video, 3D spatial audio and other innovative products. While VR “continued to take its time”, as Tony puts it, Rad moved into more “traditional” video streaming.
Talking on this week’s CoinGeek Conversations, Tony explains how he knew then that Rad “still needed a differentiator”, rather than competing head to head with the likes of Amazon and Netflix.
Blockchain looked like it could provide one. And so “we started working on incorporating smart contracts for content and handling royalty splits and payments”. That was around the start of 2018, but once again Tony found he was ahead of the curve: “the world wasn't ready for it yet.” Potential business partners were interested but not willing to dive in.
That was then. Today the world is catching up with Rad. And Rad is putting NFTs together with entertainment to create - inevitably perhaps - “NFTV”. CoinGeek owner Calvin Ayre, through his Ayre Ventures, has recently announced an investment in Rad. And Tony is planning to incorporate the Bitcoin SV blockchain as an important element in Rad’s model for the future.
Last year, Rad started experimenting with its first NFT sales. For instance you could buy an NFT for a high quality video of a classic movie which came with a physical poster that would be shipped to you. The other side of the smart contract was that royalties and other payments would immediately be sent to anyone owed them, automatically and immediately the sale was completed.
So how does BSV fit into the picture? Tony says that “Ethereum has gotten incredibly expensive” and “it’s reasonably fast …but not that fast.” BSV has the attributes people are looking for:
“I think if you look at what's happening generally across the whole ecosystem, there's been a lot of development around ‘how can we make blockchains faster and cheaper?’ And so, ultimately, BSV clearly fits into that category. And you know, there's a community that's really excited about it and its potential and building on top of it.”
One idea for using BSV would be as a kind of master data record for other chains: “if we have a bunch of different transactions that are happening on a bunch of different chains and you need a single record that's auditable that somebody can just say, ‘show me all the different things that are happening in this ecosystem’, then you don't want to go query every different blockchain and and try to cobble that data together yourself. So simultaneously you can have a bunch of different buying and selling and minting and trading that's happening, but then have kind of a master ledger that tracks all of that information.”
As to whether NFTV will be working with the big entertainment brands or be more of a disruptive force in competition with them, Tony says that a move towards more control by both producers and consumers goes with a bigger trend:
“I think it's a generational shift. It's not like one company comes out and completely destroys the whole entertainment business. It's how do we listen to creators and consumers and say, what are they doing, what are they trying to do? What do they want? And build something for that? And if that ends up going counter to the studios and what they're trying to achieve, they'll just need to listen to their consumers and their fans. "
Genuine Retweets is changing lives, according to its founder and CEO, Nick Numas. He says he feels “humbled” by the impact his company is having, especially on those living in less developed countries, where in some cases it has “doubled some people’s wages.”
“We receive letters from people that we apparently change their lives with the earnings they get from Genuine Retweets.”
The platform, which is exclusively on Twitter, allows promoters who it signs up to earn money by retweeting, commenting and liking posts. In return, they receive instant payment into their Bitcoin SV wallets. For businesses, it offers a paid service that distributes their tweets and increases engagement with them.
It’s not just about the money for Nick though. He wants to “re-educate people… to show them your presence is valuable online, and we foresee in the future there’ll be a lot more type of business operations which compensate people for their presence online.”
Genuine Retweets’ promoters are moderated to ensure that only accounts with a significant following or that could be valuable to the businesses using the service are permitted to participate in the paid work.
The moderation process is something that Nick is fastidious about. He uses 15 moderators who make decisions on jobs coming in and are paid 25 cents for each moderation. In total, the team has checked through 2400 accounts and only let 640 join as paid promoters.
“You have to be valuable to the businesses that use our service, if you’re not a valuable person i.e if you do loads of giveaways, then your account looks really tacky or if your account looks fake and stuff like that, we won’t let you in to do the promoting.”
Nick explains to Charles Miller on this week’s episode of CoinGeek Conversations that the reason he is so particular about the accounts he signs up is down to his experience working as a marketing manager for TDXP, a trading platform.
He says that he tried giveaways to increase numbers on TDXP, but this just led to follows from robots. He workshopped the issue with a developer colleague and discovered his problems could be solved using a private Twitter account and an API.
That’s when the Genuine Retweets business was born, and he’s thrilled with its progress. “We broke even in two weeks, and we’ve made a profit every single week and we pay a full-time developer now.”
While the business is currently centred around the BSV community, Nick is keen to expand the business model. He explains that the Bitcoin community is one of many that he’s keen to tap into and is currently in talks about a music version of the service and a football one for Aston Villa.
He believes, like Dr. Craig Wright, that Bitcoin’s role should be as the ‘plumbing’ for the internet, something that sits beneath the surface and ensures the smooth running of things.
“I am very besotted with Bitcoin. If anybody can find me a better tool to do entrepreneurship on the internet than Bitcoin, I need to see it because as far as I’m concerned there is no better tool do to business with on the internet than Bitcoin.”
The Bitcoin SV incubator Satoshi Block Dojo is approaching the end of its first 12-week programme in London’s East End. The cohort of eight startups is working towards a big night in which they’ll have the chance to pitch their businesses to an audience of potential investors.
Ahead of that, this week’s CoinGeek Conversations offers a sneak preview of all eight of the startup ideas. And if you want to find out more about Block Dojo itself, just go back to last week’s show, in which COO Osmin Callis explains the Dojo’s philosophy and the opportunities it is offering for many more BSV entrepreneurs.
Here, then, as briefly as possible, are the first eight businesses:
- Galatea and Pygmalion (G&P)
It’s an idea for authenticating artworks - and eventually many other kinds of product too. Galatea and Pygmalion highlights the problems of counterfeiting and piracy in the art world, and promises to fix them with a blockchain solution. The founders are two brothers.
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+App
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App offers a way for specialists to charge their customers or clients for their time more easily than by using traditional methods. It aims to create more efficient transactions in the gig economy for a wide range of experts. Its founders are a husband and wife team.
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Ninja Punk Girls
Ninja Punk Girls is an NFT-based game in which players battle each other to win currency or NFTs. It will be developed as both a card game and 3D fighting game. The founders envisage several sources of revenue, both in-game and beyond.
- Sattva Meta
Sattva Meta promotes net zero carbon emissions through an accounting mechanism offering verifiable ways to track carbon offsetting claims. Its customers will receive audit-ready reports to encourage their decarbonising programmes.
- Soundoshi
Soundoshi wants to revolutionise the music industry by allowing its customers to once again own the music they pay for. On the blockchain, fans will build an immutable collection and musicians will get a better deal than they do from the streaming services.
- Buzzmint
Buzzmint offers its service to existing brands and businesses that want to mint their own NFT projects. It will collect subscriptions and royalties from the users of its platform and believes the media and publishing world is waiting for such a solution.
- CosmosX
CosmosX is a space-themed metaverse in which businesses and consumers interact, using NFTs and the company’s own tokens. The space-themed world will be the site of virtual music and gaming and the company expects to benefit from the growth of VR and AR.
- Sesire
Sesire will provide adult video on its Bitcoin SV blockchain platform. It wants to give power back into content creators, allowing them fast and direct payment. And it will use AI to select content for its users in what is a huge global market.
CoinGeek is following the whole Block Dojo programme. Watch out for our BSV Stories film, covering this first cohort from start to finish.
The Bitcoin SV blockchain is “absolutely perfect” for start-ups looking to build their businesses on chain, says Osmin Callis, Chief Operating Officer of the Satoshi Block Dojo.
“The fact that Bitcoin SV is a complete financial system that you can run your business on is only starting to become apparent to both enterprises and individual entrepreneurs so, yes, the future, I think, looks very bright.”
Business building is a subject that Osmin knows a lot about. In her role at the Satoshi Block Dojo, she is responsible for guiding young start-ups with ideas for building services and products on the BSV blockchain.
The start-up accelerator, which welcomed its first cohort in January 2022, takes its team members through a highly structured twelve-week mentorship and training programme. This programme can be divided into three stages, as Osmin explains to Charles Miller on this week’s episode of CoinGeek Conversations.
The first stage is all about problem validation and looking at the commercial viability of the idea that the entrepreneurs have come up with. The second is focused on the technical elements of the application or service that they intend on building and the third is all about getting them pitch ready, so they are prepared to meet the Dojo’s network of investors.
Once the twelve-week incubation process is complete, the start-ups are ready to go out into the world, hopefully with their pockets full of investor change. They are not totally alone though as the Dojo is committed to continuing to support and engage its start-ups until they are ready for their seed round, a process which Osmin predicts will take around 12 months.
While the incubator is the Dojo’s main focus, they also run a series of events for those who may not already be switched on to the power of the Bitcoin SV blockchain. These include ideation jams, masterclasses, and university roadshows.
Osmin says that she wants these events to stimulate people to harness skills and ideas gained from whatever business or academic experience they have and transform it into “something that can result in them becoming a founder.”
For example, there is an ideation jam scheduled for the 20th of April which is focused on using Bitcoin SV to find innovative solutions for the construction industry. The event will be preceded by a workshop and a mixer to get attendees thinking about what challenges need to be tackled in the industry.
These events show the role the BSV blockchain can have in solving inefficiencies across a range of industries, and they also draw entrepreneurs into the Bitcoin SV community, with the winner of the jam invited to apply for a place on the Satoshi Block Dojo.
Osmin is determined that any hard-working entrepreneur should be able to find a way to connect with the Satoshi Block Dojo, and with investment funding recently announced from Ayre Ventures, this will only become easier. For those looking to join the next cohort of entrepreneurs, applications are currently open to join the incubator with a welcome date of 31st April 2022.
Users of the Gravity wallet received an unexpected email in February telling them that within a few weeks they must transfer all assets - crypto or fiat - out of their wallets. Gravity had been warned that it wouldn’t be given a licence by the UK’s Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) - and so it had to close its service.
Then, this month, a new email arrived. Gravity was restarting its service under the name of Gravity Money and was now based in Lithuania. Its former users were invited to reopen their accounts.
It’s been a busy and traumatic period for Michael Hudson, the founder and CEO of Bitstocks, the London company which operates Gravity, as he explains on this week’s CoinGeek Conversations.
It was “quite a blow, and quite a shock for us”, Michael says. “The FCA made it very clear in the discussions with them that it would be advantageous for us to withdraw our application as it stood a low likelihood of being approved.”
Michael explains this result was typical for anyone applying with a crypto-related business: “well in excess of 90 percent of applicants have received a quite similar message.”
But Bitstocks was hoping its proactive attitude to regulators over a relatively long period would mean it would be treated differently. “I try to not take it too personally,” says Michael. “It is unfortunate that we just got brushed with the same brush as everyone else in the space, irrespective of our approach. But I guess the FCA as a regulator is just too inundated and busy to actually look at applications based on their individual merit.”
So how did Michael win the approval of Lithuania’s equivalent of the FCA? "Well, the great thing is that they're very structured and very clear about the processes ...in order to be authorised.” In fact, it sounds as though the Lithuanian regulator was everything Michael had hoped for in the UK: “they have a much more efficient process. And also the legal framework is a lot clearer. It's just been a great experience working with the Lithuanians.”
Whilst Michael is as optimistic as ever about the prospects for his company (“I’m more bullish than you could possibly imagine, more than I could possibly state”), he feels he hasn’t received much help in his battles with regulators:
“If I'm being quite frank, [I'm] a little bit disappointed there hasn't been more support about getting the BSV based solution in the banking system from some of the actors in the BSV space, because I do think it's really important. And I also feel like I'm actually the only one trying to address having a seat in this new transition table from a banking standpoint.”
He’d like to see efforts to get big businesses using BSV for their supply chains and then using their endorsement to persuade bankers and regulators of its merits, rather than having the bankers, as he predicts, heading towards CBDC development based on a proof of stake model.
Making BSV acceptable in the political and financial world may mean that miners would need to adopt a carbon-offsetting plan. “To ensure that we are not attacked …we need to be carbon zero and we need to have economic value dependent on our infrastructure that's actually the same economic value that's lobbying the political interests.”
“If we start getting really big, huge brands dependent on this infrastructure, then there is a real commercial reason why they will lobby for this infrastructure and not lobby against it.”
In the meantime, Michael’s customers will be pleased to be able to open the new Lithuanian version of their Gravity wallets.
Yuriy Porytko is a fifth generation Ukrainian-American who says sport has been a significant vehicle in his life when it comes to connecting with people. It was through skateboarding that he met Adam Hawley, the managing partner at NFTfamiliars. It’s a new NFT company which has just launched a charity initiative to support Ukraine. All the proceeds raised will go to the Joint Ukrainian-American Relief Committee (UUARC) to help Ukrainians affected by the country’s war with Russia.
Yuriy describes Adam as a significant force in the skateboarding community having manufactured skateboard equipment and merchandise under his own company name, Failure. Having been in the same community for more than two decades, Yuriy considers Adam to be “family”.
The Ukrainian Relief NFT collection is a collection of NFTs that can be purchased through NFT marketplace FabriikX. Adam guarantees that the purchase price will go direct to UUARC, something that is made possible with BSV Blockchain. “This NFT means your money goes directly within minutes into that account, into those people's hands, into this channel. The BSV aspect of it just enables it to happen immediately,” he explains.
The NFT artwork functions as a keepsake for its owner and contains images that represent Ukraine, the resilience of its citizens and the spirit that guides Ukrainians as they navigate their way in the midst of war.
As Adam tells Charles Miller in this episode of CoinGeek Conversations, this is the first charity initiative on NFTfamiliars. He believes that the BSV blockchain will also be able to help with the commercial aspect of integrating community. “It's basically all the familiarity. It's the familiarity of everything. It's the connectivity of everything. It's the blockchain.. through the different NFTs, which puts everyone in their own familiarity space and make them feel comfortable.”
As parting words, Yuriy conveys this message to viewers and listeners: “People don't understand that the simplest little acts make the biggest difference. Every little thing counts. You know, just keep the Ukrainian people in your thoughts and your prayers.”
To find out more about the Ukraine initiative on NFTfamiliars, check out this CoinGeek article.
And to purchase your own NFT and contribute to the cause, go to the limited edition NFTs on FabriikX.
The real benefit of NFTs is that they can strengthen the relationships musicians have with fans and grant artists more control, says Mandeep, a rapper and doctor who has recently released his Bitcoin EP 1 on the RelayX platform.
The album, which includes the tracks Trader Joe and Satoshi Bop, is comprised of seven songs. Each one has been released with a corresponding NFT, which fans have been invited to purchase using Bitcoin SV.
The NFTs, known as $DEEP tokens act as lifetime revenue shares connecting holders to Mandeep’s music. This means that any fees he gets when his music is played will be shared out amongst token holders.
“I think that’s one of the main games that Bitcoin lets you play; it finally gives you the chance to control the incentives that people have for interacting with your work in a way that is completely flexible and up to you and so that’s the power that I’m trying to leverage to build a stronger community behind my work.”
Speaking on this week’s CoinGeek Conversations, Mandeep says that he believes this will be an improvement on the status quo, where fans are only able to stream music on Spotify, with no real connection to the artist.
“NFTs allow you to have greater control over what happens to your relationship with the consumer after the track has been released,” he adds.
Mandeep predicts that others in the industry will soon come around to his way of thinking. He points out that a profitable NFT music platform, Jamify, has already been built on the Bitcoin SV blockchain to host musicians like him and ensure they get the exposure they deserve.
Mandeep has even brought his music into the hospitals he works in. He says he often tries to encourage patients to freestyle with him, believing this to be particularly helpful for younger patients with mental health issues who might struggle to put into words how they are feeling under the scrutiny of traditional therapy.
His devotion to music is such that he is taking the bold step of quitting a career in medicine to focus on it. From August this year he plans to scale back his time spent on the wards and concentrate on music instead, although he does plan to return to medicine later as a “psychiatrist… with a grey beard.”
Medicine’s loss will be Bitcoin SV’s gain, as the multi-talented Mandeep is already using his creative thinking and passion for music to shake up the industry, one freestyle at a time.
Check out some of Mandeep's work below:
Trader Joe: https://relayx.com/market/ac7feddc254e0f2a401a39dd808a06b6e3a37b4ec6e3fbd9558adca3b0f8ef2d_o3
See Me As I Am voice choir, TedXNHS:
https://www.ted.com/talks/elftin1voice_choir_see_me_as_i_am
BL@CKBOX I S16 I Ep. 135:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sl7pFfCJ3d0
As nChain’s Director of Research, Owen Vaughan’s background is in the fields of high energy physics, cryptography and differential geometry. Now at the London research and development company for enterprise blockchain, Vaughan’s team provides foundational research in scalable blockchain technology.
As he tells Charles Miller in this episode of CoinGeek Conversations, he is witnessing an uptick in individuals who have become experts in Bitcoin technology within the last four years. “We're seeing lots of different groups within the BSV ecosystem engaging in really serious research and understanding at a very fundamental level,” he says.
He notes that developers are now capable of maximizing the use of blockchain technology by building applications that require large transactions and scripts - which was not seen several years ago.
Vaughan describes nChain as “a wonderfully rich environment in which to research because there's so much to do and so much potential.” He points to a recent nChain discovery around miners validating transactions, saying this opens up a new paradigm in the field of cryptography and zero knowledge proofs. He also mentions the invention of a threshold signature scheme - a potential new product area that could be the best in the market.
nChain began as a research-led organization but over time has evolved into a more product-oriented company. It has led Vaughan to believe that understanding the challenges in the market will help them solve issues that lie ahead.
One recent company initiative is to deliver digital cash solutions for central banks around the globe. As Vaughan explains, understanding economics is now integral to the work. He says inflation and monetary supply are some of the issues that needs to be properly examined and understood.
“We believe we're more than just a tech company, but we are capable of modeling the cash flow in a particular country and explaining what the benefits may be and the challenges involved in moving that to a blockchain based solution.”
On the question of nChain’s large patent portfolio, Vaughan says patenting is not the goal of the work that they do. But being able to acquire patents demonstrates the justification for the investment in research and helps defend the company and the BSV ecosystem against other operators who have their own patent portfolios.
The fastest route to enterprise adoption is for those within the BSV ecosystem to work together, says Richard Baker, CEO of TAAL Distributed Information Technologies Inc.
Richard believes that mainstream adoption is close, and that the next two years will be critical in showing the world what Bitcoin SV is capable of, so long as the community sticks together.
“We have to remind ourselves that right now we need to group together as an ecosystem and really power through the next 24 months… but this is the best technology and the best utility network for the long term.”
“The fight is outside, it isn’t inside,” he stresses.
Richard believes that Bitcoin SV is following a Gartner hype cycle model and is currently approaching a ‘trough of disillusionment’. While that may sound disconcerting, it does mean that BSV is one step closer to entering a ‘plateau of productivity’ where it will see mainstream adoption, something Richard predicts will happen around the time of the next Bitcoin halving in 2024.
On this week’s episode of CoinGeek Conversations, Richard tells Charles Miller that his priority in his new role as CEO of TAAL is commercialising the transaction processing business. To do this it is integral that as many transactions as possible are happening on the Bitcoin SV network and that those transactions are monetised.
He is particularly excited about developments in the play-to-earn gaming category which he says is “booming”. He singles out CryptoFights, a blockchain game developed by FYX Gaming and built on the BSV blockchain that is regularly recording daily transactions in the millions.
But it’s not just the gaming industry that Richard has set his sights on. He hopes that Taal will become a major blockchain infrastructure provider for a whole range of industries.
He explains that because of the interoperability of the blockchain and the “ability to jump in and out of all these different ecosystems, these metaverses, is going to require something that looks a lot like a Metanet service provider, we will need to have robust architecture that deals with all of the movement of microtransactions and identities in and out of all those different ecosystems.”
His experience as CEO of GeoSpock, a deep-tech software technology company, will stand him in good stead to guide Taal towards this goal. During his tenure at the Cambridge start-up, his focus was on translating real world data from sources like IoT sensors and smart street lighting into data for decision-making for governments and enterprises.
He also has experience in the Telecoms industry, building extensive optical fibre networks around the world in the early 1990s. This role saw him establishing infrastructure that became the backbone of the internet we know today and fostered innovation in a way nobody could have imagined, something he hopes to replicate at Taal, with the blockchain.
Richard is confident that he will be successful in commercialising the mining company and reshaping it into a dominant player in the blockchain landscape. He predicts a “joining of forces over the next three, five, seven years of mobile operators, the big cloud compute companies and the public blockchain leaders.”
The invention of Bitcoin and the subsequent proliferation of cryptocurrencies will have a lasting impact on traditional finance, says Eswar Prasad, Tolani Senior Professor of International Trade Policy at Cornell University and author of ‘The Future of Money’, a book exploring how finance is changing in the digital age.
While he has his doubts about the utility of Bitcoin as a currency, arguing that it has largely become “a speculative financial asset” rather than the pseudonymous, peer-to-peer medium of exchange it was designed to be, he is confident its influence will change the nature of money for good.
“I think the emergence of cryptocurrencies… is lighting a fire into central banks to start issuing digital currencies of their own. So, this is the sense in which I think the cryptocurrency revolution is going to touch all of us, even if you and I might never own a Bitcoin,” he says.
Eswar predicts that we will soon see the end of cash, with it being replaced by Central Bank Digital Currencies (CBDCs) and privately run digital payment systems or some combination of the two.
He also believes that the creation of Bitcoin in 2008 sped up the FinTech revolution, a development which has democratised finance and made it more accessible, particularly in developing countries.
“The fact that even in low-income countries you now have people having very easy access to low-cost digital payment systems makes the life of consumers and businesses a lot easier,” he says.
He points to the Aadhaar biometric identification system in India as an example. The Aadhaar Act, which became law in 2016, makes it easier for Indians, especially those in rural areas, to verify their identity and open bank accounts, improving financial inclusion.
Figures show that the scheme has been game changing. In 2014’s Global Findex Database just 53% of adults in India had bank accounts, in 2017 that number had increased to 80%. That’s an extra 300 million accounts.
Talking to Charles Miller on CoinGeek Conversations, Eswar says he is impressed with blockchain technology and believes it will have a lasting impact. He sees it as not only the foundation for decentralised finance but also predicts that it will play a key role in innovations in public governance, something that we’ve already seen the BSV blockchain proposed for in Tuvalu.
But it’s not all good news where Eswar is concerned as he thinks the crypto mania that’s taken hold of our society has a darker side. “I think financial stability issues and investor protection, especially of unsophisticated retail investors who might be investing in cryptocurrencies, getting taken in by the razzle dazzle of the new technology and not understanding the risks… is a concern at the moment.”
Overall, he is cautiously optimistic about the impact the digital currency revolution will have on our lives, saying “I think there is a lot to look forward to in the new technologies but also a fair bit of fear.”
Joshua Henslee, a former ERP and software consultant, isn’t worried by the falling dollar price of Bitcoin SV: “as the price goes down,” he says “it's almost as if the entrepreneurs and applications being built are going up.”
Talking to Charles Miller on CoinGeek Conversations, Joshua says he is happy to see the increasing utilization of tokens, NFTs, and new marketplaces on the BSV blockchain. As he stressed, “every significant metric is in the positive trend for Bitcoin SV, except its dollar price.”
Josh also discusses his views on legal matters, referencing the recent Craig Wright vs Ira Kleiman case. He questions the judge’s ability to issue a court order to miners to reroute coins or reassign ownership of a blockchain, saying that the judge did not have sufficient knowledge of Bitcoin and its workings. As he points out, the complexity of the case was evident as the court case dragged on for 45 days with the jury taking 10 days to deliberate and come up with a final verdict.
Josh also questions the role of law when it comes to income tax in the Bitcoin world. As he points out, “the reality is a lot of people I know, most or some will not [pay],” he says. “It turns into more of the individual taking personal responsibility and doing what they're supposed to do.”
In another of his YouTube videos called “Upload a file to the blockchain in five minutes,” Josh guides programmers to do as the title suggests. But for non-programmers like Charles, getting his hands on a user-friendly interface might not be too far away in the future, Josh says. “I think really it's the inability for the apps that do that to monetize that really give you a slick UI and make it really easy for the end user.”
Josh is interested in two recent initiatives built on the BSV blockchain. The first is Jamify a music platform which lets users listen to music, purchase a music NFT and interact with the artist and vice versa. He says Jamify’s advantage compared to conventional music platforms existing today is its low cost barrier to entry and the artists’ ability to accept micropayments. The second initiative, 1000 Blades is an NFT card game in which participants can purchase NFTs and win rewards. To learn more about Josh’s initiatives, go to his YouTube channel.
Europe is starting to realise the full potential of blockchain technology, says Meike Krautscheid, Chief Commercial Office at SmartLedger, a blockchain solution distribution channel.
Meike believes that Europe is finally catching up with its transatlantic neighbours in recognising the power of blockchain as a solution. This is something that she hopes to capitalise on, by positioning SmartLedger as “one of the first movers in the field.”
SmartLedger uses blockchain technology to provide solutions to clients through a combination of consultancy, partnership and internal development. This can mean anything from connecting clients with innovators working on blockchain applications to actually developing services to meet client’s needs.
For example, SmartLedger recently developed TicketMint, a platform built to solve ticketing fraud, scalping and a lack of transparency in the events industry. Built on the BSV blockchain, TicketMint can operate on a global scale without worrying about high numbers of transactions and high transaction fees. It also utilises NFT technology by turning every ticket into an exclusive token.
This means that every ticket will be on the blockchain, timestamped and made to follow implemented rule sets. This will help to ensure ticket validity and make it almost impossible for purchasers to resell tickets at extortionate prices, due to the ability to place price ceilings in rulesets.
On this episode of CoinGeek Conversations, Meike tells Charles Miller that TicketMint is just one of the exciting projects that the company is working on. She hints at further developments within the cybersecurity industry and an initiative called Proof of ESG, which they are working on with a Nobel prize winner.
Meike is unable to publicly announce who the clients they are working with are due to privacy concerns, but she does say that they are “global companies that everybody knows.”
In Meike’s role as Chief Commercial Officer, she needs to be well-informed about anything new being developed using blockchain technology. “I go to the conferences; I speak about the potential of blockchain technology and I’m really an advocate especially of the public blockchain technology of BSV.”
She is also a member of the Women of BSV, a group of female influencers sharing knowledge and views about Bitcoin SV. She believes that being part of the Bitcoin community is an essential way to keep abreast of new and innovative products, along with more formal study like courses and certificates, of which she has many.
Bitcoin is not Meike’s only passion. She is a talented double bass player who has taken part in concerts around the world, performing in front of large audiences. She explains that one of the reasons she wanted to diversify her career is due to concerns over sexism in the music industry, admitting to doubts about whether she will still be accepted as a female musician in her 50s and 60s.
Charles and Meike even joke about the possibility of combining her passions by starting a BSV orchestra. She says, “I think there are many wonderful musicians in this space, and I think we can start a band, a BSV band.”
As more enterprises want to claim to be environmentally responsible and accountable, the accuracy of carbon footprint data gathering is a growing cause of concern. Businesses are looking for new ways to efficiently verify their carbon footprint, says Bryan Daugherty, Bitcoin Association’s North America Manager.
Bryan recently launched a new initiative on the Bitcoin SV blockchain called Proof of ESG (environmental, social and corporate governance) also known as The ESG Timestamp Initiative. The company aims to “reimagine ESG reporting and impact through strategic blockchain reinvention and business transformation.”
Figures quoted by Bryan show a significant carbon footprint for each BSV transaction, but he argues that this will decrease as more people start to utilize blockchain. Until then, he puts focus on the developments in enterprise efficiencies that have been achieved with blockchain.
He points to companies like MetaStreme and WeatherSV that have collected immutable data utilizing blockchain technology, saying that blockchain allows people to make informed choices. “As we go into this next industrial revolution utilizing blockchain, it really does provide this foundation for not just efficiency and utility but to authenticate this data and break down these data silos and integrate a lot of more information where you can make better decisions.”
The Proof of ESG founder talks about a partnership with Pure Shenandoah, a company based in Virginia that grows hemp and produces CBD and sustainable products. Individuals who wish to reduce their carbon footprint can purchase an NFT called ‘hash power up’ from M.R. Megawatt and Friends, a sustainable gaming and sustainable NFT platform. That allows an individual to own a small plot or a few hemp plants from Pure Shenandoah which farmers can grow the next season. As he explains, per season, crops produce an average of 1.2 tons of carbon sequestering per acre. This allows any individual to participate and contribute to carbon sequestering through NFTs.
Individuals will also be given the opportunity to be incentivized by playing a game on the M.R. Megawatt and Friends platform. And just like Haste, players on the leaderboard will get a chance to earn micropayments back. But unlike Haste, the game comes with an environmental incentive: eighty five percent of its fees will go to Pure Shenandoah enabling its farmers to plant more hemp.
On this episode of CoinGeek Conversations, Bryan explains to Charles Miller how blockchain can assure companies that data is authenticated, honest and reliable. But what about the accuracy of the data going into the blockchain system? Bryan explains how IOT devices can be used for data gathering. “We're using everything from drones and cameras and atmospheric measuring devices. Once you're getting this data, it's a matter of utilizing it as well. And that's where blockchain also comes in because it's not just the events streaming or the storage, but it's also the computational power of this distributed small world network that you can start to use all sorts of cool analysis and metrics.”
Bryan has also recently been appointed as a subject matter expert to the Cybersecurity and Information Systems Information Analysis Centre (CSIAC), a component of the United States Department of Defense’s Information Analysis Centre enterprise. Bryan describe the CSIAC as “a group that facilitates some of the communication and research into emerging technologies across the Department of Defense and&
It was the year in which, despite everything, CoinGeek managed to bring BSVers together in Zurich and New York for two magnificent three day conferences. Both online and in person, they showcased the vibrancy of entrepreneurship around BSV, featuring a host of new projects like Peersend, Haste and Project Babbage, while also digging into its history with blockchain pioneers Stuart Haber and Scott Stornetta and cryptography guru Ian Grigg.
Then, of course, there was that trial: the seemingly endless drama in a Miami courtroom in which Dr Craig Wright successfully defended himself against accusations of fraud from the brother of his late friend and colleague Dave Kleiman.
And it was the year in which the world learnt, to its bafflement, about blockchain technology through the extraordinary prices being paid for NFTs.
So how to sum it all up, from the perspective of the 48 editions of CoinGeek Conversations that were aired in 2021?
In the final show of the year Charles Miller was joined by the two founders of the Women of BSV group, Diddy Wheldon and Ruth Heasman and his reporter colleague, Claire Celdran. Their choice of highlights led to discussion that included Terranode, Ira Kleiman’s emailing habits, Craig Wright’s audiobooks and those ubiquitous NFTs.
On that subject, Ruth Heasman was happy to trumpet the advantages of BSV: “comparing the differences between BSV and other blockchains, there's really no one else doing it the way that BSV is doing it at the moment,” she said. “The fees mean, on Ethereum, that generally artists, unless they sell an awful lot or at a very high price, then they're not making any money from their artwork. But on BSV of course, transaction fees are often less than a cent, or certainly less than a few dollars anyway.”
Claire Celdran picked a clip that told us something about Craig Wright which had nothing to do with Bitcoin. He was talking about his huge consumption of audio books, sometimes through the night. For Claire, it was a welcome insight into his personality: “he has a certain charm about him because he's smart. And from what I've learnt in the many interviews that I've seen of Craig is that he loves to learn. He's had this never-ending journey, picking on all these courses from different universities. So that's something I admire about him.”
It was the potential of Terranode that Diddy Wheldon wanted to highlight, choosing a clip from the Zurich conference in which nChain’s CTO Steve Shadders performed a live demo of scaling on the BSV blockchain, which Diddy believed, “proves the point of the scaling debate.” Indeed, Steve’s demo showed 50,000 transactions per second, with the promise of at least double that being possible.
As for the prospects for 2022, Ruth Heasman confessed she was up for more of the same: “more intrigue. I love it, it's like being part of a soap opera almost, following Bitcoin. But it's fascinating. It's ever changing. It's exciting. And I just couldn't imagine not being in the middle of it. I really couldn't. I love it.”
Happy 2022 from CoinGeek Conversations!
As the outgoing CEO of TAAL Distributed Information Technologies, Stefan Matthews is pleased with the health of the business he’s handing on to his successor: “things are going very well at TAAL,” he says, on this week’s CoinGeek Conversations.
TAAL is a publicly-quoted business on the Canadian stock exchange which began as a blockchain miner but now sees itself as the provider of an expanding range of other services too. The emphasis has switched from one source of mining revenue - the bitcoins that a miner receives for winning a block, the so-called block reward - to the other source - micropayments received for every transaction processed as part of a block.
TAAL reports that its revenues doubled from Q2 to Q3 of 2021 - from about $6 million to $12 million. But transaction processing still only accounted for 3 per cent of those totals. In 2024, Bitcoin software will automatically effect another halving of the level of block reward that miners receive for each block, so the race is on to build up transaction processing. From his contacts in the industry, Stefan is undaunted by the challenge:
“The number of calls I get, the number of messages I receive from participants in the industry, the amount of development activity that's going on - and some of the projections that these organisations have around their transactional activity on the network is massive.”
In Q3, TAAL processed an impressive 52 million transactions - but that only shows the mind-boggling numbers that are going to be required to replace the block reward income and the tiny revenue per transaction that TAAL receives - about an eighth of a cent per transaction. It’s the microscopic size of the transaction fee that holds the key to multiplying their numbers - by attracting businesses to use the ultra-efficient BSV blockchain.
But Stefan says there’s more to TAAL than those two sources of mining income: “it's not just about the number of transactions and the fees from those transactions that are in the blocks. There are a lot of other things we do in terms of providing business services and blockchain-as-a-service.”
“We have multiple APIs. We build customised nodes to suit specific business applications that our clients are working with. And we're going to be deriving a significant amount of revenue down the track from activities that are not just what you see in terms of packing transactions out of mempool into a block.”
TAAL has been expanding, partly through acquisitions, such as the BSV block explorer, WhatsOnChain, whose APIs are already processing up to 90 million transactions per month. For the moment, that service is offered free, to encourage businesses to understand and explore the potential of BSV.
But in the future that will change, and, like TAAL, WhatsOnChain will expand the services it offers, says Stefan: “WhatsOnChain isn't a one trick pony as well. It's got a number of components to it and it's got a development roadmap.”
In January, the former CEO of the British BSV startup Geospock, Richard Baker, already a TAAL board member, will take over as TAAL’s CEO. Stefan will remain as Executive Chairman “so I will continue to have an executive role in the business supporting Richard”.
Ty Everett has big ambitions. His Project Babbage is named after the 19th Century British mathematician and inventor Charles Babbage, often called the ‘father of the computer’.
The Project Babbage website invites us - in big, bold type at the top of the front page - to “Help revolutionize what it means to use computers. Help preserve what it means to be humans.”
So how’s that going to work? The answer lies with the BSV-based Metanet which Ty describes as “a new version of the internet,” adding that “it’s a version that I think people are going to really like when they get to understand it.”
Project Babbage will provide an interface between users and the apps and services they use, an interface which stores each person’s identity and online history - the personal details and data currently stored so profitably by tech giants like Facebook and Google.
“When we allow people to move between apps and services while retaining ownership over the things that they've done over the people they've connected with, over the ideas that they've shared, we can enable a better way for value to be conveyed and conducted and assessed,” says Ty.
Speaking on this week’s CoinGeek Conversations, Ty describes how his Babbage Desktop will act as “a single identity layer”. Instead of having to provide the same information to each service provider, you’ll be able to deploy it from what’s stored on the Babbage software, to anyone you give permission to access it:
“You have one account, one password, one set of keys, so to speak, that control the different ways that apps can interact with you, using Bitcoin.”
Project Babbage will allow BSV startups to leverage users’ collected details from its desktop centre, but in time it will also, Ty believes, attract existing businesses to make themselves Babbage-compatible:
“If existing apps are smart, if you are a data silo, if you have a bunch of users and a bunch of data, eventually it will make sense for you to voluntarily break down those walls and start moving all of that data that you have on chain by using Bitcoin transactions to build up a collection of the things that existing users have done.”
From its earliest days, one of the promises of Bitcoin (‘digital cash’, as the White Paper describes it) was to add a monetary layer to the internet - a feature whose absence was so often said to create time-wasting processes and unnecessary costs.
Project Babbage plans to rectify that, making use of Bitcoin SV’s micropayment capabilities:
“One of the biggest things I think that we can achieve with Bitcoin and micropayments is the reduction of economic friction,” says Ty, “because when you don't have to go through a whole bunch of hassle in order to set up agreements and arrangements and have them be affected by all of these legacy processes that create a lot of overhead and a lot of cost, [then] creators can create content and earn money from it without needing to sign up through all of these different things and depend on revenue that comes from one data broker such as such as YouTube or Facebook.”
Ty says his big vision does not depend on building a huge team. Much of the work will be done by him personally: “I've written a lot of code. I've built a lot of these components already.”
Will Everett be the new Babbage? Watch this space.
Founded in the United States in 1928, the Food Institute has provided authoritative news on food products to its members for many decades. Brian Choi started following its service five years ago. As an investment banker and private equity investor, his job required him to know the latest news on the food market and commodities. He received weekly updates from the Institute until one day he saw an opportunity for himself.
As he tells Charles Miller on this week’s CoinGeek Conversations, he wanted to “build the Food Institute into becoming an industry hub where you can go to, whether you're a food industry executive, whether you're a private equity individual, whether you're in venture capital, to know what's happening in the food industry.”
In 2020, Brian managed to acquire the Institute and turn his vision into reality. Under his leadership as CEO, the organization continues to provide food industry news whilst adding a digital media component and expanding its content to cover all aspects and stages of food processing - from agriculture, to manufacturing to retail and service.
In addition, the Institute provides expert commentaries from food business CEOs and investors. Brian wants the company to be “the Bloomberg of the food industry.” He adds “It’s the one hub where you can get the information that you need to help you be informed about your business.”
The Food Institute and blockchain
Brian is keen to point out that most of their content is based on up-and-coming trends, as well as products and services that have an impact on the food industry. For instance, in relation to new technology, Brian explains that they’ve already seen the emergence of artificial intelligence and robotics in food processing and manufacturing.
Now with blockchain he believes that technology can impact the food industry, such that data will be leveraged and in turn, help businesses and consumers be better informed.
Moreover, he sees blockchain as a key component in efficiently providing a measure of accountability for a company, especially when it comes to meeting its environmental and sustainability goals. “With companies like Coke and PepsiCo, they are putting a stake in the ground saying, by 2030 we're going to be carbon neutral, or by 2025 we're going to use fifty percent less water. It's another thing to say here are the facts, this is the data, this is what we've done and having it transparent to everyone and easily verifiable - which is what blockchain is able to do.”
The food institute and Bitcoin SV
Bitcoin Association President Jimmy Nguyen, along with Stephan Nilsson, founder of UNISOT and SeafoodChain, were invited by the Food Institute to educate its audience on the basics of blockchain and how food companies can apply blockchain to their businesses. As Charles points out, UNISOT, a company that utilizes the Bitcoin SV blockchain to make the global food supply chain more efficient and transparent, is a terrific example of how blockchain can be applied in the food industry.
Brian agrees, saying he would like to invite Jimmy and Stephan back for round two of discussions to expound on blockchain backed applications that are suited for the food industry.
Finally, Brian shares his thoughts on the adoption of blockchain technology in the food industry and how BSV can help. “I'm hoping more companies like UNISOT and SeafoodChain come to the forefront because I think we're still a long way away for this technology being adopted by the masses. The more entrepreneurs are leveraging the BSV blockchain and developing applications, that's only going to help foster adoption.”
Today many online games have their own virtual currency. There’s V-Bucks on Fortnite or VC (virtual currency) on NBA 2K. The currencies let you buy exclusive content or upgrades for that game. But they can’t be used outside of their own game.
Supposing there was a virtual currency that could be converted easily to and from regular money and could be used across a wide range of games. It’s coming.
It’s called the Duro and it’s going to be marketed by the Bitcoin SV wallet Handcash.
So how does the Duro relate to BSV? Simple: one Duro is just the name Handcash is giving to one two hundred thousandth of a BSV. Or, to put it another way:
1 BSV = 200,000 Duros.
By giving a name to that size of unit, the numbers involved for very small transactions will be more user-friendly. So, for instance, if 1 BSV = $160 US, then 10 Duros are worth 0.8 of a cent - the kind of money you can throw around buying something in an online game without having to worry too much.
On this week’s CoinGeek Conversations, Brandon Bryant, a software developer for Handcash, talks about how the Duro ecosystem will evolve and open access to a range of games, thanks to Handcash’s partnering with several BSV startups and with Built by Gamers, an existing esports business whose Taylor Searle featured on last week’s edition of the show.
So how will newbies find their way into the system? Brandon explains:
“You download a Handcash wallet - and soon we will have fiat rails inside of Handcash so you'll be able to use Apple Pay or your preferred payment method to buy some Duros or some Bitcoin SV. “
Then it’s just a question of picking some games to try out:
“You'll be directed to our app store and inside of the app store, you'll find the Haste Arcade, the NFTY Jigs app and all the other apps that are using the Handcash SDK. And you'll be able to connect to those apps, authorise payments - and you're on your way.”
The difficulty of onboarding new users into the BSV ecosystem has long been seen as a limiting factor in widespread adoption of the many products and services available. Handcash has tried to make it as simple as possible: “the goal is to have the sign up process in under a few minutes.”
And with Taylor Searle’s Built by Gamers’ users being encouraged to sign up to Handcash, the prospects for many new users have never looked so good:
“Handcash is launching a referral programme. So Built By Gamers has a huge firehose of audience and attention. And they're going to point that at Handcash in this ecosystem. And in return, they're earning a percentage of the profit from the top ups that those users that they refer get. So everyone's economically aligned to just drive growth within the ecosystem.”
For game players, there’s more to the Handcash connection than just currency because they will also be able to trade virtual goods. Handcash is partnering with NFTY Jigs to support RUN tokens, so digital items and NFTs will also be transferable between games.
A relatively recent recruit to the Handcash team, Brandon says he’s impressed by the relentless focus that its founders Alex Agut and Rafa Seibane bring to the business:
“Rafa and Alex are experts at saying no.” But not in this case: “Handcash is really going after the esports industry and gaming and everything that comes along with that.”
Built by Gamers, an American esports organization, wants to get ahead of the game by integrating with Bitcoin SV.
“It’s a sneaky industry and we want to get out in front,” says Taylor Searle, the company’s strategic advisor. He believes gaming is an overlooked sector when you consider the huge numbers of people and money that are now involved.
Based in Arizona with operations worldwide, Built by Gamers onboards professional players and content creators and distributes their work to various platforms while managing brand integrations and sponsorships. The organization acts as an intermediary between sponsors and players, allowing the latter to focus on their gameplay. It also provides its teams with housing, food stipends and a coaching staff, much like a traditional sports team would have access to. As Taylor explains, “these kids are the most elite, I call them athletes in the space.”
The organization is always recruiting new members and plans to partner with schools and universities to discover new talent. Ideally, they’d like to sign up people who are both great players and effective influencers. But for Taylor, the secret sauce is “recruiting people based on how well they drive with our culture”. Establishing themselves as the most professional and most gamer-oriented organization in the esports community is a priority. For Taylor, representing the ‘gamer ethos’ of constant improvement is the way to go.
On this episode of CoinGeek Conversations, Taylor explains how they will push gaming to the next level with the help of the Bitcoin SV blockchain. “Our goal is to create gamification of the fan experience. That’s only possible on Bitcoin SV, there really isn't competition in terms of how it excels and how it's going to help us unlock the future.”
Taylor mentions that other blockchains have approached them in the past but he says only the Bitcoin SV blockchain can harness the power of gamification. “Every other project out there is about getting scarce collectables, and that's cool, but there's so much more to offer with this technology than creating rare things.”
Built by Gamers plans to onboard people to Handcash and incorporate BSV blockchain backed apps into their website. “Someone will come to our website through this adoption funnel and they'll sign up for Handcash, NFTY jigs, Haste arcade all at once,” he explains. “We will use this technology to pretty much become a middleman to almost every fan interaction.”
The mission of NiftyCo, where Victor Tang is CTO is to “democratise” NFTs (non-fungible tokens). As he puts it, “we're basically creating a platform that makes it possible for anyone, not just crypto enthusiasts, to create and transact NFTs on the blockchain.”
Speaking on this week’s CoinGeek Conversations, Victor explains that users won’t need to create wallets, use exchanges to convert from fiat or transfer assets between accounts.
Instead, NiftyCo’s customers will only need to know “how to create a user account, how to upload documents or image files and how to pay for that with a credit card or a bank account.”
As a result, “hopefully we will be able to have hundreds of thousands of users ...creating and selling and trading NFTs as opposed to thousands of crypto enthusiasts.”
New users would still need to complete the usual KYC and AML procedures, but “after that, you simply click a button that says, I'd like to mint this piece of art. You enter in the title, your name, as the artist, and then the files that you wish to upload. You could upload just one image or you can upload some supporting documentation that goes with that - some certificate of authenticity that you've signed. You could even include a little audio file as your narration of this piece of art - what inspired you etc. And they'd all be combined and bundled up within this one NFT and you can then proceed to sell it or you can hold on to it and just licence it so that you still retain ownership.”
From then on, the main responsibility for the user will be to avoid losing their passphrase - just as you must be equally careful with your 12 seed words for any digital wallet.
The leaders of NiftyCo are split between Seattle, Washington and Toledo, Ohio, home of co-founder Phil Runyon. Victor says today they have “just a handful of developers” but they’re “working feverishly” on one particular launch project, which is at the high end of the NFT market.
Their client is “a major museum” which wants to create “an NFT for a 17th century Dutch masterpiece”. NiftyCo’s approach is to make their NFTs more secure than others by encrypting every document or image that is included with it and giving the owner the private key. That means “anybody accessing the blockchain can certainly find the URL pointing to these documents, but they cannot view it. They cannot access it in any way.”
That overcomes some of what people have found hard to accept about existing high end art NFTs: that the purchaser has no better access to the work than anyone else on the internet.
As Victor explains the added value NiftyCo’s security will provide: “if you pay hundreds of thousands or millions of dollars for this piece of art, you want it to be able to show it in your hotel or in your private residence on a large screen TV and know that you know it's yours only.”
Working for an internet service provider in the 1990s, Dave Perrill witnessed the emergence of a new set of technologies. As the dot com boom gathered pace, he saw the magnitude of adoption and innovation that occurred on the internet platform.
Dave ventured into blockchain in 2017. He is now CEO and co-founder of Compute North, developing and operating data center infrastructure for computationally intensive applications such as Bitcoin miners. Like the internet back in the 1990s, he believes that his new business is here to stay. And like the internet, he expects blockchain to continue to evolve and be innovated upon.
As a seasoned entrepreneur, Dave thinks at least one out of fifty blockchain businesses will succeed. “Just like the dot-com days where some ideas didn’t actually pull through, some will come to fruition.”
The job of Compute North is to help build up data infrastructure sites and make sure they operate effectively and efficiently.
CoinGeek Conversations host Charles Miller suggested to Dave that if this was the gold rush era, Compute North would be the company that capitalizes on the needs of miners by selling them picks, shovels and pans. Dave agreed with the analogy and points to a bigger trend: “today’s data centers are fantastic but they are overbuilt for a lot of applications. They don’t need that level of redundancy. We think crypto can lead the way to provide other things like machine learning, graphic rendering, e-commerce, things that don’t need to be there in real time applications.”
Bitcoin mining consumes a large amount of energy. But Dave counters that “I do feel like the energy argument is somewhat of the lazy argument.” He believes that the people who attack the energy use of Bitcoin don’t see the value in the network. “They don’t understand it. They don’t understand there is value to the energy.”
Dave also points out that miners are incentivized to find lower cost energy. “It’s a global competitive network. Driving to the lowest cost is really important - to ride not just the highs but the lows of demand. Eventually these prices will converge.” Dave sees renewable energy as a cost-effective solution and a viable option. “We are seeing customers make a push for ESG [Environmental, Social and Governance] not because it’s the right thing to do and the right narrative for the industry but also because economically, it makes most sense.”
In this episode of CoinGeek Conversations, Dave reflects on the recent CoinGeek Conference in New York City which he attended. Speaking from experience of attending other blockchain conferences such as BTC’s, Ethereum’s and Litecoin’s, he tells Charles Miller that the BSV conference was “very thoughtful”. He goes on to say that the BSV community is “strategically thinking about the future, the differentiators, and how it would apply to the rest of the ecosystems”.
As for what’s to come, Dave sees a future where blockchain will be embedded deep in our technology. “Most people won’t even understand it, the complexities behind the scenes and how it works won’t be a part of the public dynamic.” Dave believes that the underpinnings of how the technology comes together will be buried - and for him, that’s a good thing . He says, for the most part, “people will only care about what the technology brings to them.”
Working at Bellcore Labs in the 1990s, scientists Stuart Haber and Scott Stornetta were allowed to pick their own research projects. For Scott, a problem worth solving was the authentication of digital documents: how could you be sure the version you were looking at had not been altered from its original?
The two worked as a team and were on the point of proving to themselves that the question of trust made the problem insoluble: there always needed to be some independent person or body to verify authenticity – but what if they were also part of a collusion?
But then, Scott says, he had a brainwave. If you needed to keep adding extra trusted parties to vouch for the honesty of the existing players, then, logically, the list would expand infinitely until the whole world was required. And that still wouldn’t be enough.
Scott’s insight was, as he explains it, that “I realised that if you turn that upside down and created a system of interlinked documents with essentially everyone as a witness, then you had, in fact, solved the problem.”
As Stuart points out, time is an agreed social construct. So, using time means that, in effect, the world would be able to validate your document as having existed in a particular form at a particular time.
On this week’s CoinGeek Conversations, Scott and Stuart talk about how they turned their theory into working code and how that became a key part of the Bitcoin White Paper.
Their original paper, How to Timestamp a Digital Document, was published in 1990. It showed how the various elements of a timestamp verification system would work. In practical terms, they used hash functions to generate the additional files. Stuart describes a one way hash function as “a way of …taking the fingerprint of a file”. And that was the basis of the system that Bitcoin uses to this day:
“Now we call it a blockchain, but we built a chain of blocks. And in order to achieve worldwide agreement …on the registration requests that our service had received once a week, we would compute a fingerprint, a small string of numbers and letters …that efficiently summarised the entire week of requests that had preceded it, and we published that.”
The two eventually started their own company, Surety, which operates to this day. And the Sunday edition of the New York Times still publishes, as an ad the company pays for, the hash that acts as the ‘fingerprint’ for all of the last week’s transactions.
Scott says he and Stuart welcomed Satoshi Nakamoto using their timestamping work in Bitcoin: “it was terrific in my mind that on top of a foundational layer, Satoshi had this terrific innovation.”
An important part of Satoshi’s development of the idea was to limit it to money, Scott says. They had had wider ambitions, but a more focussed approach was more productive: “we expected all the world's financial records would be done with this system. But in addition, all the world's photographs, all the world's movies. So we weren't short on ambition, but I think there was great insight to limiting it to a very specific use case.”
Stuart says he and Scott enjoyed being invited to the CoinGeek conference in New York, where they met Dr Craig Wright for the first time: “Scott and I both both met Craig …and we've enjoyed our conversation, great conversation with him, both on stage and off stage, about all sorts of topics - not all of them involving hash functions.”
One of the most discussed presentations at CoinGeek New York was by a newcomer to its conferences, Jeffrey Baek. His Peersend product offers what appears to be an almost magical integration of BSV with existing websites such as Twitter, and, to come, Amazon.
Peersend works through a Chrome extension which allows Jeff to superimpose his own Peersend icons onto Tweets, for instance, providing an instant mechanism for paying anyone on Twitter.
If, as a Twitter user and BSV wallet-holder, you send money to someone who doesn’t know anything about BSV and has maybe not even heard of it, no problem! That person will see a tweet in their feed which invites them to collect whatever you have sent them (denoted in fiat, not BSV) through a Handcash wallet. They have to sign up to Handcash to collect the money.
And if the target of your generosity doesn’t respond to your gift, don’t worry: your donation will be returned to you after 24 hours, so you can try to find someone more grateful.
It’s a simple onboarding process that could swell the numbers of BSVers spectacularly. And that’s part of Jeff’s motivation he says: “in order for Bitcoin to expand the ecosystem, we've been doing pretty well building our own siloed BSV services. But we wanted a service that could help out non-BSV people.”
Twitter is just one example of the use of Peersend, which Jeff explains more generally on this week’s CoinGeek Conversations:
“You'll be able to send BSV pretty much anywhere on the internet, any web pages, any social media platform, as long as you see a Paymail address somewhere. So if you see a Paymail address on, say, a Medium post, then the extension will highlight the Paymail and from there you'll be able to send money directly with just one click.”
Peersend is a kind of identity management system which Jeff hopes will eliminate the inefficiencies of today’s internet where users need to register separately with each business. It would mean, he says, that platforms don’t ‘own you’ as they do now. With Peersend, all those separate relationships could be “merged together into a single identity and single cash system”. Jeff’s vision is of a seamless online experience where you only have to give you identity and financial details once, for use across the internet: “it's not bound to a currency or country or platform or anything like that.”
So how is that going to work in practice, when it comes to Amazon, for instance, where Jeff says you’ll be able to buy things without even registering for an Amazon account?
“When you submit your home address at Peersend, then we'll create a Buy button on the product that you see on Amazon or eBay, and then you click to purchase it. Then we will take care of the currency conversion and order on behalf of you so that Amazon can deliver the product that you just bought.”
Jeff’s Peer Technologies is based in Seoul, South Korea, and has eight staff now. His current projects are just the start of his ambitions. He also has plans to build a BSV browser: “unless Bitcoin has its own browser that is fundamentally different from the existing browsers and has a money layer built in, it's very difficult for Bitcoin to succeed.”
If you thought digital currency was just another financial ‘boys club’, you may need to think again. The Women of BSV group is committed to carving out a place for women in a male-dominated industry.
Ruth Heasman and Diddy Wheldon are the two founders of the group which describes itself on Twitter as “down to earth & welcoming.” On their YouTube channel they cover events, conduct interviews with BSV entrepreneurs and influencers and create educational videos for those looking to learn about Bitcoin.
Ruth explains that the women don’t feel side-lined or oppressed: they are simply trying to “provide marketing and education and entertainment, just with a different slant that has more appeal to women because …a lot of it is quite dry.”
While they may find some BSV coverage too academic, they didn’t feel that way about the CoinGeek Conference in New York last week. On this week’s episode of CoinGeek Conversations, Diddy says she thought the speakers were “phenomenal.”
Education is not the only goal for the Women of BSV. They are also hoping to bring a new perspective to businesses. Ruth says, “we’re trying to provide a bit of light relief really …in a more sort of chatty way. And we’re quite interested in the people themselves, the entrepreneurs so we’re asking slightly different questions and having a bit of fun with it.”
Ahead of next week’s CoinGeek Conference in New York, Charles Miller speaks to Bitcoin Association Founding President, Jimmy Nguyen, about the complexities of organizing a live event in the time of Covid.
“It’s exciting - yet painful - because of Covid challenges with travel,” Jimmy says. Since the start of the pandemic in 2020, global lockdown restrictions have prevented many from traveling in and out of their countries but CoinGeek’s organizers haven’t let that interrupt their conference schedule and have now evolved a hybrid format combining in person and specially designed online experiences.
Being able to work on both those facets of an event at once has been “the silver lining in this cloud of covid,” Jimmy said.
So online viewers can expect a broadcast-quality show, complete with lights, cameras, directors, and a superb stage, whilst the conference will also welcome a live in-person audience. “It’s like going to be like a live awards show taping or TV show broadcast.”
Similar to the last two conferences— CoinGeek Live 2020 and CoinGeek Zurich 2021— CoinGeek New York will showcase both live and virtual speakers on stage, to deliver the latest in the BSV ecosystem. And just like CoinGeek Zurich, the event will be livestreamed on CoinGeek’s YouTube channel where audiences around the world can conveniently tune in to enjoy the show.
Charles, who attended CoinGeek Zurich in June, asked Jimmy whether there had been enough new developments in the past four months to justify another conference now. Jimmy was quick to point out that there will be a number of new project releases that he is very excited about, including updates on the first stablecoin on BSV, announcements about BSV use in the online gaming and eSports space and about the latest NFTs on BSV.
In addition, Jimmy mentioned looking forward to the presentation of Blarecast, the much-anticipated music platform launching on the BSV blockchain. He is also excited to hear from the founder of Aequantium, who is expected to talk about a new use of tokens as a financial instrument.
What was Jimmy’s rationale for choosing the conference slogan “It’s About Time?” He said it comes from the fact that Bitcoin SV system elements are – indeed - about time. “The white paper did not call it a blockchain, it is described as a distributed timestamped server.”
In addition, Jimmy explains the other connotations that can be derived from the theme. “It's about time for Bitcoin to be useful and not to be just treated as a speculative investment asset or a store of value; it's about time for the blockchain ecosystem to be more legally compliant; it's about time for real global adoption; it's about time for Bitcoin SV’s power, that as we know were limited by the scaling wars, to finally really be unleashed.”
Coincidentally, CoinGeek New York will be held at the Sheraton Hotel in Times Square. To register to be an online participant, go to: https://coingeekconference.com. There’s still time!
Craig Massey is a man on a mission. A mission to show the world what companies can achieve when they use Bitcoin SV. That’s why he has co-founded the Satoshi Block Dojo, a start-up accelerator for budding entrepreneurs with ideas for building on the BSV blockchain. The London based programme will offer successful applicants 12 weeks of support, investment opportunities and up to £150,000 in backing.
An experienced entrepreneur himself, Craig Massey was inspired to get into the BSV space by his joint co-founder Richard Boase, a Bitcoin journalist and BSV devotee. Craig says he was shocked by the difference in what he was hearing about the digital currency from Richard and the negativity he was seeing online.
This confusing contradiction drove Craig to find out more and really do his research. He says that he spent 150 hours watching videos of Craig Wright, when he should have been relaxing on a beach in the Caribbean.
“The deeper I went and the deeper you go, you actually uncover what I think is the most amazing opportunity.” That opportunity, to build on the BSV blockchain and utilise the original Bitcoin protocol is something that Craig is jumping into with both feet.
The accelerator has already accepted six founders who will be starting their journey in January 2022. Craig says that he’s chosen to focus on businesses who plan to build real world applications, rather than infrastructure companies which are already prevalent in the space.
Most tech startups can only dream of the early achievements of InvoiceMate. Before its official launch later this year, the Dubai-based company already has four customers using its product and the prospect of another to be added soon. And these aren’t just a few friends doing them a favour: they include, for instance, a large government institution, SALIC - the Saudi LIvestock and Investment Company.
No wonder Muhammad Salman Anjum is bullish about the prospects for InvoiceMate. He calls himself Chief Mate but in any other company would be called CEO. “We are the world's first ever blockchain-powered invoice-management system,” says Muhammad. He insists that he’s “not using blockchain for the sake of blockchain” but rather because its features are right for the particular requirements of invoicing:
“This is a process of workflow which requires a lot of trusted digitisation ...and blockchain is that enabler. And that is the reason why we have chosen blockchain to give power to our invoice management system. It's the right fit. Organisations are seeing this as a missing link in their existing IT architecture, and that's why they are seeing us as a value.”
The InvoiceMate software integrates with ERP (enterprise resource planning) systems such as Oracle, SAP or Microsoft Dynamics adding a specialised functionality which puts it in competition, not with the ERP systems as a whole, but with invoicing options they may offer as add-ons. But InvoiceMate can also be used on its own, as several of its early customers are doing.
As for the choice of the Bitcoin SV blockchain to power InvoiceMate, Muhammad made that decision after considerable experience with permissioned blockchains and a relatively long history of interest in the sector - even to the extent of having been a visiting expert on no less than three blockchain cruises, starting around 2018.
Part of what swung him in favour of Bitcoin SV was its low transaction fees and the chance to make them predictable to his clients through working closely with TAAL, a transaction processor. TAAL is happy to do deals with InvoiceMate to sell a certain number of transactions for a fixed rate or over a fixed period. That allows InvoiceMate to give its customers certainty about their costs when they subscribe to the service.
The customer doesn’t need to worry about transaction processing of course: they are only interested in the service as they are using it. Indeed, as Muhammad says “they sometimes even don't know which blockchain we are using”.
Speaking on this week’s CoinGeek Conversations, Muhammad also discusses his new role as Head of the Bitcoin Association’s first regional hub, also in Dubai, which covers the Middle East, North Africa and South Asia. It’s a job that’s “very close to my heart,” Muhammad says, as he considers himself “primarily an educator”:
‘The whole objective is to educate the different sides of the ecosystem, like developers, like academia, government ...When it comes to the regulators and the government entities, we want them to again learn what are the implications of blockchain in the public sector and at the same time, we can help them in the regulatory framework for the crypto side. So in totality, it's more of an educational role.”
If InvoiceMate can sign up more big customers, that will be a prime example with which to educate those learning about BSV through the Bitcoin Association.
In the fourth and final installment of our CoinGeek Conversations special episodes, Natalie Mason picks out three fascinating interviews from past shows that showcase note-worthy educators in the Bitcoin SV ecosystem.
On this episode, Lise Li Bitcoin Association China Manager talks about the technological advancements in China and how the Bitcoin SV blockchain can fit right into the country’s socio-cultural environment; Michael Hudson, Bitstocks and Gravity CEO talks about their company’s mission and guiding philosophies; and Liz Louw, a digital marketing and content strategist shares her research methodologies in writing ‘What is Bitcoin?’
To get free access to Liz’s eBook, click on this link: What is Bitcoin?
In the third of four CoinGeek Conversations special episodes, Natalie Mason picks out her favourite moments from previous interviews with technologists in the Bitcoin SV ecosystem.
On this episode, Dean Little, Founder and CEO of Bitping, fresh from winning 2019’s Bitcoin SV Hackathon, explains the political benefits his idea can bring to the world; Luke Rohenaz, CEO of TonicPow talks about how he utilises social media and shared network protocols; and Richard Baker, former CEO of Geospock, explores the opportunities for Bitcoin SV to move into the lucrative cloud market.
Join Natalie next week as she picks three more guests from past shows for the episode, “The Educators.”
In the second of four CoinGeek Conversations special episodes, Natalie Mason picks out highlights from some of her favourite past shows featuring exciting visionaries in the BSV space.
On this episode, Lorien Gamaroff,CEO and co-founder of Centbee, shares his hopes for what Bitcoin can achieve in developing countries like his native Zimbabwe; Jack Liu, founder of RelayX explains what attracted him to Bitcoin and how he hopes micropayments can revolutionise the way we live; and Brendan Lee, founder of Elas Digital, talks about his ambitious plans for the Bitcoin SV blockchain in Tuvalu and the rest of the world.
Join Natalie next week as she picks three more guests from past shows for the episode, “The Technologists.”
In the first of four CoinGeek Conversations special episodes, Natalie Mason picks out highlights from some of our favorite past shows that featured top entrepreneurs in the BSV space.
On this episode, Josh Petty, CEO and founder of the social media platform Twetch, explains how an effective business model can contribute to the success of a company; Stephan Nilsson, CEO of UNISOT, discusses the benefits of a public blockchain such as BSV in the global supply chain industry; and Robert Rice, CEO and founder of Transmira, talks about his journey in the virtual reality space and monetizing on his XR platform, Omniscape.
Join Natalie next week as she picks three more guests from past shows for the episode, “The Visionaries.”
Financial cryptographer Ian Grigg wanted to help protect Satoshi Nakamoto, the pseudonymous inventor of Bitcoin, without knowing who that person was. He figured that anyone in favour of the libertarian politics of the community loosely called cypherpunks around 2012 ought also to believe that Satoshi should be allowed to stay anonymous if that was their choice. (Ian believed Satoshi was a group of people, albeit led by one key individual.)
In the second of a two-part interview for this week’s CoinGeek Conversations, Ian explains he was concerned that an attention-seeking US government prosecutor might bring charges - perhaps for running Bitcoin as an unlicensed money services business or for money laundering. If that happened, it would produce “a very odd situation where Satoshi has invented something of fantastic potential benefit to the world. And here's some prosecutor who's figured out how to make a career winning move. And he's going to destroy these people.”
Ian’s first idea was to nominate Satoshi for the Turing Prize - after checking that there was nothing in the rules to say that a nominee must have a known, conventional identity. There was strife in the crypto world at the time between BTC, Ethereum and other groups but, Ian said, “just that little symbol brought together a bunch of enemies in the field who agreed that this was a good thing to do.”
As a result of Ian’s work, “one of the team contacted me”. She didn’t reveal her link with Satoshi, but she seemed to be under a lot of stress, “like they were living in a pressure cooker”. Ian wondered about the Satoshi connection, but “all I had was this crazy person talking to me, and this person knew quite a lot of stuff. So I was interested.”
They continued to communicate online until Ian “pretty much convinced myself, ‘yes, OK, I'm talking to the Satoshi team now’.” But his correspondent wasn’t telling him: “she was definitely keeping that secret. But I waited and waited and waited. And eventually she said, ‘you've got to meet Craig. He's, you know, he's a good guy’.”
This led to a meeting with Dr Wright in a London pub, where Ian unobtrusively put Craig through his Satoshi paces: “I actually threw a bunch of test questions at him. Not that they sounded like test questions, but they were tests that I constructed in my mind, three of them, and each one he just sailed through.”
Nothing was said on either side about Craig being Satoshi. But Ian felt the clincher was in a slightly abrupt response from Craig that he believes revealed more than Craig had intended.
As they were parting, Ian told Craig that he and a group of his friends were trying to help Satoshi by publicly offering support and arguing against the unmasking of Satoshi: “and I him asked directly, 'can you help me?' And he said 'no, I can't help you'. And it was so direct, it was so immediate that I realised he was revealing himself in that answer because I caught him in having to say directly, no, he can't help that - because he is Satoshi.”
Nothing more was said that night, but later, corresponding with the Satoshi associate who had set up his meeting with Craig, Ian says he “managed to get [her] to reveal the full story. And then we were OK after that.”
The history of Bitcoin began long before Satoshi Nakamoto’s White Paper appeared on an obscure online messageboard. Many of the ideas that Satoshi used had been part of previous cryptocurrencies. But Satoshi combined them in an original way and added his own brilliant solution to problems that had dogged previous attempts at digital currencies.
Around 2008, Ian Grigg was a financial cryptographer on the fringes of a loosely-defined group known as the cypherpunks. They anticipated a blending of cryptography with the ever-growing Internet: “if you put the two together,” Ian said, ”you created the possibility of having, if you like, a new trade space, a new privacy space, new monetary systems.”
There was a distinctly libertarian - if not anarchistic - flavour to the cypherpunks’ aspirations: “they were looking for ways to create a space where people could do things without having to be necessarily controlled by the big governments, the old governments, the crusty institutions that would stop you from doing certain things.”
In the first of a two-part interview for CoinGeek Conversations, Ian Grigg talks about the early days of Bitcoin and how he came to believe, before it had been suggested in the media, that Dr Craig Wright was Satoshi Nakamoto (or at least, the leader of what Ian calls “the Satoshi team”).
When Ian first saw Satoshi’s proposal on the Cryptography Mailing List, he was sceptical: “I thought, this is never going to work. The notion of spending energy to create consensus, that'll never work. Nobody will do that.”
Nevertheless, being already well-versed in the field, Ian recognised the originality of the ideas: “it was coupling this ‘proof of work’ to the economic incentives in the sense that when you won your lottery ...that caused the generation of money or Bitcoin, and that gave people an economic incentive to do that process.”
It was this “monetary feedback loop” that was the key to Bitcoin’s ingenious design: “this was quite a stunning notion because up until then, everybody was talking about, ‘oh well, somebody would issue some money and then manually we would pay for stuff’. But nobody had advanced the idea that the machine itself would generate its own money and distribute it.”
Ian followed what was happening in Bitcoin for a few years, until about 2014 when the search for the identity of Satoshi was hotting up. He felt strongly that Satoshi should be allowed to stay hidden: “we come from the privacy sector ...And all we're trying to do is take away his privacy. This caused me to be very disquieted.”
Ian began spreading this view, and eventually had some effect on his peers. But it didn’t stop Satoshi being unmasked in December 2015. Ian’s role in trying to protect Dr Craig Wright during that episode is the subject of next week’s episode of CoinGeek Conversations.
Dr Maximilian Sinan Korkmaz is a civil engineer who has been working in the construction industry for 16 years. He founded Stabilwerk Bau, a construction company based in Frankfurt, Germany. Stabilwerk Bau now accepts his BSV blockchain-based credit tokens as payment for its services. On this episode of CoinGeek Conversations, Dr Korkmaz discusses some of the obstacles experienced in the construction industry today and how blockchain can offer solutions.
Dr Korkmaz first caught wind of Bitcoin while studying for his PhD in 2010 but it wasn’t until 2017 that he took a liking to it, specifically the Bitcoin SV blockchain. “I chose Bitcoin SV because the promises were all about industries and applications and businesses so I thought it was the right one for me.”
As he tells Charles Miller in this week’s podcast, there is a lack of digitization in the construction industry. He notes that issues often arise from communication problems between participants involved in a construction project. To address those concerns, Dr Korkmaz found a solution in blockchain. “I thought I might be able to make these processes more efficient using blockchain,” he notes.
Furthermore, Dr Korkmaz says Stabilwerk Bau is the first construction company in the world to accept credit tokens as payment for services. As he explains, Stabilwerk Credits, which run on the BSV blockchain, offer his clients the chance to pay the company in fiat in exchange for credit tokens. The incentive for those who choose this payment option is to receive a ten per cent reduction in cost. In addition, Dr Korkmaz, says Stabilwerk Bau plans to “tokenize the entire relationship among the actors of construction projects,” to provide for a smoother, swifter and more efficient communication process.
Also in the pipeline is the P2P software company he has founded, to offer blockchain solutions to the construction industry and others. Dr Korkmaz plans to produce an app that will connect clients to general contractors and general contractors to subcontractors within an area. The app, which will work exclusively with Bitcoin SV, will be made available to users worldwide.
Governments and legacy financial systems all over the world are discovering that it’s not easy being green. And Bitcoin is no exception. Elon Musk famously reversed his decision to accept Bitcoin as payment for Tesla in May, citing environmental concerns as the reason. But many in the Bitcoin SV world are confident that it can and will be eco-friendly.Zach Resnick, Managing Partner of venture capital fund Unbounded Capital is one of many unconcerned BSVers. “We would argue that Bitcoin is perhaps one of the most eco-friendly technologies ever created,” he says.
Zach argues that Bitcoin’s design incentivises miners to find cheap energy to maximise their profits. As renewables are cheaper, they are encouraged to find or create clean, renewable sources of energy.
He also points out that because Bitcoin miners can be located anywhere, they can make use of renewable energy in places that conventional energy customers couldn’t otherwise use.
“You can start up a mining operation with one hundred per cent renewable energy anywhere, really far from any grid and still be able to utilise all the energy efficiently.”
This means that poorer countries can use natural resources, like hydropower, to mine Bitcoin and make money. This was a central argument in Stone Ridge’s annual shareholder letter, which outlines the economic benefits Bitcoin will bring to the world.
On this week’s episode of CoinGeek Conversations, Zach stresses that he thinks we should measure Bitcoin’s energy consumption against the value it brings to the world.
The founder of Zurich’s MoneyMuseum, Dr. Jurg Conzett discusses the history and evolution of money on this episode of CoinGeek Conversations.
As Dr. Conzett tells Charles Miller, money creation today is unlike the coins of the Middle Ages in the sense that its value remains the same after a historical event has taken place. “If there was a pandemic, you close shop, put the coins on the shelf, waited six months then opened again, the coins still have the same value.” he said. “Not so with our money, a pandemic hits and the next minute the money begins to disappear.”
Dr. Conzett believes that money creation is changing right in front of our eyes with the digitization of central bank money to make CBDCs – central bank digital currencies. According to him, the digitization of central bank money was governments’ response to fear and uncertainty triggered by the rise of Bitcoin. “Governments around the world were frightened because when Bitcoin has risen substantially, they say, ‘what do we do if people go to an exchange and transact with Bitcoin? What happens to taxes?’ They must be in horror and say ‘we have to do something’, so what they decided is to tokenize.”
Dr. Conzett describes a future where most of the banking money will be replaced by digitized central bank money under the control of governments, giving politicians power over the money supply. “They [politicians] have a tremendous responsibility and we will see how they go about fiscal responsibility.”
For his part, Dr. Conzett sees no direct or necessary relation between the digitization of money and Bitcoin and blockchain, citing China as an example. “China has digitized their currency, but not with Bitcoin, not on blockchain.” He notes that Bitcoin and blockchain will only surface if and when politicians decide to incorporate blockchain technology into the digitized money system. “There will be pressure to bring all the money onto the blockchain, because once it's on blockchain, at least in BSV, it will be public knowledge.” But in order to get there, he believes people must increase the token economy.
As for the future of blockchain, Dr. Conzett believes only one Bitcoin ecosystem will prevail. “In my opinion, there will be one blockchain which attracts most because it will be the most efficient, and the most efficient, I think will win.”
There is “no doubt that blockchain technology is here to stay,” says IBM’s Tatjana Meier.
Tatjana, Blockchain Practice Leader at IBM Services Switzerland, admits that it’s still early days for the technology. But she is confident it will prove beneficial for businesses and consumers alike and “can do a lot of good.”
She is particularly excited about the value blockchain brings to supply chain management. Traditionally, she explains, “you only have information one tier back, but you don’t have the visibility along the supply chain.”
This is not the case when companies use blockchains. Blockchains helps participants record price, quality, and other relevant information to help manage a supply chain. This improves the traceability and sustainability of products by making it easier for companies to detect unethical suppliers or counterfeit products.
During a panel discussion at CoinGeek Zurich, Tatjana argued that this will ease regulatory and consumer pressure. On this week’s episode of CoinGeek Conversations, she explained further, citing a new law on human rights in supply chains that has recently been adopted by the German Parliament.
The law will require large companies to regularly identify and address human rights and environmental concerns in their supply chains. Businesses will be expected to publish reports outlining what they are doing to tackle any risks and are liable to fines if they do not show that they have addressed abuses.
The immutability of blockchain will make it much easier for companies to do their due diligence, says Tatjana. Indeed, the transparency of the technology has even earned it the nickname of the ‘trust machine’ from the Economist.
This transparency will allow big companies to win points with increasingly ethically aware customers, as well as regulators.
Entrepreneurs Joe De Pinto and Dan Wagner have created a unique use for microtransactions through Haste, an online games arcade with what they call Instant Leaderboard Payout or ILP games. The idea is that the top players in a game at any time receive payouts from the small entry fees paid by the rest of the players. Everyone’s trying to get to the top of the leaderboard where they’ll be earning money instead of spending it.
Joe explains how he and Dan were inspired by the possibilities created by the micropayment capabilities of Bitcoin SV (BSV): “It’s really simple to understand. You take a quarter, a dime, a nickel, you play a simple game and you split that money hundreds of ways.”
On this week’s CoinGeek Conversations, Charles Miller and the two business partners from Los Angeles discuss all the possible ways a player – or even non-players - can earn money with Haste.
And, as Dan explains, unlike with traditional payment systems, the use of BSV allows players to receive payouts in real time. “It doesn't matter where you're at anywhere in the world, if you're on the leaderboard, your wallet gets pinged immediately, instantly, without the platform ever touching anything.”
Alongside the game play, there are now Haste tokens, which, similar to a traditional arcade, can be redeemed. But instead of being rewarded with a stuffed animal and the like, they get BSV. “The tokens do a good job of representing a way to reward people simply for playing without even having to make the leaderboard.”
Finally, in Haste, users can also create their own NFT player card, which in turn rewards the owner with a 10 percent rebate each time they play. In addition, all players can also buy and trade cards.
Joe and Dan, who are also co-founders of a popular app called Barpay, a platform that allows customers to order and pay for their drinks at bars and restaurants, bring their previous experience in business into Haste. Barpay has been successful in helping customers make payment transactions in establishments, especially in crowded places. In the past year, Dan said Barpay saw a sudden growth in demand. With the pandemic, he points out that more establishments wanted their customers to be able to access their menus online - a need Barpay could address.
“Before Covid, we were in several dozen restaurants with just an app that you could use to order and pay for drinks during the busy times. At this point, we have over eleven thousand digital menu type accounts, several hundred order and pay accounts that are allowing people to scan a QR code to place an order and pay for it.”
Dan sees Bitcoin being used as a form of payment on Barpay in the future. “We can take that [Bitcoin] to the rest of the market, telling these owners, we just figured out how to save you three percent on every transaction. That is going to be an absolute game changer for these merchants.”
What’s next for Haste? Expect new features in the near future as two senior developers will be joining the team very soon.
British technology journalist Eileen Brown says she receives more PR pitches for Ethereum-based projects than for any other protocol. But despite ETH’s popularity, she is keen to point out that most companies that use Ethereum tend to do their transactions off chain to achieve speed and cost efficiency - which she notes is not the case with Bitcoin SV. “I don't see that with BSV,” she said. “I see complete transparency with BSV projects.”
Speaking to Charles Miller on the sidelines of the CoinGeek Zurich conference for this week’s CoinGeek Conversations, Eileen said CoinGeek is a credible organization as it does the job of explaining contentious topics about Bitcoin to followers and critics alike. “I like the fact that the CoinGeek conference has detractors and enthusiasts,” says Eileen. She was at the conference to appear in a panel on media coverage of Bitcoin, but took note of the end session in which two Bitcoin critics, Professor Nouriel Roubini and Nassim Nicholas Taleb had been invited to give keynotes and to debate with Dr. Craig Wright.
One of the most hotly-debated topics at the conference was the massive amounts of energy being consumed by BTC, a concern that was highlighted by Elon Musk leading to a sudden devaluation of the digital currency. Eileen sees environmental concerns as a major shift in public attitudes to Bitcoin.
Eileen believes the public needs to be aware of the different kinds of Bitcoin so as not to confuse them with each other: “They have no idea that [BSV] can scale and therefore each transaction costs proportionately less and uses less server cycles,” she says. “I think there's a lot of work to be done in splitting out the conversations so that each Bitcoin has a name and is referred to by its name.”
As for the future Bitcoin, Eileen is interested to see the consequences of El Salvador’s recent move to allow its people to accept Bitcoin as currency. “Regulators will be watching this really carefully,” she says. “It's almost as though this country's going to be a case study and if it succeeds, well, more and more countries will adopt it.”
Digital currencies can survive if they embrace the rule of law, says leading economist and professor at New York University’s Stern School of Business, Nouriel Roubini.
The economist, who is known as “Dr. Doom” for his pessimistic predictions about the economy, including in 2008 when he famously predicted the housing bubble crash, believes that legal institutions will help bring reliability to cryptocurrencies.
Nouriel says AML and KYC legislation will be crucial to the acceptance of Bitcoin by legacy financial systems. “You need regulation, you need that credibility, but you build it by having institutions,” he says.
The importance he places on the rule of law is one subject which he and Dr. Craig Wright, the inventor of Bitcoin, agree on. The two men shared a stage together at CoinGeek Zurich last week, where they discussed the role of Bitcoin in our financial system and the digital asset market.
During his combative keynote speech, Nouriel argued that cryptocurrencies are weakened by a lack of regulation. He explains further to Charles Miller, on this week’s episode of CoinGeek Conversations, that he thinks there needs to be an international agreement on the regulation of cryptocurrencies to ensure we don’t end up with a “law of the jungle.”
Nouriel also agrees with Dr. Craig Wright on the legal benefits of Bitcoin being a pseudonymous currency, rather than an anonymous one, saying “law enforcement prefers people using Bitcoin rather than an offshore financial centre for a variety of criminal activities.”
This is because every Bitcoin transaction is recorded on the blockchain, a permanent and public ledger, which anyone can access. This means transactions are traceable, public keys can be identified and criminals can be connected to digital wallets, bursting with ill-gotten gains.
This was proven last week in the United States, when the FBI traced $2.3 million worth of Bitcoins, extorted by a criminal hacking group known as DarkSide. The money, paid in ransom by Colonial Pipeline, was not only found but seized by federal investigators.
This will help to prove the legitimacy of digital currencies and shift the image of Bitcoin as the currency of choice for criminals, especially when combined with regulation.
While Nouriel is no convert to Bitcoin SV just yet, it seems that the attractive regulatory framework BSV is building, the proven traceability of digital assets and the contempt for BTC that he shares with those working in the BSV ecosystem, could lead to a change of perspective from “Dr. Doom” in the future.
How do you attract the attention of young people in 2021? By offering them cryptocurrency, says Phuong Dinh, entrepreneur and founder of Mijem Inc.
That’s why he has decided to integrate a Bitcoin SV cashback reward scheme into the online community he has created. Mijem is a free app aimed at college students in the United States and Canada, that allows members to buy and sell items, like eBay, but for Gen Z.
According to Phuong, a high proportion of the student demographic “have never owned cryptocurrency but would like to own one.” Indeed, a Coinbase survey conducted in 2018, found that 18% of US students said they own (or have owned) cryptocurrency, twice the rate of the general population.
The platform will be introducing a loyalty program, built on the BSV blockchain, where students who buy items using Mijem’s payment system are rewarded with points that they can redeem or convert to BSV.
Phuong explains to Charles Miller, on this week’s episode of CoinGeek Conversations, that he believes the integration of digital currency into the app will “incentivise” students to use it more.
This unique scheme, which will be rolled out later in the year, will be created in partnership with Fabriik, so users can transfer the BSV that they have earned directly into their own wallets.
Picking BSV as the app’s digital currency of choice was a no-brainer for Phuong; “it’s what the original Satoshi envisioned,” he says. He praises BSV for its technological advantages and the efforts within the ecosystem to find solutions to Bitcoin’s environmental footprint.
Mijem connects students with their peers so they can efficiently buy, sell and trade goods and services, meeting a need for those in secondary education who are keen to engage with each other.
Phuong tells Charles that when he first pitched the idea, there was immediate interest as students all need similar things and are all based in the same place (on campus) where they can exchange items easily.
He says, “they have collections of furniture that other students may need because they’re all in a similar phase in life, so they all need a mini fridge, they all need a couch, they all need similar things.”
Central to the platform’s ethos is transparency: users can see who members are, who their friends are, what ratings they have and message them, if needed.
Mijem has partnered with over 70 universities in the United States and Canada so far, but Phuong says he has plans to venture further afield in the future. With the global student population expected to reach 380 million by 2030, Mijem has a wealth of potential customers. Phoung plans to offer them BSV as Gen Z’s coin of choice.
Bitcoin SV needs to put more emphasis on connecting its experts and developers with potential business users, according to Patrick Prinz of the Bitcoin Association. Talking on CoinGeek Conversations, Patrick stressed the importance of creating a ‘distribution arm’ to introduce businesses to the new world of digital transformation. He cites Salesforce, an American cloud-based software company that provides a customer relationship management service as a company that “built an army of outside distributors by incentivizing them”.
He views this kind of business model as a particular opportunity for BSV because of its own technical capabilities. “I think we have a unique tool that allows us to incentivize people like never before: it's microtransactions. You can let people contribute and then reward them in real time as revenue comes in.”
But he also envisages a job that has much in common with existing marketing and consultancy practices. “This is relationship management work,” Patrick asserts. “You can buy the services or become a distribution partner. This is the opportunity that I'm looking at.”
Patrick comes from a financial services and consulting background. He notes that there is a disconnect between the BSV ecosystem and most of the industries it could serve. “In order to bridge this gap,” he says “it requires people who can translate the technical terminology... who can guide the companies within the growing ecosystem.”
As Europe and Operations Manager for Bitcoin Association, a non-profit that promotes Bitcoin SV, Patrick is also one of the organizers for the upcoming CoinGeek conference to be held in Zurich, Switzerland for three days from June 6.
Staying aligned with the theme of the conference, “Ignite the power of data”, data-driven business models will be highlighted in Zurich. Patrick believes that putting people’s focus on data as opposed to Bitcoin as a digital currency, serves BSV well. As he tells CoinGeek Conversations’ host Charles Miller, the strategy is very clear. “We are building businesses. We're not doing a marketing pump and dump so it takes longer and naturally people have to be more patient. But once the foundation has been laid, it's unstoppable.”
On this episode, Charles and Patrick also discussed Elon Musk’s recent remarks in reference to Bitcoin mining being environmentally unfriendly, on which Patrick comments: “The ecological aspects is a very trendy topic... it requires education on why proof of work is superior... there's clear incentives and a certain visibility and transparency of the players that is extremely important to the security of the network.”
Legacy financial services are making a mistake not offering crypto, according to Daniel Skowronski, General Manager of Fabriik Exchange.
Daniel’s extensive experience working in finance, including stints in senior management at HSBC Hong Kong and Bank of America, has left him concerned about the lack of agility in the banking world.
He warns that banks and stock markets will be left behind if they continue to ignore digital currencies. He believes that their reluctance is down to a concern with wealth preservation, saying “I think they are sort of a victim of their own self… they sort of became cocky, they sort of became arrogant.”
Daniel explains to Charles Miller on this week’s episode of CoinGeek Conversations that this is one of the reasons why he has turned his back on the industry and is now working on Fabriik Exchange.
Fabriik Exchange is a digital marketplace, launching in June, which will allow customers to exchange directly between digital currencies. It will also include a portfolio manager where “newbies” can easily pick and choose which assets they want.
Daniel is hopeful that the service will “bridge the gap between the old world and the new world, but more importantly, create wider access to everybody.”
Access is one of the core values that underpins Fabriik and all of its products. Daniel believes that access is also the USP for digital currencies, praising their ability to give “access across a number of different categories whether it’s the rich, it’s the poor.”
Fabriik Exchange will facilitate that access by allowing users to directly exchange coins, saving transaction fees, and through the company’s ‘everything digital’ mindset.
Fabriik aims to disrupt the status quo by creating a safe and open financial ecosystem that will allow people across the globe to thrive. The firm believes that our financial system is broken, as one quarter of the world’s population (1.7 billion people) cannot access it.
Regulation will be essential for this plan. Daniel says that Fabriik has been “built first and foremost around regulation because we’re starting to see bigger players, institutions, real money starting to flow in this industry.”
The company are also keen to focus on a younger market. Daniel tells Charles a story about a twenty-five-year-old investor who, when creating a portfolio, shunned traditional stocks and bonds and invested in five cryptocurrencies instead. Daniel explained that this experience showed him that there “is a new way of thinking, a new way of investing.” It is this millennial mindset that Fabriik intends to capitalise on.
The Exchange will be launching from the US first and then rolling out to the European Union. After that, they plan to slowly move out into Asia, but Daniel stresses that no customer will be left out, saying “we don’t have to actually be there to be able to accept them.”
Daniel also talked about his interest in AI technology. Daniel explains that his work for both companies is driven by “the idea of this open access to billions of people around the planet that was unavailable before.”
What do Microsoft’s Bill Gates and Google’s Larry Page and Sergey Brin have in common? Aside from great success, these tech innovators pursued higher education while setting-up a business. Much like Robin Kohze, CEO of Vaionex - a company that specializes in solutions at the nexus of data science and blockchain technology -who is currently completing a PhD in genetics at Cambridge University.
On this week’s CoinGeek Conversations, Robin tells Charles Miller that while working on his academic and entrepreneurial activities simultaneously is a challenge, it keeps his ambitions aligned: “I can always transfer the experience from one field to the next.” For instance, Robin studies pattern recognition in genomics, a skill which he hopes to bring to the Bitcoin economy. “When you're in genetics, you realize that it's a very complex structure that constantly interacts and changes,” he says.“In the Bitcoin world we have a real opportunity to fine tune, optimize our worldwide economic system.”
Robin also founded the Cambridge University Metanet Society which seeks to educate about and promote the powerful capabilities of Bitcoin SV. “What the Metanet society is about and what Vaionexis about,” Robin explains “is creating a funnel to bring developers, non-developers and future developers into the space, creating their own applications and reimagining.”
Currently, Vaionex operates five platforms— Satolearn, Raspora, Metashard, ApiAndMe, and Blockcodes. Charles jumped at the opportunity to complete Satolearn’s wallet workshop. “What was innovative about it,” Charles says “is that you actually interact with blockchain during the workshop itself and real things happen on the blockchain.” It’s a feature that’s quite unique from other learning platforms.
In the interview, Robin was happy to announce that Vaionex is working with the University of Exeter to integrate the Satolearn platform within its FinTech MSc program. The workshop, as he explains will teach “students how to write applications with the BSV Blockchain ...some will be asked to create an actual product to be submitted as a Master’s thesis.”
In addition to offering training with Satolearn, Robin has relaunched the Bitcoin SV Developers website which will provide anyone with the opportunity to connect with builders in the ecosystem. It’s “a kind of dictionary of all the developers in the [BSV] ecosystem all linked to their respective tools and their companies ...I think that would be a uniting presence in the work that everyone can be led to.”
Vaionex aims to someday be a globally recognized, best in class blockchain service provider. Robin believes it will take group effort, doing less talk and more work to achieve this. “I think we are fighting for our spot in the next generation of technology and that's what is often referred to as proof of work in the ecosystem, that everyone just shows what they can do without talking too much about what they will do soon in the future. It's more about actually doing it and offerings of value that enriches everyone’s experience.”
Tuvalu may be the fourth smallest country in the world, but it hasn’t let that get in the way of its giant ambitions. The island nation announced in December 2020 that it plans to create the world’s first national digital ledger, using Bitcoin SV (BSV) blockchain technology.
The plan is to migrate to a completely digital infrastructure, with Tuvalu choosing BSV for its scalability and efficiency. The news has already made waves in the BSV ecosystem but could it go further and show the world what can be done on BSV?
One of those behind the project, Brendan Lee, CEO of Elas Digital, certainly thinks so. He told Charles Miller, on this week’s episode of CoinGeek Conversations that he is confident the project will be an “eye-opener to other people who are looking in, at just what’s possible when you use Bitcoin in this way.”
He believes that the scheme is “a fabulous opportunity… to demonstrate what’s possible” and hopes that the success of the project will encourage other nations, even the US, to follow suit.
The digital transformation is being led by a partnership between Elas Digital, developers nChain, BSV consultancy firm Faiā and the Tuvaluan government.
Brendan first heard about the project after seeing an article on Medium by his former colleague, the MD of Faiā, George Siosi Samuels. He was intrigued and reached out to George who was keen to involve him.
The three companies all bring unique strengths to the project. Elas has been integral in designing the initial concept, nChain brings developmental expertise and Craig Wright’s Metanet while Faiā’s community-driven approach will ensure the project’s utility for the people of Tuvalu.
They aim to build “the highest velocity financial and administrative service in the world.” This will include the digitisation of government documents and the introduction of a tokenised cash system which will sit on top of the Tuvaluan currency (the Australian dollar).
The digitisation of government records will make it easier for the government to access and verify the source of data. And Brendan believes that a digital cash system will also prove extremely valuable for Tuvalu, a country which has “a very difficult time actually keeping enough cash in circulation for the economy to function properly.”
Brendan explains that his understanding of the islands’ needs is derived from public consultations and ongoing dialogue with government ministers.
He has also been able to lean on George’s Tuvaluan heritage. George’s mother was born on one of the islands. This has allowed the team to approach the project with a better understanding of what’s appropriate and how the ledger will fit into islanders’ lives.
This has been vital as one of Brendan’s core goals is eventually “handing it over to them and allowing them to use it to build a record of their own culture and heritage.”
At the moment, Brendan is focusing on a few starter projects, including a portal for citizenship applications which he hopes to have up and running by the end of the year. After that, he is confident that the process will speed up and prove to the world just what’s possible on BSV.
It’s almost exactly ten years since Satoshi Nakamoto made his last regular appearance online – on April 23 2011. After that, there was only one more message, of just five words, a few years later. To commemorate the occasion, on this week’s CoinGeek Conversations, Charles Miller is joined by the man behind the pseudonym, Dr. Craig S. Wright.
Between managing a full-time job at the Sydney accountancy firm BDO, finishing multiple degrees and traveling from the city to his farm, Craig found the time to write emails and post as Satoshi Nakamoto on the Cryptography Mailing List where he linked to the Bitcoin White Paper – allowing the mailing list members to be first to see it.
Craig had doubts about Bitcoin even after its release, he admits: “I was rather uncertain whether it would work or not, to tell you the truth, I was not confident at all.”
The first and noteworthy reaction to the White Paper came from mailing list contributor James A. Donald who said that the problem with the idea was that Bitcoin would never be able to scale – a point that Craig has been busy refuting ever since.
In trying to work out who was behind the Satoshi identity - all the more mysterious after he ‘disappeared’ in 2011 - several discussions focused on the way Satoshi writes. Charles points out that ‘Craig as Satoshi’ tends to write calmly. In contrast, he quotes Craig in a 2010 post writing as himself, in which he sounds decidedly agitated. Craig explains that he has many different writing styles appropriate for different contexts.
The “Satoshi anoraks,” as Charles calls the amateur online investigators, have made all sorts of analyses - from the use of double spacing to the times of day or night that Satoshi posted.
One observation was about Mike Hearn’s holiday greeting to Satoshi in which he said: “Happy Christmas Satoshi, assuming you celebrate it.” Satoshi didn’t respond to Hearn’s greeting. Charles asked whether that was deliberate or just an omission: “I don't hide that I'm Christian anymore, but I used to,” Craig said. “I found that it was rather problematic because of the attitudes of people in Silicon Valley in particular.”
A conversation with Craig wouldn’t be complete without a mention of books, in this case, audio books. The two exchanged some laughs as Craig describes how his wife would have to put up with the sound of his audio books being played at high speed as they were in bed at night. “I live on audiobooks - the wife says it sounds like a bunch of chipmunks.”
Join Charles Miller on this episode of CoinGeek Conversations to learn more about ‘the rise and fall of Satoshi Nakamoto’.
The Chinese government is “open” to blockchain technology says Lise Li, China Manager of the Bitcoin Association.
Lise says that the government’s attitude is down to a recognition that it needs new technology to digitise and “build a more efficient and more trustworthy …society.” She also credited the power of the internet industry and the “large group of experienced developers and engineers” that China boasts.
Forty of those talented developers gathered last week on the beautiful island of Dong’ao, in Guangdong province, to attend the Bitcoin Association’s BSV Bootcamp. They were there to learn more about BSV and blockchain technology, attending workshops and presentations on a range of subjects including BSV wallets and how to use script.
Speaking on this week’s episode of CoinGeek Conversations, Lise told CoinGeek’s Charles Miller that it was not only BSVers at the bootcamp as she had invited 20 developers who were not involved in BSV companies. She said she was “happy to see that the BSV ecosystem is getting more diversified.”
Charles also caught up with bootcamp attendee Gu Lu, founder of SatoPlay – a game platform built on the BSV blockchain. Gu has recently developed a new game called Overshoot which he was proud to tell Charles is the first 3D shooter game on BSV.
The game utilises a smart contract solution and allows users to earn NFTs and trade with each other. Players can “collect ten cards for each game. If they collect four of them, they can convert them into a set of play cards, which there are only 50 cards around the world and no more.”
Gu explains that the conference is a great opportunity to meet developers outside the BSV world so he can “introduce the game to other people, maybe outside the industry, maybe outside the blockchain.”
He’s also keen to learn from developers working on other chains, saying “it’s great to talk to them and find the difference between different blockchains, find maybe something is better on that chain, maybe something is better on BSV.”
Gu’s collaborative attitude is a reflection of the ethos of the bootcamp. The attendees eat breakfast, lunch and dinner together and are encouraged to learn from each other. Lise explains that the reason she chose Dong’ao Island was because she wanted her guests to relax “and also be more dedicated to the event and to learn something.”
One attendee who is keen to learn is Amanda Li, a postgraduate student at Renmin University in China and a new entrant to the BSV ecosystem. Amanda is majoring in the theory of blockchain and believes that the technology can “achieve a more secure and more people centralized society.”
Amanda first heard about BSV through Lise Li who was giving a lecture at her university. She was immediately enthralled and believes that wider use of the BSV blockchain has the potential to “change the world.”
Even outside the world of BSV, there are signs that the Chinese government is warming to cryptocurrencies with the deputy governor of the People’s Bank of China recently labelling bitcoin an “investment alternative.” Watch this space.
Experienced cryptocurrency journalist and self-confessed Bitcoin sceptic, Amy Castor puts matters into perspective when it comes to the valuation of BTC. The spike in price in recent months has everyone, both crypto and non-crypto people, buzzing. “There’s a big rush of people trying to make money in the space,” Amy says. “People are kind of running in, in the hopes that it'll go up higher.”
The price of BTC of late is around sixty thousand dollars, a whopping increase from its previous ten thousand dollars back in September. But Amy says BTC has no intrinsic value. She views it mainly as a speculative investment and predicts a repeat of what happened during the 2017 crypto price crash: “this is a bubble, the bubble is going to pop” she says. “It's like a game of musical chairs. And there aren’t going to be a lot of places to sit when the music stops.”
In this week’s CoinGeek Conversation, Amy tells Charles Miller that she was a marketing writer who eventually took the initiative to learn about crypto before pivoting into her current profession. Being within cycling distance of lectures at MIT helped: “sometimes Gary Gensler would teach courses at MIT Sloan and I would just go in and sit in the classes, and the other things that they had going on there as a way to get up to speed.”
Today, Amy’s numerous articles on cryptocurrencies and blockchain technologies can be seen on The Block, Bitcoin Magazine, Coindesk, Forbes and Decrypt—all of which gave her exposure, but to her, writing on her blog has proven to be a better fit.
“There was a time when I was writing for different crypto publications and at some point I just sort of gave up on that and just said, I'm just going to write what I want to write for my blog. It seems like when I was just mostly true to myself is when my stories would get the most attention.”
Amy is as doubtful about non-fungible tokens - NFTs - as she is about the price of BTC. She admits NFTs have brought excitement to cryptocurrency in recent months, noting that more and more people are reading about them and buying crypto to be able to join the NFT bandwagon. However she sees no real value in NFTs themselves. As she points out, “you could have an entity that points to nothing.”
It’s unclear whether NFTs will remain relevant for long. She believes they will eventually hit a stumbling block. “I think the problem with it is they're going to run up against certain regulations.”
Amy looks to some NFT purchases as contentious - for instance, the electronic mosaic by artist Beeple that sold for sixty nine millions dollars. Amy was quick to suggest that it’s crypto insiders who buy these types of NFTs and don’t seem to care about the artwork itself.
Also known for her extensive research and articles on Tether, Amy didn’t shy away from disclosing her doubts on the blockchain based cryptocurrency: "what is backing Tether in terms of actual dollars?”
As to the future of cryptocurrency and where it’s heading, Amy says “regulations will eventually catch up to everything that's going on at the moment.” She believes Bitcoin will still be around, but it won’t have much value, as we see it today.
Top online gaming lawyer Jeff Ifrah says that US regulators are unlikely to have a problem with tokens that are “offered on the game to extend play, to skip levels, to gain certain powers.”
The news will be welcomed by game developers keen to monetize through the integration of cryptocurrency wallets and blockchain technology.
Jeff is also optimistic about the recent flurry of activity around NFTs. He said “it’s a very exciting space right now and I really hope the regulators don’t ruin it.”
He singled out NBA Top Shots, saying that the endorsement of the NBA and stars like LeBron James could have a positive influence on regulators.
However, Jeff, speaking on this week’s episode of CoinGeek Conversations, did stress that in the US, regulation varies depending on what state you’re in. He explained to Becky Liggero that it ultimately comes down to state regulators who have “to decide whether or not he or she is going to permit an operator to accept crypto.”
He pointed out that when it comes to using cryptocurrency for gambling in America, “there’s no prohibition that’s written into the law about it. It’s just that the regulators haven’t approved it as a form of alternative payment.”
This is because regulators are more concerned with onboarding payment systems like banks and credit companies first. But Jeff believes that regulators will address cryptocurrency, they just want to get traditional payments sorted first.
Lots of states in the US require crypto companies to obtain a money transmitter license to operate. Jeff warns, “if you were to accept some sort of payment processing that was not licensed, you would not just be, as a processor, in trouble with the regulator, but you’d be putting the entire license of the operator at risk as well for doing business with an unlicensed supplier.”
On the use of blockchain, Jeff tells Becky that regulators are likely to need only the lowest level of licensing. They will want to know who owns the technology, but nothing more complicated than that.
This will be music to the ears of companies using blockchain to develop new gaming systems that are ‘provably fair’, in a way that is transparent to all users. Once a casino can prove it’s trustworthy, users are much more likely to game there.
It’s not all plain sailing for the use of digital currency in iGaming though as Jeff warns that any tokens “offered to an entire market through an ICO… that’s going to be a problem.”
He also cautions that even if a site is being operated from a country where Bitcoin and online gambling are totally legal and properly licensed, if you allow “someone who’s physically located in the United States to access your technology, you have opened yourself up to risk.”
Overall, regulators in the US have been slow to take account of cryptocurrency in the online gaming space. But Jeff is hopeful that an injection of cash could be the answer. He believes that “state regulators need to set aside money from their licensing regime” to clarify the rules and enforce regulation where necessary.
Calling on traders and non-traders who want to start trading! TDXP - short for ‘truly distributed exchange protocol’ - is a trading platform that is simple and easy to use. All you need is a Bitcoin SV wallet and you can start buying and selling cryptocurrencies, commodities, stocks, indices and foreign exchange.
So what makes TDXP different from other trading platforms? That’s what Charles Miller finds out as he speaks to TDXP CEO, Armen Azatyan in Russia and TDXP’s marketing manager, Nick Numas in the UK, in this week’s CoinGeek Conversations.
Armen and Nick have teamed up in pursuit of a shared goal— to expand TDXP to a larger market. They come from diverse backgrounds, each offering a distinct set of skills set. Armen has primarily worked in information technology entrepreneurship while Nick, a dance instructor with a degree in banking is focused on engaging the community.
“Going into this environment ‘the big business’ has a very serious directive,” Nick says. “I like this team and the pressure is on.” Having joined TDXP recently, Nick hasn’t been to Russia yet nor can he speak the language, but he looks forward to visiting Armen and the team one day. As marketing manager Nick is focused on engaging with communities in countries like Japan and China.
One of TDXP’s strengths is that it runs on BSV technology, Armen points out: “to trade in tiny amounts is BSV’s ability and we are grateful for the tech we can utilize.”
TDXP has already been on a journey before arriving at the BSV solution. The company started out on Ethereum. But with Ethereum, Armen says, the fees are still high.
On top of that, Armen points out, TDXP has distinct arrangements for its liquidity mechanism. “Key difference with TDXP is that Ethereum is slow, they are doing spot trading. In our case, the liquidity pool is mutual for all assets and all categories, thanks to the nature of CFO or contract-for-difference model.”
What’s next for TDXP? Armen notes they’ve got big plans in the pipeline. “We will be launching a sophisticated referral program in the near future and we plan to share a significant portion of the revenue with the community and its partners.”
Flashing a nice big smile, Nick beefs up support for the company saying, “I love this business because of their approach… trying to clean up the space, that’s what I stand for. And Bitcoin can do that.”
There’s no stopping TDXP as it plows ahead with its plans to expand to communities outside its network. Aside from having a product Armen describes as “the nicest user experience you’ll ever get with trading,” they have a new team member in Nick - whose energy and enthusiasm Armen says are rare skills advantageous to a growing company.
Non-fungible tokens (NFTs) are like Bitcoin marmite - you either love ‘em or hate ‘em. Some, like digital artist Beeple, who recently sold an NFT at auction for $69.3 million, are understandably enamoured. Others, such as crypto sceptic David Gerard, have serious doubts.
Josh Petty, co-founder of Twetch, has seen the trend first-hand. He recently launched NFTs for 101 Twetch hats which sold out in under a minute. The hats are embroidered with an individual number and come with a digital trading card to represent them.
“The Twetch hat is a very special type of digital item because it actually comes with the physical peg,” Josh says. The hats, which first sold for $100 to $420 and are currently trading at $2000, are just the first step for Josh. He says, “the hat is a very simple, primitive example of the direction we’re going where the property that you have in real life or the digital life, those things are interacting.”
On this week’s CoinGeek Conversations, David Gerard admitted he was impressed by Josh’s initiative but said he still had concerns about NFTs: “a lot of my objections to NFTs are not so much the future possibilities of what you might be able to do with this construct as with a lot of the grim realities we’re seeing here in March 2021.”
David is unimpressed by customer service issues on NFT markets run by Ethereum. He says there are “enormous amounts of problems that they really haven’t done a lot of homework to work out how to sort out. Just customer service issues like you sold me an NFT that wasn’t minted by the artist and I feel ripped off.”
Because an NFT doesn’t require people to own the copyright of something to mint tokens for it, it’s a market ripe for fraud. And there are other possible problems too: Josh admits that “there’s even been cases where people are going to an Ethereum based NFT website, they buy this piece of art, the artist later just goes to the website and uploads a different image of a rug.”
But Josh explains that it’s easier to build verification into the blockchain on Bitcoin SV and show where digital property is minted. On Twetch “somebody can actually prove they own it, and they can prove it’s the thing that they have, that digital item and it’s built into their ownership and we’re solving that problem where no one else really is.”
Josh also criticises Ethereum’s high minting fees, saying, “the price of purchasing an NFT - the minimum is so high on Ethereum that small artists that want to sell something for twenty dollars or less aren’t going to be able to have any income from this at all. On BSV we can do this.” BSV’s low transaction fees and capacity for scaling mean that budding digital creators can offer tokens at a higher margin. On Ethereum, new entrants are hit with high transaction fees and unexpected marketplace costs, restricting their earning potential.
Josh believes BSV offers accessibility to young artists. He plans to “build a better platform that actually empowers people to be able to sell and trade things and make actual money from it.”
The conversation was more of a meeting of the minds than Josh and David expected. David agreed that “there’s a world in which NFTs are this sort of fun, interesting thing you can play with and that’s good.”
RelayX’s new product, the RelayX Exchange, billed as Bitcoin’s first decentralized exchange, last week started offering trades in a first token, the Shua (created by and named after Bitcoin SV developer Joshua Henslee).
But it’s non-fungible tokens, NFTs, that have been in the news and RelayX founder Jack Liu is bullish about their prospects – though not just for speculators:
“It’s not about the token going higher and higher in price,” Jack asserts. “It’s about an immutable way to do provenance - and track and move and trade an item, that I think can be super-powerful for all the items in the planet.”
The possibilities for NFTs are almost unimaginable: “there are a billion physical things but only a few so far have become NFTs,” he points out. “At scale every single piece of matter in this entire world, as Craig Wright mentions, even a grain of sand, could be represented on the blockchain”
Jack was speaking on this week’s episode of Coingeek Conversations. He admitted that he hasn’t been a customer for the video clip NFTs offered by NBA Top Shot, even though he’s a big basketball fan. But he didn’t want anyone to think that was through any lack of confidence in their potential:
“I’m not a skeptic. Personally I’m fascinated about NFTs.” He just doesn’t happen to be a collector: “I have great appreciation for art and artists but owning a piece of the work is not my focus.” He says RelayX will be creating a market place for NFTs soon.
A whole new perspective on NFTs arose when host Charles Miller suggested that an NFT might be a long-term alternative to receiving socks as a Christmas present. Hypothetically, Jack explained that somewhere down the line, Charles might be able to sell the NFT which was a representative token for the socks. Or that the NFT might entitle the holder to replace the socks with new ones over time – more of like a subscription than a one-off gift.
But returning to fungible tokens, at the moment, there is just one, the Shua, available on the RelayX decentralized exchange (DEX). “We thought it was a good token to surface, it has a lot of users and it runs on both the Run network and the Money Button network,” Jack explained. “It’s a good way to test out the DEX before we unleash more tokens.”
Jack said his team will be putting out more tokens on RelayX and Run, exceeding the number already available on MoneyButton. He predicts that there will be an explosion of tokens that are exchangeable, useable and redeemable.
Jack’s investment arm, Output Capital, is supporting Haste, the BSV gaming app. The decision to invest, Jack says, was due to the healthy number of transactions the startup already had. “It’s kind of obvious that this kind of app and platform has so many users, it’s so easy to use and that you can associate transactional blockchain with rewards.”
As for the issuance of their own tokens by Haste and others, Jack explains, it’s a new way to incentivize. “Gamers get to earn the token and developers who make new games on the platform get to earn from Haste.”
Jack wants the community to promote the platform with the use of tokens. “Tokens help bootstrap a network effect in the same way that doing Facebook and Twitter ads might have done ...but they cost a lot of money and require VC fundraising.”
Jack mentions Handcash and his hopes that it would eventually support Haste and other tokens. Ideally, he wants the two wallets to have interoperability. “My goal is to grow Bitcoin and not just grow Relay and weaken the whole ecosystem. We grow together.”
A little over a year ago, two brothers from Australia presented their application idea to a group of investors at the Bitcoin Association’s Pitch Day conference in London. Their proposal for a picture-sharing app powered by Bitcoin SV was then called Memento. It is now open for business, as Relica.
In this week’s CoinGeek Conversations, Charles Miller catches up with co-founders Jeremy and Daniel Street to ask about their journey — how Relica came to be, how it’s doing and where it’s heading.
For most of the past year, both have still been working their day jobs. And they live on different continents – Jeremy in the UK and Daniel in Australia. Developing their idea into a viable startup business has been hard work, but the brothers are determined that what Relica offers today is just the start of their ambitions.
What is Relica?
Simply put, Relica allows users to share their pictures - and profit from them. It may sound a lot like Instagram, but there is more to it than meets the eye. “The platform treats everyone equally, where users can upload and share photos and videos: liking and commenting will result in monetized rewards” Jeremy explains.
How does it work?
Just like Instagram, the majority of the photos on Relica are stored on the server base. What makes it different from Instagram, Dan points out is that the hash of individual photos is stored on the BSV blockchain, serving as a proof of identity and proof of ownership. In addition, he says interactions that take place with the photos on Relica are purely on the blockchain.
How do users profit by using Relica?
Relica’s users need to sign-up with a MoneyButton (or in future also a Handcash) wallet, then pay a tiny amount to post a photo. As Dan explains, they lost a few users because of the current payment requisite so they’re working on a new system that would entice users to post and keep sharing. “What we’re going to do is integrate a new system which is very unique to BSV apps - allowing users to post their first photo for free and having almost an ‘achievement system’ within Relica so they can earn money through sharing through their socials.”
As for users having to pay for content they like, Jeremy says an incentive model as such is debatable. “Charging people too much money for a basic interaction that we’ve all know to come and love or to like or comment is debatable and we’ve had lengthy discussions on whether or not that’s an incentive model that’s going to exist in a few years.”
Unlike Patreon and other similar websites where people pay for other users’ content, Dan says they are building something completely out of the box that’s never been done before. “What we’re planning for phase two, isn’t even on the existing Internet itself so Relica is pretty much a revolution in the [BSV] apps that they’ve built.” Jeremy adds that their end goal is to lower the entry barrier to the BSV ecosystem.
Relica launched in late November 2020 but it wasn’t until a month ago when they fully opened the app to its users. The response has been a positive so far, Dan says. Relica has 800 users and they expect more to come on board after releasing their marketing campaign. “We haven’t started a marketing campaign, which involves onboarding a number of influencers to reach out to their followers,” Dan says. “We want to refine the product first then start marketing Relica full time to influencers.”
At present, Relica is self-funded. But, as mentioned, they have exciting new ideas in the pipeline to present to its potential investors. “Things have changed a little bit since pitch day during the last 12 months. I think we have more focus as to where we want to be, so our plan is to continue to develop, continue to self-fund for the time being and reach out to investors within the next two to three months as we have some exciting new i
Can blockchain technology which streamlines and secures supply chains operate across widely different industries?
‘Yes’, says Stephan Nilsson, founder and CEO of the Oslo-based enterprise blockchain platform UNISOT. ‘Well, I might be persuaded,’ says Sukhi Jutla, co-founder and CEO of MarketOrders, a London-based online platform for the gold and diamond jewelry industry.
The two entrepreneurs were brought together for this week’s episode of CoinGeek Conversations, in which Charles Miller invited them to compare their respective fields – jewelry for Sukhi, and, as his first case study for UNISOT, Stephan’s experience with supply chains in the Norwegian fish industry.
The discussion revolved around how blockchain would be utilized to establish faster and cost-effective transactions, as well as boosting transparency levels within the supply chain.
At MarketOrders, precious stones and jewels are constantly being moved from one location to another and because of this, Sukhi stresses transparency is key. “When something goes wrong during the process, who is to blame? There is no transparency in the industry.” To address the issue, MarketOrders is exploring blockchain solutions.
MarketOrders published a white paper last year detailing the use of blockchain technology. One use case Sukhi mentions is the technology’s ability to provide tools that could help the company speed up payments hence avoiding large transaction fees. “We've got as far as creating MarketOrders Tokens. We envision this is to have an ecosystem on our platform whereby our suppliers and our customers actually settle payments using the tokens.”
Stephan couldn’t agree more with Sukhi when it comes to blockchain and transparency. UNISOT specializes in the use of blockchain to efficiently manage supply chains, starting with the seafood supply chain. He outlined some similarities between UNISOT’s objective and what MarketOrders wants to achieve. “There's a lot of the same thing here, we have to take care of a product that is being moved around in the world, and today there are a lot of problems encountered while doing that, and that's where this technology can help.”
Stephan goes on to describe his experience working with Bitcoin SV, UNISOT’s preferred blockchain technology. He almost refers to it as the gold standard when it comes to scalability. “With this blockchain technology [BSV], it's so scalable and so low cost.”
As he points out, scalability is essential for a growing business. “You must have a system that is scalable because you don't want to rebuild your application or your whole system every six months when a couple of developers decides to put in a new function.”
Sukhi admits not having heard of BSV before but after speaking to Stephan about its scalability and micro-payment capabilities, she was ready to explore further with Stephan, to find out about his UNISOT solution.
Stephan didn’t shy away from speaking his thoughts on Ethereum, which Sukhi had been looking at: “It doesn’t scale: Ethereum offers a lot of solutions but none of them are in production. No one has actually been able to run this production using all the functionality of the Ethereum blockchain because it's simply not scaling.”
The podcast capped off with a brief discussion on cryptocurrency and its price volatility. Sukhi reacts to the recent publicity around BTC stating, “the price volatility is a huge distraction and my focus is always on the application of the technology… blockchain is actually a technology. It's an application. It's a different way of doing something. And in my opinion, it's a far more trustworthy and efficient way to do a process that's already existing.”
Stephan ended his interview with a recommendation for Sukhi and people who are interested to learn more about BSV. He suggests watching ‘The Bitcoin Theory’ with Ryan X Charles on YouTube. “It has e
Steven Walt, General Manager of Fabriik Markets describes the business as the digital assets service arm of the Bayesian-owned, Fabriik group. He highlights the company’s three major offerings - market making, liquidity provision and its OTC or over-the-counter desks.
“The focus of the company is trading” Steven says. As he points out, digital asset prices change every second. To address the volatility, clients are provided a stable fixed price of up to 15 minutes. This would essentially allow payment processors the ability to provide their customers time to transact.
“What we do is we use really outstanding algorithms ...to forecast volatility and fix the price of up to 15 minutes.”
Steven was talking to Charles Miller on this week’s CoinGeek Conversations podcast.
In addition to trading, Fabriik Markets is positioning itself to be a one-stop-shop for liquidity. Steven describes their liquidity plan as disruptive, stressing they will be the first in the space to temporarily absorb price risk.
Furthermore, Fabriik Markets takes great pride in their OTC desks. Also referred to by the company as a ‘white glove service,’ this is where they assist their clients in the buying and selling of digital assets. This type of service will be made available to institutions and individuals that are looking to make trades of $100,000 US or more.
Fabriik Markets’ OTC desks will have more to offer compared to others in the space, Steven explains. For instance, customers will be given more variations and approaches to execute an order.
“Most desks out there, they quote a single price which is also what we do, but what we plan to do as well is offering additional ways of entering into and exiting out of a position.”
Having worked in the traditional financial market, as well as the digital asset space, Steven notes, there are many similarities between the two industries.
“I think ultimately where the digital assets is right now is maybe where traditional asset was 20-30 years ago, it’s very early days in my opinion.”
In light of this, he believes a lot can be taken from the traditional assets space and applied to the digital assets space. One of them, is algorithm. At Fabriik, he says customers will be able to use some traditional algorithm but more catered toward the digital asset space. Ultimately, they want to build simple products that people understand.
“What’s familiar is what works the best.”
Charles and Steven also touched on other topics such as tokenization. This is where Bitcoin SV is believed to make an impact. As Steven explains, they see massive potential in the BSV blockchain when it comes to creating tokens.
Fabriik Markets has committed to dealing with decentralized digital assets, such as BSV, BTC and BCH.
“We believe there’s a lot of power that comes from the BSV ecosystem. The blockchain is extremely scalable. And we’ve chosen it, for example to support tokenization.”
Imagine signing up for a website, start sharing links and, voila, you’re earning money! That’s just one of the scenarios that could happen when you create an account with TonicPow and start participating.
On this week’s episode of Coingeek conversations, Charles Miller talks to TonicPow Founder and CEO, Luke Rohenaz about his startup and its potential to go after the tech giants.
TonicPow allows its users to earn Bitcoin, advertise a business or do both. You can sign-up and choose to be a promoter and/or an advertiser. How? Well, a promoter can copy one of the display ads, share the link and instantly get rewarded in Bitcoin SV. Whereas an advertiser can display an ad for promoters to pick up by simply creating a campaign.
Luke and his partners first presented TonicPow at the 2019 Coingeek Conference in Toronto where they won second place in the first Bitcoin Association BSV Hackathon.
Since its inception, the site has gone through many phases, Luke says. What started as a peer-to-peer advertising solution, now includes a pay-per-click model where users can see results a lot quicker. The aim is to help advertisers achieve “conversions” – when users end up spending money on the product or service advertised. “What we want to do is not just be paying you for clicks, we hope that you share things, really looking out for this conversion.”
While the goal of the 2019 hackathon was to onboard people to BSV, Luke points out the challenge at the Cambrian SV Bootcamp in Bali was to increase on chain transactions, and that again changed TonicPow’s thinking: “why don’t we report every click that goes on chain, solve different problems with transparency but also the concept of these real time micropayments, which show off the real capabilities of Bitcoin SV.”
In the interview, Charles quotes what Luke has said in the past— “As it develops, TonicPow could go after tech giants with the ‘network effect’ of the shared database of the BSV blockchain.” When asked to expound on this, Luke describes the ‘network effect’ as having the ability to use shared protocols to ingest data from other services. Luke brings up the concept of ‘coopetition’ where competitors share content online through the use of agreed common protocols.
“That’s what I mean by the shared network effect, you don’t have to be the mega giant to compete with the mega giant. You just have to be a participant in a mutually beneficial coopetition scenario.”
In relation to other social networks on Bitcoin SV, Luke visualizes TonicPow as potentially evolving to an open protocol. But unlike other existing ad models that revolve around knowing about people intimately, TonicPow’s targeting strategy makes use of individual promoters who share to their audiences and followers. As Luke emphasized “they’re doing the targeting without spying.”
So, what makes TonicPow stand out from other social media marketing campaigns? It’s in the special powers of Bitcoin SV: “where we end up shining is when you start to count up the various little edges that Bitcoin gives you.. it’s a better place to build something like this.”
The pharmaceutical industry or Big Pharma is no doubt a multi-billion-dollar industry. Whilst extremely profitable, pharmaceutical companies have a long-standing history of fraud cases often resulting in billion-dollar pay out settlements. These cases generally stem from purported illegal marketing strategies and the company’s failure to report safety data. As a result, trust remains to be an issue, widening the gap between pharmaceutical companies and its consumers.
Veridat, a company that uses bitcoin blockchain technology, offers a solution to the problem. It describes itself as a TaaS or Trust as a Service for data integrity. Speaking to Natalie Mason on this week’s episode of Coingeek Conversations, Veridat Director, Phillip Runyan says the company allows auditors to access information on clinical trials, on a transaction to transaction basis. This altogether eliminates the likelihood of overlooking or dismissing valuable data pertinent to the general public.
“There is massive value to this [Veridat]” Phillip says. “It’s not that they’re worried about somebody coming in and committing fraud, it’s really more of, we have this service that allows us to backup a ton of information… they also have all the benefits of showing this immutable chain of custody, immutable data ledger.”
Natalie and Phillip also discussed companies that mislead its consumers through its falsified marketing campaigns. For instance, Johnson and Johnson spent years in litigation over its opioid marketing practices culminating with a 4 billion-dollar settlement offer. As Phillip explains, an incident as such would result to someone taking the fall or getting fired. The company however, stays in tact moving along with the same practices. Phillip sees a potential tochange the system. “With billions of dollars at stake there are people who functions as bad actors, but as we’ve seen with our Pharma partner, it’s less about being a bad actor, it’s about streamlining audit processee.”
The idea of using blockchain technology in big pharma is currently being studied by the FDA and industry professionals who operate in data integrity, as well as consultants who work for the contract research organizations of pharmaceutical companies. Veridat has managed to move the conversation from “Why would I” to “Why wouldn’t I?”
With Covid-19 vaccines rolling out in countries worldwide, the service offered by Veridat if utilized, can prove to be beneficial to both big pharma and its consumers. With its use of Bitcoin SV blockchain technology, Phillip explains every transaction is verified against a public blockchain while reaping the benefits of its massive scaling capability and secured network. So, the question reverts back to “Why wouldn’t I?” The answer is simple. Phillip attests, BSV tech is cost effective, fast, scalable and secured. “It’s an insurance policy that keeps on giving.”
The Bitcoin SV Academy has launched a new course, Introduction to Bitcoin Theory, which is designed for anyone, even those completely new to Bitcoin. Its 13 sections are expected to take nine hours to complete and there’s an exam at the end to make sure you have absorbed the knowledge. The course covers the design of the Bitcoin blockchain and the node network, with an emphasis on its security features.
CoinGeek’s Charles Miller recently completed the course and in this week’s CoinGeek Conversations he talks to Brendan Lee, one of the instructors on the course and the Bitcoin Association’s Training and Development Manager, about what he learnt.
In particular, Charles asks Brendan to talk him through what happens when an ordinary user makes a small transfer of Bitcoin from one wallet to another. Using a block explorer, Brendan analyses the transaction that Charles made between two of his own wallets, to see exactly how the payment was made, Including features such as the return of ‘change’ from one wallet to another. Each transaction can be traced, showing precisely how the payment leaves one wallet and arrives in the other.
When making a transaction, Brendan says a user would want to spend one coin at a time. As he points out, a coin which has a million Satoshis in it, is enough to make a transaction. After a user sends a coin, Brendan explains that the input will create several outputs, each one containing various amounts of Satoshis. One of those outputs will go to the address provided. As for the rest of the coins Brendan says, they go back into the user’s wallet as change which can then be used for another transaction.
In the conversation, Brendan also goes into a detailed explanation of how a Bitcoin address is generated. He says Bitcoin addresses are derived from a private key. “You start with the private key and then you do the elliptic curve maths on the private key and you get the public key. You take the public key and you hash that…. and we take the public hash and we put it through. Basically we change the format of how we present it and we put a one on the front and we call that a Bitcoin address.”
On whether Bitcoin transactions are more intangible compared to the normal financial system, Brendan says “Satoshis don't exist except as a record on the public ledger and when we perform a transaction, what we're effectively doing is, we're taking an existing record that we can assert ownership over and redistributing its contents… But for the first time in history, we're able to do that using a digital medium in a way that can't be duplicated or undone. And that's the unique aspect of Bitcoin and I think is what actually does make them almost a tangible thing.”
When emerging technologies collide, the effects are game changing. Those at the forefront of augmented and virtual reality have already transformed multiple industries. But what happens when you apply blockchain technology, putting both the 3D and real world on chain? It allows for unparalleled personalization of data and most importantly, profitability that anyone can build on, reaping just rewards.
Robert Rice is the founder and CEO of Transmira Inc. the developer of Omniscape, an XR platform seamlessly blending AR and VR. He also happened to coin the term XR, the umbrella term for mixing the two mixed reality technologies. I was pleased to bump into Robert at an investment summit in Dubai, where he was giving a presentation on how the BSV blockchain allows him to augment smart cities in a way that is safe and secure. We sat down to record the latest episode of CoinGeek Conversations.
Having started out as a comic book store owner, Rice was the first to use PC components in arcade games and was noted as an Internet Gaming Pioneer by Advertizing Age magazine in 1996. Flash forward to today, he explained Omniscape’s unparalleled advertizing offer to brands. “Starbucks for example can do a campaign and geolocate 3D Starbucks coffee cups all over the place.” Imagine Pokémon GO, but once you’ve found your coffee cup you can redeem it at the nearest Starbucks for an actual cup of coffee. So, what’s in it for Starbucks? By placing objects where their customers are, they are able to target audiences on an individual level, driving them straight into their stores.
“Imagine watching a Superbowl and a Doritos commercial comes on TV. Well, whip out your phone because there’s probably going to be a 3D bag of Doritos that you can grab.” Triggering content from live streamed TV, Robert explained the super impressive part. “Let’s say there’s three people sitting on a couch watching the football game and the Doritos commercial comes on TV, we can deliver a different experience to each one. Maybe I’m getting the free bag of Doritos, the guy next to me is getting an offer on Dr. Pepper… now that I can deliver it that way, I’m also getting data back.” He is taking targeted advertizing to the next level by allowing for data to be broken down to each individual household member’s preferences, tracking and changing content in real time.
Another industry that Robert and his team are shaking up is global digital real estate. And he’s keen to see individuals having a fun experience which allows them to profit from ownership. “For 2 or 3 Dollars, you can go onto Omniscape and buy a location somewhere. And that space is yours for 2 years, just like a Domain name.” You then have the power to trade your space for profit. And for those wanting to make a social impact, Robert is also hoping to create space. For example, by buying a piece of the ocean, Omniscape hopes to donate the profits to charities that are fighting to protect the world’s oceans.
Like the data offering for advertizers, the virtual real estate platform will exist on the blockchain. And Robert is adamant that this is only possible on BSV. “There really is no choice when you compare the technical pieces: the size, speed, scale, cost; you’d have to be an idiot in my industry to do something else that’s not Bitcoin SV.”
For Robert, it’s important to not only build things for the benefit of businesses and brands. But for individuals too. “I think that, if we can make it easy for anybody: business, brand, consumer, content creator to make things and monetize it quickly, I think we’ll destroy everybody else.”
Check out this week’s episode of CoinGeek Conversation to learn more about what Robert is doing in the space, his predictions for game changing industries over the next couple of decades and his comic character alter ego. Robert Rice. You’re a hero.
Craig Wright is a lockdown sceptic. Masks and isolation policies “don’t make a difference”, he says. Dr Wright, the Chief Scientist of nChain, says he’s studied epidemiology and is convinced that, despite appearances and government claims, death rates are no worse than usual because “everything else has gone down equal to the number of Covid deaths”. He had the disease himself “months ago” and dismisses the experience as “terrible for a day”.
The real damage from government response to the pandemic, he says, is long term. The disruption in trade affects developing countries: “if you look at the people in Sri Lanka who are not getting fed, the increases in poverty in African countries, the increases in poverty in Bangladesh etc., what we're seeing is individuals who now are being marginalised and pushed into poverty for the first time in a long time.”
As the pseudonymous inventor of Bitcoin, Satoshi Nakamoto, Dr Wright is also sceptical about BTC’s recent dramatic price volatility, dismissing it as “purely manipulation”. He says that it would take thousands of times the amount of currency inflows seen in the crypto market to change the price of gold to the same extent. With BTC, “what we have is a very small market and it’s easy to be manipulated”.
Dr Wright was talking in a wide-ranging interview for the CoinGeek Conversations podcast. In looking back to Bitcoin’s early days, he said that around the time that he released the Bitcoin White Paper in October 2008, he had just returned to Australia from a trip to Microsoft headquarters in Seattle where he’d been discussing a possible role in the Bing search engine and click fraud team.
The 2008 financial crisis put an end to all hiring at Microsoft so it didn’t come to anything but, he said, “I had a whole lot of ideas which Bitcoin would have been part of”. He wanted Microsoft to introduce a Bitcoin-based Internet as a competitor to the ad-based model: “I thought rather than the way Google's doing things, if they could implement micro-payments and have all this run that way, that would actually be a far more effective methodology.”
So does he regret not being able to develop Bitcoin at Microsoft? Wright says that there would have been advantages to him personally in terms of resources and remuneration but that it would have been “an easy life versus something better but more challenging.”
Around that time Wright wrote an essay as part of what he calls this “self-reflective” period in his life. Only published last year, Sisyphus Impenitant refers to the Greek myth of Sisyphus who was punished by Zeus for trying to defy death by having to push a rock uphill, only to have it always roll back to the bottom. For Wright, it was a way of examining personal pressures: “Warrior. Father. Husband. A trilogy of competing stresses.” He rated himself more highly as a warrior and husband than a father.
Wright is known for his long list of academic qualifications and love of acquiring more. He referred, for instance, to an essay he wrote as part of a Masters in English Literature, about one of Shakespeare’s sonnets in which he speculates about the poem’s relation to Elizabeth I and contemporary historical events. In a previous interview he said he was taking 25 degree courses simultaneously. Now he says he’s finished some of those, but that last year he read 2400 books. That works out at an average of six and a half per day. Asked how that’s possible, he says, “I read very fast” and “some books are smaller than others”.
A staunch critic of Silicon Valley, writer and journalist David Gerard offers a stinging critique of Facebook’s cryptocurrency project: “Libra is not a story about cryptocurrency; it’s a story about Silicon Valley hubris and people who think they can start their own money and take over the world that way.”
Known in the crypto world as a Bitcoin and blockchain critic, in his new book Libra Shrugged Gerard offers a comprehensive analysis of Facebook’s Libra project. Speaking to Coingeek’s Charles Miller, he characterizes the Libra team as “a group of people who think they can take advantage of the system without getting called out on it.”
When Facebook announced Libra back in June 2019, “its original plan was to run a currency basket-based token on blockchain.” Gerard explains. The project, however, was met with fierce criticism from regulators around the world.
Regulators’ biggest concern, Gerard says, is to avoid a repeat of the 2008 financial crisis which was brought about by the kind of structure Facebook’s Libra was proposing. Regulators fear that a monopoly could threaten global financial stability - as happened in 2008 when a few companies were purported to be ‘too big to fail’:
“Regulators around the world are frightened of one thing and that’s another 2008 happening. And Facebook came along and presented them with a plan for ‘here’s how we could do a 2008 all by ourselves’.”
Following opposition and backlash, the social media platform floated a new plan for a series of currency substitute tokens such as a dollar token, pound token, and Euro token. But as Gerard explains, this plan didn’t go down well with regulators either. “The real objection the regulators have is the scale of it.” The currency reserve needed to fulfill Facebook’s plan would have been worth over a trillion dollars - posing a major problem for global financial stability in itself.
In October 2020, Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg was summoned by members of the US Congress to a hearing to explain the company’s plans. Gerard observes Zuckerberg to be a good talker, serving up well thought-out statements, however lacking substance. Zuckerberg has since made it clear that Libra would not move forward without proper regulatory compliance. But one by one, large companies dropped their support for Libra, leaving a select few onboard.
In December, Libra was renamed Diem. In an attempt to win over regulators, Diem presented a simpler and revamped structure. Its launch date was initially set for January 2021. As Gerard explains, it’s the same Libra group proposing different technologies to solve problems, except that now it’s the Diem Association instead of the Libra Association.
You can buy David Gerard’s Libra Shrugged here: https://davidgerard.co.uk/blockchain/libra/
If you launch a company called BIG - the handy acronym of the Vancouver-based Blockchain Intelligence Group -, you need big ambitions. And the co-founder and President of BIG, Lance Morginn has plenty. They’re centered on the idea of using the blockchain’s public face in a more user-friendly way, by creating tools that more easily ‘read’ the information it contains.
Beginning with a tool for law-enforcement, the company has already expanded to create software that provides a reputation score to guide decisions about Bitcoin transactions.
BIG’s ability to analyze and present clear representations of blockchain transaction histories has already had results, including in court, Lance says: “we’ve defended some of the largest exchanges on the planet successfully.”
With more interest in Bitcoin and blockchain from regulators, the prospects for BIG look good. With regulation, Lance notes, people are required to carefully monitor transactions they make: “it’s no longer a nice to have, it’s a must have.”
A veteran in the technology sector, Lance has witnessed the crypto space grow exponentially. With vast amounts of data stored in transactions, he asserts that ‘search and analytics’ are a necessity.
QLUE or Quantitative Law Enforcement Unified Edge
Since the company’s inception in 2015, Blockchain Intelligence Group found its niche catering to law enforcement through its first product QLUE – for Quantitative Law Enforcement Unified Edge.
QLUE is a visualization engine that allows investigators to follow the money flow. With QLUE, every transaction can be viewed in a matter of minutes unlike other tools which could take months, Lance explains.
A great advantage of QLUE he notes, is its ability to identify different entities in the visualization, allowing law enforcement to see who people are interacting with. This information enables law enforcement to subpoena the KYC information and de-anonymize a pseudo-anonymous person.
QLUE is also being used in court cases involving Bitcoin. The tool simplifies the information presented to the jury by using graphics or an excel format. This in turn, helps the jury make confident decisions without having to fully understand the way crypto works. Compliance officers subpoenaed in such cases also make use of QLUE to expedite a report.
While QLUE has made significant appearances in courtrooms around the world, in the US, BIG has been recognized at the Federal level as an expert witness testimony provider.
Bit Rank Verified
Wanting to further provide a ‘search and analytics’ oriented service, Lance developed Bit Rank Verified. The tool helps assess the risk of cryptocurrency transactions by providing an easy-to-understand risk score. “It’s a crypto equivalent of a credit score,” Lance says.
Bit Rank Verified is used by digital banks, exchanges, ATM operators, financial institutions or just about any organization seeking confidence that funds being received did not originate from illicit, immoral or unethical sources. The software checks an address before allowing clients to transfer funds. This reduces the workload on compliance officers.
Online Certificate Course at BIG
The company also offers online courses to anyone who wants to learn about Bitcoin and blockchain, the dark web and how tools like theirs can aid an investigation. A series of modules and a culminating exam awaits eager learners, who are rewarded with certificates to show they are BIG Certified Cryptocurrency Investigators.
Collectively, the Blockchain Intelligence Group works with different blockchains. However, Lance admits Bitcoin SV’s mandate on regulation and transparency sets it apart. “Of the top 20 cryptocurrency based on market cap, BSV was an obvious one for us, just based on the other objectives and missions that they've got around the appearance of Bitcoin SV.”
Sharing their picks of interesting BSV moments captured on video, CoinGeek’s Natalie Mason, Charles Miller, Kurt Wuckert Jr and Bitcoin Association’s Patrick Prinz close out the year in a special CoinGeek Conversations episode.
And what better way to start than conversation than hearing from the one and only Craig Wright? The episode opens with a clip of Craig professing the importance of owning your digital identity.
Kurt chose to share an inspiring video clip filmed during a Cambrian SV event in Lisbon. In the video, Paul Martin of Relay X gives a passionate speech. “One of the things that motivates me the most about Bitcoin is not just the fact that it incentivizes, this sort of risk taking to make the future a better place for our descendants, but the fact that now we have this anchor of truth.”
For Kurt, 2020 was a landmark year for Bitcoin: “We agreed that opening up the protocol and allowing it to scale, however it may, has changed the way discussions occur in Bitcoin so much for the better that I can't even describe how happy I am to see that.”
Next, Charles shared a part of his interview with economist and writer George Gilder. In a remarkable quote, George compares the cryptocurrency movement to the internet movement.
As Kurt was there with George on the day, he gives a moving personal insight into just how dedicated George was on the day. A testament to Gilder’s passion and dedication to speak out on what he believes in.
Natalie is next to share her favorite clip of the year- a heated debate between Unbound Capital founder, Jackson Laskey and Twetch CFO, Aaron Burns about whether or not there is space for venture capital in Bitcoin.
With most of the panel agreeing that venture capital, thankfully, isn’t going anywhere soon as Charles puts it, to witness “two extremely thoughtful and energetic people with opposing views.” The debate is certainly a moment worth checking out in full- between two great forces in the BSV space.
Lastly, Patrick shares a recent CoinGeek Conversation interview with Peter Bainbridge-Clayton of Kompany. In the clip, Peter explains how other blockchain’s fell short – taking us through his experiences that led to finally finding a workable model: Bitcoin SV.
Working on the frontlines of business adoption of this technology, Patrick has seen many enterprises experience the same situation. “They typically start out with Ethereum then moving over to Hyperledger and realizing that neither of them satisfies the demands of the requirements they have for their business.” Patrick firmly believes that once companies find BSV, they don’t look back.
Expectations for the year ahead
Charles hopes to have get togethers in person and see people having drinks together which he says is that “extra bonus of business lubricant that will just power things up to the next level.”
From a Bitcoin Association perspective, Patrick sums it up in two words- enterprise adoption.
Bitcoin historian Kurt hopes to make people understand what Bitcoin SV has been through in the past to get to where it is today. He looks forward to “writing those rhetorical wrongs of the Bitcoin journey.”
In closing, Natalie leaves the last word to founder of Ayre Group and CoinGeek, Calvin Ayre, who sets his expectations for 2021 and beyond: “We see unique consumer facing applications and unique enterprise solutions that take advantage of the superpowers of this technology, which is its nano transaction capability and its immutable data storage on a public blockchain. With those two things combined together, this technology has a global monopoly- which is patent protected”.
From the whole CGC team, happy holidays! We can't wait to see what next year brings for BSV!
The United Nations Children's Fund (UNICEF) is dedicated to improving the welfare of children across the globe. The organization has launched initiatives called Giga and Project Connect to enhance the quality of education by connecting schools to the internet. This initiative comes from UNICEF’s Office of Innovation, a unit dedicated to studying new technologies including blockchain.
Mehran Hydary, product manager at UNICEF, talked to CoinGeek’s Natalie Mason about how technology is being used to advance its initiatives. As Mehran explains, Giga’s mission is to connect every school around the world to the internet. Its main focus is to raise funds needed to get the infrastructure in place as well as to educate people on the importance of internet connectivity.
Alongside this initiative is Project Connect, whose focus is to map out schools and identify which areas lack the internet. This is where blockchain comes into play. Validating locations can be tricky, Mehran points out. For this reason, UNICEF’s blockchain team came up with an app called Project Connect Game. It is designed to encourage people to validate maps through its incentivization and gamification mechanisms, Mehran explains:
“The idea is to take the data we have from the government, load it into a mobile app, people can go to this app and loosely identify if it looks like a school or not.”
The incentivization takes place in the form of a reward system where users can receive a stablecoin cryptocurrency depending on how well they play the game. Mehran admits there are a few obstacles. “The challenge is how to distribute money, are there tax implications or regulatory concerns. Can we get crypto as a reward to get people to contribute to this platform?”
These questions are some of the areas of concerns that Mehran and his team are looking into. He says UNICEF is at a stage where it is validating different blockchain technologies. For now, he says the blockchain team’s main explorations have been primarily with Bitcoin Core and Ethereum.
Mehran points out that Bitcoin Core is easy for most people to understand while Ethereum, he believes, has a large developer community that yields substantial products and services. “A lot of tools and use cases that have come out of that space are tangible examples that we can share with our team.” But Mehran admits, there is more room for research. “We are not prescriptive and we are willing to do research in that capacity. We haven’t had a BSV project come up yet but our team is open to exploring different blockchain if the use cases are right.”
UNICEF works in 190 countries including the world’s toughest places to reach. The organization has a constant drive to bring forth its mission, to help children survive, thrive and fulfil their potential.
With initiatives like Giga and Project Connect, UNICEF aims to deliver not only quality education through connectivity to remote areas around the world but also introduce the use of technologies like blockchain to these communities. Mehran wants to see more of the blockchain technology brought forward to countries UNICEF is working with.
“I think a lot of blockchain companies focus on people that are already tech savvy, people that are scrolling through Twitter 10 hours a day. I don't think that's the audience that crypto really empowers. I think those people already have access to financial tools. They don't have an issue getting an education and keeping that education. I think there needs to be a lot of work that needs to be done in countries that we're not thinking about. And UNICEF is one team that's doing work in all these countries. But I think it would be good to see more and more startups and blockchain companies hire dedicated teams that focus on bringing these amazing technologies on the ground and thinking the same challenges that we're thinking on.”
If you believed in the potential of Bitcoin SV, what would you do? You might set up a venture capital and hedge fund to invest in BSV startups because you thought they had such great prospects. And if that wasn’t enough, you might try to get into transaction processing with your own Bitcoin node infrastructure. That’s what exactly what Dave Mullen-Muhr, of Unbounded Capital and Unbounded Enterprise, is doing.
On this week’s episode of Coingeek Conversations, Charles Miller talks to Dave about the Unbounded brand and the book he co-authored with his business partner, Jackson Laskey, How Bitcoin SV Will Win.
What are Unbounded Capital and Unbounded Enterprise?
Unlike Unbounded Capital a finance company that invests in the Bitcoin SV ecosystem, Unbounded Enterprise now takes the business a step further. “There is just so much opportunity, that’s what really it all comes down to. We were watching everything being built and we figured we can do more than just invest in companies,” Dave says.
With Unbounded Enterprise they will help businesses move from idea to execution by making it easy to integrate with Bitcoin SV.
Unbounded Capital and Unbounded Enterprise share the same goal. That is, to drive the adoption of Bitcoin SV and help push the blockchain space forward. One way of doing that is by making it easy for enterprises to implement the technology into their business.
As Dave explains, Bitcoin is unbounded but there are still some limits in place – particularly in implementing the various technologies that are available but not always easy to use: “we want to remove those limits.”
How Bitcoin SV Will Win
The ebook that Dave co-authored with his business partner Jackson Laskey, How Bitcoin SV Will Win: Why the Cryptocurrency Consensus is Wrong, is described on Amazon as “a comprehensive explanation of where the cryptocurrency industry currently is, why it is there, and why it is so at odds with Unbounded Capital’s vision of Bitcoin.” The book started as a collection of blog posts by both authors while on a year’s journey learning about Bitcoin. Dave says the book is a way of reframing people’s ideas about Bitcoin to enable its readers to look towards what he calls a “hyper efficient network that offers a fundamentally new toolset for business.”
As Dave says, there are parallels with the emergence of the Internet:
“When you give people tools, they’re going to build and they’re going to find a way to generate value from those tools. We’ve had this amazing toolset since when I was born, which is the Internet. And [Bitcoin SV] is a huge upgrade to that toolset, that now we can transact in tiny payments. We can have really, really highly interoperable data paradigms. And we can have data ownership. I think entrepreneurs are going to use these tools and the new wave of innovation will be similar to what we saw in the nineties and early two thousands.”
Kompany provides advanced solutions to financial institutions and corporations on identity verification.
It offers a quick and efficient way to do business verification. With this being a legal requirement for global businesses, Kompany have positioned themselves as the go to company, on a global scale. Having previously built up the verification system for the UK's Companies House, Kompany CTO and co-founder Peter Bainbridge-Clayton is well versed on the processes.
Peter sat down with CoinGeek’s Natalie Mason to talk about his company’s journey, how it fits in perfectly on the blockchain and why they are moving forward on Bitcoin SV over other chains.
So why did Kompany opt for blockchain? “Blockchain is good on proof” Peter says. “When you look at legal intricacies this [Blockchain] is the best way of doing it, it’s the only way that guarantees it can’t be gamed.” Kompany assures their customers that they are capable of proving to regulators that these “checks” were carried out. He points out, “the last thing customers want is to be fined for not doing checks and not being able to prove they did it.”
Like many start-ups, Kompany had to undergo several phases before it can catapult to success. In its initial stages, Kompany used Ethereum for its reputable smart contracts, as Peter explains, but Ethereum’s speed capacity was a drawback. Its slow speed would refrain Kompany from responding to its customers instantaneously. This led Kompany to try faster chains like Hyperledger. Granted it proved faster than Ethereum for Kompany’s needs, Hyperledger is on a private chain and that was an issue and not quite the right model.
Finally, nChain introduced Peter to Bitcoin SV. This ushered-in an opportunity for Peter to learn about BSV blockchain capabilities. At present, he is convinced that BSV is the right fit for Kompany. “BSV has everything we wanted- speed, consensus, cost, built-in time stamp and native token” he says. “We built a marketplace for this kind of information so that information becomes tokenized and can be traded.”
Kompany will undergo some finishing touches before it is implemented. Its plan, to have a fully on chain request response system. It’s a promising agenda and is definitely one worth looking out for.
To know more about Peter Bainbridge-Clayton and how Kompany is building a valid use-case on the blockchain, checkout this episode of CoinGeek Conversations.
If you’re interested in Dr Craig Wright, and want to find out more about him, there’s no better place to go than Ramonquesada.com. It’s a website devoted to all things Craig and Satoshi-related and includes a chronological list of more than 400 of Craig Wright’s publications, pictures of his academic certificates and videos of his interviews and presentations.
So who is Ramon Quesada and why has he assembled this incredible collection of Craigobilia? That question is answered in this week’s CoinGeek Conversations, where Ramon explains his project and how he felt he needed to know more about Dr Wright when he heard of all the controversies surrounding him.
Ramon admits that it’s taken him “some years” to collect all the information on his site, although he only made it public in 2020. It all started with the emergence of BCH in 2017. Suddenly Ramon was aware of “somebody who says he was Satoshi Nakamoto. It was Craig Wright”.
Ramon was already interested in BTC, but Wright’s claims presented him with a dilemma: “I got angry because I didn't have enough knowledge to make a decision. So I said to myself, you have to learn, you have to study ...because you have to be on one of the two sides”.
Ramon was born in Cuba and emigrated to France before moving to Valencia, Spain, where he now lives. He started a Facebook group called Bitcoin Valencia in 2013 and then the Bitcoin Association of Valencia in 2015. He isn’t a technologist, but worked for various businesses, including becoming part owner of Coin Telegraph in Spain from 2016 to 2017
For Ramon, the possibilities of Bitcoin have an idealistic side: “I come from Cuba. I have seen how some under-developed countries are not helping to grow their economies. So also I saw Bitcoin could maybe help this difference between the first world and the third world.”
But it’s not all altruism for Ramon. He says that when he is finally able to make a decision about Dr Wright, based on all his research, he will be investing his money in Bitcoin: “yes - I am investing my life.” All your worldly goods will be invested in Bitcoin? “Yes ...It's like any anybody in their field, they do the research and they bet for that.”
Ramon has never met Craig Wright, but would like to do so (“yes, sure, of course”). So what would he ask Dr Wright if he had the chance? “I don't know. I have a lot of things to ask him, a lot!” But for all the many videos and documents on his website, Ramon is not expected to ever get to the end of his investigations of Dr Wright: “I know that there are a lot of things, neither you, me, nobody are going to know because he doesn't like to show all what he has.”
GeoSpock is a Cambridge technology company with its roots in the city’s science research community. CEO Richard Baker explained that his co-founder Steve Marsh was researching an area that appears to be very different from where GeoSpock is focussed today: “back in 2010, 2011, [Steve] was doing his PhD in computer engineering at Cambridge and he set about the challenge of building a supercomputer to emulate one second of human brain function.”
What connects Steve’s research with GeoSpock’s current interest in data from sources such as roads, traffic signals and supply chains is, as Richard puts it, “how you deal with extreme datasets”.
The secret lies in creating a “parallel environment ...which is all about serial communication.” That allows the speeding up of access to data in large data stores, and to GeoSpock’s claim that whatever query is applied to the data they are working with, they will have an answer in less than a minute.
Richard points out that people are no longer the biggest producers of data: that honour (or shame) is now claimed by machines. As devices connected to the Internet of Things generate more and more data, that creates new problems for technology, and society: “the challenge there is, as this data is pervasive, how do you harness it and how do you translate it into meaningful insights and into decisions ultimately?”
GeoSpock’s software will allow the company to be working in an area that Richard believes can be described as “change for good”. The technology should work across a broad range of industries. Richard gives examples of the kinds of problems he’d hope to be solving: “how do we generate city environments that are good for citizens? How do you ensure that they are clean, that there's low CO2? How do you plan clean and efficient transport systems? How do those transport systems actually function?”
So how does Bitcoin come into GeoSpock’s plan? And why did nChain recently announce its connection with the company as the lead partner in a $5.4m Series A investment round? Richard explains that while today, the company uses Amazon Web Services, he is planning a shift towards BSV, whose combined data storage and transaction opportunities could prove ideal in the future:
“Why isn't Bitcoin SV, both in terms of protocol, but also in terms of what organizations like TAAL are doing, the alternative store? We really see a situation where today we're dealing with event information coming from sensors, but actually the next step is really dealing with the commercial transactions.”
If the idea of an intimate connection between data and money seems unfamiliar, think again. Isn’t that what happens, in a very manual way, every time you fill up your car at a garage? Well, why not automate the process? “We should be able to plug in our car and our car settles for the amount of time that it's been on the charging station in a public space. That ultimately will become a machine to machine commercial transaction. And I think we see an opportunity here where Bitcoin SV becomes the digital ledger of choice for those types of transactions in the machine to machine economy.”
Why do journalists get complaints and abuse on social media just for mentioning Bitcoin SV?
Eileen Brown writes about the tech scene for ZDNet, and says the BSV effect is quite unique in her experience: “when I wrote about the [BSV] Genesis protocol upgrade, the trolling I received on Twitter lasted for nearly three weeks, and I never had that before.”
“What is it about Bitcoin SV that people hate so much?” Eileen asks. “They want to bully somebody like me into not attending [the CoinGeek conference], not writing about it. The trolling is amazingly vicious.”
Eileen says that as a journalist she is neutral between different cryptocurrency camps and has deliberately never owned any crypto. Rather than being intimidated by the trolling, Eileen is just interested: “it's fascinating to watch, from a human perspective”.
But when it comes to explaining the motives behind it, she is very clear: “somebody, or some group of people, are heavily financially invested in making certain that Bitcoin SV does not succeed.”
Eileen has been trying out some of the BSV social media apps, and has noticed how differently they are making her behave: “it actually dramatically changed the way that I would post. I found I was less flippant. I was a lot more considered in the way that I posted. On Twetch, for example, if you post a 'like' or a 'rebranch' as it's called, it costs you money. So you're much more measured in what you decide to like”.
On Powping, tipping is voluntary, which Eileen has also enjoyed: “I find that if I ask a question and somebody gives me a reasonably measured answer, I will tip an amount that I think is the value of the response that I've been given. And the nice thing about this particular platform is that it tells you the complete amount of money that particular post has earned, not just for the creator, but anybody that looks at anybody's posts can see the economy of that blog post was two dollars”.
For all her enthusiasm, Eileen believes the revolution isn’t going to happen overnight: “I think it's going to take a while to change people's behavior. If you remember back to about 2007, 2008, when Facebook released itself onto the general public and took itself out of universities, one of Facebook’s key mantras was 'it's free and always will be'. So we have a whole generation of people who've grown up in this Freakonomics environment: everything's for free.”
Eileen is impressed with BSV ideas about keeping a stable protocol for people to build on, so that the whole system isn’t “at the whim of some young person in his bedroom”. She compares it with the general adoption of HTTP for the Internet, over rivals like FTP, which still exist but are no longer widely used.
Over the long term, Eileen is bullish about the prospects: “I think that in a few more years, once we've gone past the uncertainty and startup mentality of a lot of the Bitcoin SV projects, I think we'll start to get enterprise stability across the whole protocol.”
The founder of the RelayX wallet, Jack Liu, has been helping investors to deal with a crisis on a cryptocurrency exchange by using Bitcoin SV’s ability to tokenise assets.
The exchange OKEx recently suspended all withdrawals because, it explained, “one of our private key-holders is currently cooperating with a public security bureau.” It hasn’t said who, or what this all about, although it has assured users that their money is safe.
In response to the crisis, Jack Liu has implemented an innovative solution which provides a case study for the potential of tokenisation on BSV.
The problem at OKEx is an unusual one, Jack points out. The exchange is still functioning normally with the important exception that users can’t withdraw funds. This has led to the kind of tokenising option that he is offering, using BSV.
But Jack says that he’s not the only one thinking along these lines: “because you can't withdraw, there appears to be already emerging markets that allow a user with funds on the exchange to swap with a user who has funds outside the exchange.”
So how does the OK BSV token work? It first requires OKEx holders of BSV to transfer them within OKEx:“right now the funds are sitting with different users' accounts inside OKEx. So instead of that, if you would like to have a representative token for your asset, funds are sent to a central account inside OKEx and the amount backing that is one to one issued for an OK BSV token.”
While buyers of OK BSV tokens are offered them on a one to one basis with their BSV funds, there will be a small percentage charge of one to 0.995 when you want to redeem them for BSV again.
Jack sees the BSV token as providing real practical value to some OKEx customers: “imagine you're saving up for a wedding or to buy a house or something. And you need to close on the house next week. Even if you are absolutely certain that everything's fine, which is exactly what the exchange is saying, you might have a liquidity issue and you just want to have some funds outside exchange now. So this option, I think, is critical, but it also just coincidentally demonstrates our new RelayX token wallet, and also our use of the RUN [tokenising] protocol on Bitcoin SV.”
For Jack, the OK BSV token is just the start of what will be possible, and not just for financial products: “traditional assets, whether it's farmland or fruits or produce or buildings or financial assets, those don't run on any common ledger. And so those values are very hard to transfer. You'd have to take the funds out to dollars and then wire money to somewhere else to move these assets. So there's going to be a massive shift to tokenise every asset in the world onto a common ledger.”
Another step that would make that vision more possible would be for all BSV wallets to offer tokenising protocols - the more the merrier, Jack says: “the sooner we get to a market consensus and market dominance, the more tokenization happens. I think you need tokens for Bitcoin to take the next step in its evolution.”
“Art washes from our souls the dust of everyday life,” claimed Pablo Picasso. But while that may still be true of art and everyday dust, Bitcoin SV is changing attitudes to its own variety of dust.
Bitcoin dust is a computational leftover, a by-product of transactions measured in minute quantities of Satoshis (one Satoshi being a ten millionth of a Bitcoin). Until now, these leftovers were too small to be worth worrying about – or, more precisely, would cost more to do something with than their own value.
But now, as the CTO of nChain, Steve Shadders, explains, new possibilities for making use of dust are becoming available: “there is really nothing revolutionary about this at all. All it required was to remove some artificial restrictions that had been put in place quite a few years ago.”
Now it will be possible to ‘clean up’ data that is actually costing the miners money to maintain, by allowing them accept ‘piles’ of dust, which, added together, are worth something: “it's probably not the end of the world if you never did clean it up. But it turns out that there is a way that you can clean it up relatively cheaply or almost for free and provide a net benefit for everybody involved.”
So that’s useful, up to a point, in tidying up the records that have to be kept on the Bitcoin blockchain. But this capability also opens up new possibilities for providing services which, until now, would not have had an economic model, because their units of revenue would have been too small. But in future, nanopayments could provide the basis for new kinds of businesses.
Steve explains: “the idea behind collecting a whole lot of individual bits of dust and putting them together to turn it into a more useful denomination of Bitcoin opens up the idea of a service provider being able to charge so little for a service that it falls into the realm of dust, but be able to actually accumulate that value until they reach a point where they've got enough of it to collect together and turn it into meaningful value.”
So what kind of business models might be able to take advantage of dust accumulation? Steve mentions functions including micro-computations and payments for validating a Bitcoin signature. There’s also been talk of its use in Internet of Things applications, where millions of pieces of data are being collected from sensors in the environment.
Steve is reluctant to speculate in much detail about the opportunities: “now that this this model has been demonstrated, it's going to be up to other creative minds to work out how that maps onto a business model.”
But he adds, intriguingly: “I can think of a few myself that are very fundamentally to do with how Bitcoin works in the back end and the infrastructure required to make Bitcoin work. So that's enough to convince me that there is a use case, which suggests to me that there's probably plenty of other models out there that I haven't thought of.”
That sounds like a challenge to BSV entrepreneurs. We have already seen an ecosystem of startups based on micropayments. Are we at the start of a ‘second wave’ based on nanopayments?
Douglas Rushkoff has been following technology and media for more than 30 years - ever since, as a young theatre director, he decided he’d had enough of its elitist culture: “theatres started to feel very predictable ...I was really looking for something more participatory. Interactive. Unknown. Unpredictable.”
It was the late 1980s, and there was a new medium that fitted the bill. “My strangest friends from college, the weirdest, most theatrical, Grateful-Dead-head, acid freak colleagues ended up moving out to the Bay Area and working for the likes of Intel and Apple and Silicon Graphics and Sun. And I really wanted to know, why would weird psychedelic people be making computers?”
San Francisco, and Silicon Valley to its south, were experiencing a unique mixing of counter-culture with the technology and futurism of the US defence industries. Into this heady mix came an even more exciting ingredient: a place - or not a place - called cyberspace, which could be reached through something called the Internet: “the Internet seemed to be the way that human beings were going to connect up to one another in one giant Gaiain global brain and sort of realise planetary consciousness.”
There are plenty of big hopes for a better future attached to the idea of Bitcoin. ‘Banking the unbanked’ is just the start of it. So does Douglas see echoes of his cyberpunk experiences in the hopes of today’s BSV community? He is polite, but frank: “I mean, yes and no. You know, in all honesty (long pause) I don't see ‘a better ledger’ as the solution to the problem”.
But Douglas has taken on board the idea that BSV comes with a different agenda from the rest of the crypto world and that getting back to Satoshi’s original vision means BSV’s ambitions go far beyond currency speculation:
“What Bitcoin was for was not to get a few investors rich off an inflated token. What Bitcoin was for was to distribute the power of authentication globally so that money would be as cheap as we needed it to be at any moment, that money was here to really optimise our transactions - that what we were trying to do was increase the velocity of money, the readiness of capital to move into an almost superfluid economic state where anyone who needs capital at any moment, that vacuum is immediately filled by the capital they need to do the thing they need to do ...And that's beautiful. That's a beautiful thing.”
Douglas’ latest book, and his podcast series, are called Team Human. They explore the intersection between technology and human values or, as the podcast website says, “grapples with complex issues of agency, social justice, and all those quirky non-binary corners of life”. As he puts it, “the possibility of these spaces is to engender a new sense of civic responsibility for one another”.
With that focus, it’s not surprising that Douglas has reservations about some potential involvements of BSV in human interactions. Whilst he’s happy enough with the idea of blockchain as a better substitute for human trust than central authorities such as banks, he sees it as an interim solution. “it's one stage toward then moving into a world where we trust one another as humans, where we're involved with each other locally and we're not [requiring that] every bit of value that we exchange with each other has to be recorded”.
He says he’s most excited about the use of blockchain technology for applications that enhance record-keeping and recall: “that, to my mind, that's what a good blockchain really is, where everything that's happened is retrievable, as if it just happened right now.It's a different way to live. It's a highly accountable world.”
Bequant is a London-based financial business that describes itself as “a one stop solution for professional digital assets, investors and institutions.”
Its founder and CEO George Zarya explained how the business offers a range of services, including prime brokerage, exchange, custody and fund administration, that mirror the way a more traditional financial services business. And yet Bequant works exclusively with cryptocurrencies, simplifying access to that market.
“We’re trying to bring in more professionalism, a more established type of approach and apply it to this new emerging market,” George says.
There’s an irony about trying to bridge the gap between the crypto business and the financial establishment because, as George says, Bitcoin began with the idea of decentralization “and removing the intermediaries from the whole cycle”.
And yet Bequant is a kind of intermediary, for which George offers no apologies: “in the institutional world, the intermediaries play a very important role. That's why we feel that the prime brokerage solutions, the professional exchanges that aggregate source liquidity, brokers, liquidity providers - are very important to facilitate these functions.”
But it’s not just a question of mirroring the structures that George knew from his previous work in more traditional financial institutions: this is a new field and there’s also the chance to introduce innovation that’s appropriate for the world of crypto:
“We shaved off a lot of inefficiencies, if I can judge from my experience in the traditional space where we had an army of operations people, an army of onboarding people and a handful of IT guys sitting in the corner. Now things have changed tremendously: you have an army of IT guys and zero in operations. Everything is automated.”
With offices in London and Malta, Bequant has been in business since early 2018 (although “it feels like a decade”, George says). It hasn’t been hard to attract experienced people from the City to join, and the staff now numbers about 35. They like the novelty of the new world of crypto: “I think that part of the reason why a lot of people move into the industry is the dynamics of the space. The traditional space is becoming utterly boring.”
Bequant is a big business already, with the exchange having a monthly turnover of “roughly eight hundred million to a billion” and volumes on the prime brokerage averaging more than a hundred million a day. “These numbers are maybe shocking,” George says, “but again, from the institutional perspective, it's a normal sort of size that your typical quantitative trading fund would generate.”
When it comes to BSV, George is supportive of efforts to promote adoption through its scaling capacity and the ecosystem’s development: “adoption is one of the most important things for the industry, generally speaking. And we support any project that is working towards that goal and offers the tools to to build upon and grow the industry.”
Recent news about the possibility of nano-payments on Bitcoin SV is inspiring ideas for a whole new field of applications. Calvin Ayre, founder of Ayre Group and CoinGeek, describes it as “commerce between machines”. Just as micro-transactions have, “this is going to create even more new business models”.
The technology will take the ‘Internet of things’ to a whole new level through the application of smart contracts: “corporations most likely will own machines that will be conducting commerce with each other. So the value will eventually go back to the shareholders. But these little bits of business can be agreed in advance and then rolled out across little pieces of equipment scattered all over the globe. And then they can just start doing business with each other.”
Until now, the billions of transactions between sensors, for instance, have either had no monetisation associated with them, or if they are monetized, it’s in big numbers and likely to be inaccurate. Nano-payments would change that: “this will optimize things and allow value to be tied to actual services, not estimates of them”.
Calvin is more sceptical about other new ideas that are attracting attention at the moment. He’s not completely dismissive of all DeFi (decentralized finance) projects, “but of course, as always, the ones that actually do make sense would work better on BSV than these other platforms that don't scale.”
But most of DeFi is to be avoided, Calvin warns: “for sure the majority of the people that are going to be trying to trot out some kind of a programme around this new marketing buzz around DeFi ...are going to have no interest in anything but a scam. So it's unfortunate that a lot of people are going to lose money.”
As for central bank digital currencies (CBDCs), “every country in the world could actually operate their central bank currency on top of BSV - in addition to all the other stuff we can do.” The danger is that CBDCs will start to be established on different systems “and you'll get these siloed central bank digital currencies. And if the vision of how the world unfolds follows the course that we're predicting, then eventually that won't make sense - because they were using a technology that doesn't seamlessly integrate to the rest of the world.”
Next week’s CoinGeek Live conference from New York and London, will be a great chance to take the temperature of the growing BSV ecosystem, with three days of presentations from the worlds of technology, finance and enterprise. So, does Calvin expect to see incremental growth across many different fronts, or is he waiting for a big breakthrough that will change everything?
“I think what you find is that the momentum of the slow, incremental change is happening right now and it's going to continue to happen,” he says. “But every now and then, there's going to be a solar flare, something that's, like, coming out - because I know a few things that are being worked on that I think when they come out, people are going to go, ‘holy crap!’”
A few weeks ago, we spoke to the co-founder and CEO of Centbee, Lorien Gamaroff, about a range of new services that are now available on the BSV wallet, allowing users to buy utilities and other products directly from well-known providers.
This week, we’re showing a live demo of exactly that from the same recording session: how to buy prepaid mobile airtime using Centbee. Lorien is joined by Centbee marketing consultant Heidi Patmore, who has a personal example of just how useful the new services can be.
Heidi explains that in South Africa, where Centbee is based, if you need to top up your prepaid electricity credit, it’s usually a question of using a banking app or visiting a local shop and paying at the till, in return for which, you’ll be given a code to enter into your electricity meter at home, to prove that you now have credit.
So what happens if your banking app doesn’t work? That’s what Heidi discovered one evening:
“A couple of nights ago my banking app went down. Now that’s the only way I usually buy electricity. And there was a bug at FNB [a big South African bank]. Everything went down, and my electricity started beeping at half past nine at night.”
Thanks to the new services on Centbee, Heidi was able to prepay for her electricity with BSV. “Thanks Lorien for building that because I was able to top up my electricity. Otherwise I would have had to get in my car and drive somewhere at half past nine at night to try and somehow figure out how to buy electricity.”
Heidi predicts this will be a game-changer for Centbee, and for BSV: “the convenience of this is going to be massive. People are going to start doing this. We’re going to shift consumer behaviour by having brought out this product.”
Lorien is confident that electricity is just one example of what users want: “there's a big market for electricity, but there's also a big market for people like teenagers, for example, who right now, if they want to use Uber or they want to have a PlayStation subscription or something like that ...they have to go to their parents or whoever and get that transaction made. But I have noticed with my own son that he now has the ability to not only top up his data on his phone, but also to have a PlayStation subscription or or get an Uber ride without having to now phone me up and ask”.
It’s a big step towards the much-discussed use of Bitcoin to serve the “unbanked”, as Lorien explained: “I think that this is going to open up a market that hasn't been accessible before. And I think that there will now be users that come on board. There's no statistics around those types of users, because they've always just been not part of the system. Now there's a digital payment system that they can easily be a part of.”
How do you explain Bitcoin to a general audience? That was writer Liz Louw’s challenge as she set out to produce What is Bitcoin?, an ebook for the London-based Bitcoin investment company Bitstocks.
Liz is not the first to confront the problem. She quotes Satoshi Nakamoto himself, who found that “writing a description for this thing for general audiences is bloody hard. There’s nothing to relate it to.”
As a digital marketing and content strategist, writing about business was already one of Liz’s professional skills, but this job meant more to her than just another assignment. The book represents “the fruit of at least three years of research” and is not the kind of “impersonal, objective piece” that she is sometimes asked to turn out, she says.
Liz decided to address the complexities of the subject by looking for narratives. So to help readers understand the principles of Bitcoin she went back to the story of Craig Wright’s work for casinos, before he wrote the White Paper as Satoshi Nakamoto.
How could he solve the problem of making the gaming in online casinos auditable, and making players confident that the system was fair? The principles of Bitcoin were designed to answer those questions. Centrally, designing a system that was “open, public” was key to the solution: “its simplicity - that is the breakthrough”.
When it came to maintaining the computer network behind Bitcoin, again, it is the principle of honesty that makes Satoshi’s system work: “the marvel of Satoshi’s creation is that it enforces honesty through an incentive scheme that makes it more worthwhile to play by the rules than to play dirty.”
Having looked at the origins of Bitcoin and the way it works, Liz’s book ends with ideas about the future. She writes about Bitcoin enabling “the fourth industrial revolution” - the other three being, in order, machines powered by water and steam, electricity, electronics and information technology.
In particular, Liz describes a grand vision of what the data-recording capabilities of Bitcoin will enable: “sooner or later, we will get to the stage where we can interact with computers with access to all of the data that humans have emitted throughout the entire history of humanity. Everything humanity has ever produced will be on the record, available for us to interact with.”
Liz hints at some big announcements to come from Bitstocks that will build on this idea - a pivot from money to data, it seems. “We’re starting to refer to Gravity [Bitstock’s app] ...as a data bank.” The buying and trading of Bitcoin, “that’s the first offering we have,” she says, “but there is much more being built behind the scenes.”
A former technology analyst on Wall Street, John Pitts brings his experience of assessing Internet companies to making educated guesses about the prospects for Bitcoin SV and BTC. And he’s confident that it’s possible to make valuations based on the existing information: “it's my belief not only that you can, but if it cannot be valued, then it probably isn't anything.”
In an article on CoinGeek, John worked through a series of calculations to assess the value of the BTC network and compared it with BSV. He started by taking transaction fees across the network as the ‘income’ of the network - equivalent to sales in assessing the value of a tech startup. With small blocks, and therefore limited potential for transaction fees, BTC comes off badly, with the whole network being worth as little as $45,000 according to John’s calculations.
John is unapologetic: “that's about where I think BTC is going, which is effectively zero. And the reason for that is because BTC isn't using the most important thing about Bitcoin, which is the data, the information.”
When it comes to BSV, it’s a different story, because the blocks will be much bigger: “if you adjust those numbers and you start using one gigabyte instead of one megabyte or you use one terabyte ...you get very big numbers.”
But John is cautious about predicting too much too soon for BSV: “these things take time. They always do. You know, it took Apple 40 years to get to a trillion dollar valuation. Maybe it doesn't take BSV that long because it's more important than what Apple has done. But the point is, it's going to take a lot longer than people think. However, the valuations can be astronomical for BSV. So there's good news and there's bad news.”
John goes on to compare the value of data stored on BSV to the relative value of land and the buildings on them in a city. When the city prospers, land increases in value and that makes it worthwhile for real estate developers to replace smaller, cheaper buildings with new ones. In the same way, as the BSV network grows in value, with a limited supply of coins (21 million), data that’s not valued by its owner can be replaced by more valuable data, making better use of the ‘real estate’ on the coins.
But John’s interest in BSV is not just theoretical, nor even just financial. He is also an app developer, with SLictionary (above) now available to users. It’s a BSV-powered dictionary, whose marketing describes it as the “biggest advancement in dictionaries since books”.
The idea is to invite users to create competing definitions and upload photos and videos to help explain words too. Popular definitions will be rewarded with BSV. Although the user has to pay a small search fee, John says, the money “takes away all the bad entries and accentuates the good ones.” Unlike with Wikipedia, “people can’t spam it. People cannot manipulate it. I think that's the beauty of the whole thing.”
At the moment, there are still thousands of words waiting to be defined on SLictionary. But for John, that’s not a problem. He’s in BSV for the long run, based on his research into the potential of the network. It worked when he made that kind of judgement on the young Amazon.com. Now he’s getting the same kind of feeling about BSV, as he said in his article: “this is one of those times I’m betting my life, my good name, and even my children’s destiny on a set of research.”
“Destiny” is still waiting to be defined on SLictionary.
For the final addition of Top Picks from CoinGeek Conversations past, it had to be Dr. Craig Wright. Who better than the candid inventor, aka Satoshi Nakamoto, to set the Bitcoin story straight?
Let’s start with his explanation of what Bitcoin is and why it is not a cryptocurrency. As Craig puts it: “Cryptography is secret writing. Bitcoin is the exact opposite of that. Bitcoin is basically a public ledger. So, it’s designed to be private, but it doesn’t actually encrypt things. You can encrypt data and store it in the blockchain; but the difference here is, Bitcoin itself is a set of digital signatures, it’s a chain of evidence and it’s everything that those other systems that aim for an anonymous transfer is not.”
Craig believes that Bitcoin will be widely used by world states, in time. But how do we get there? Craig lays out his idea of how governments will use Bitcoin technology to print traditional currencies.
The conversation also addresses Craig’s use of the term blockchain in the original white paper. Some have noted that the term did not appear at this crucial stage in the development of the Metanet. Craig answers, “If you look at the original code in the comments, ‘blockchain’ is used twice. Although it was block (space) chain”, noting how he used a space between the two words back then, as can be seen in much of his writing.
Another question that was asked regarding the early years: why was there no patent on the original Bitcoin? There appears to be a few reasons. “There’s no way to pseudonymously patent” says Craig, who goes on to note the high cost factor as well as another key reason “any software that is based on complex cryptographic algorithms: digital signatures, hashing… needs to be open source. People need to be able to find where the errors and vulnerabilities are.” Later on, in the interview, we learn how far his patent ambitions have come. Having filed several thousand already, Craig has a new goal: “by the time I finish I want to hit ten thousand.”
In looking at Craig’s colorful career, we get a glimpse of what might have guided the creation of Bitcoin. Laying out his own work motivations, Craig says, “it’s more about the world we want to live in. I don’t think it’s about altruism, I think we all have a duty and we all have to pay the cost of being in a world that we want to be honest and open.”
Towards the end of the conversation, Craig conveys the ultimate purpose of Bitcoin: “Bitcoin, with a stable protocol, takes away power…” he says, “money is all about power and this is one of the things Bitcoin has done. It has removed that power. It will remove that power globally.
This timeless interview between Dr. Craig Wright and CoinGeek’s Charles Miller originally took place in 2019. Charles will be kicking off the 4th season of CoinGeek Conversations, next week, speaking to those who are propelling Bitcoin into its future.
For the next few weeks, CoinGeek producer Natalie Mason is introducing her own Top Picks from CoinGeek Conversations, giving us another chance to enjoy previous episodes of the podcast series.
Natalie’s choice this week is Lise Li, discussing the opportunities for Bitcoin SV in China. Lise is the China Manager for the Bitcoin Association. She has worked in ecommerce and been Chief Operating Officer for a Bitcoin mining pool, but, most important, she believes in the potential of BSV in China.
It’s partly a matter of culture. As a resident of Beijing, she says that when she’s had foreign friends visiting they are “shocked” to see that Chinese people will take only their phones when they go out. They don’t bother with wallets because they’ll be able to pay for everything with apps like Alipay and Wechat Pay. Whereas, in Europe, especially in Germany, she’s noticed that “everyone loves to pay in cash”. Their phone-friendly lifestyle will make the everyday use of Bitcoin less of a change for Chinese people. Besides, “the young generation accepts new things fast, and they love tech”.
Whilst there are still regulatory restrictions slowing the development of Bitcoin in China - such as the ban on converting fiat currency into crypto - officialdom appears to be softening its attitude. The new Special Economic Zone announced this year for Shenzhen is to include plans for research on cryptocurrencies.
Lise describes her job at the Bitcoin Association as one of “gathering pioneers” to share their expertise and experience with Bitcoin SV. She believes that BSV development in China is “a more active field” than in other countries - with many university students taking part in projects. And in terms of hardware, she says that “almost all” the manufacturers of mining equipment are in China.
Lise predicts that data storage will be the most important use of BSV, more important even than its use as money. And although she is promoting BSV activities in China, her vision for the future is international, nothing less than to “build a globalised business ecosystem”.
For the next few weeks, CoinGeek producer Natalie Mason is introducing her own Top Picks from CoinGeek Conversations, giving us another chance to enjoy previous episodes of the podcast series.
Natalie’s choice this week is Jimmy Wales, talking about his phenomenally successful creation, Wikipedia.
Jimmy spoke at CoinGeek’s London conference, where he reflected on what Bitcoin SV supporters have in common with the early proponents of a free, online encyclopedia - since Wikipedia’s feasibility was just as much of a challenge to conventional wisdom as the notion of a global Bitcoin economy is today.
“I think that there's definitely parallels and there's differences as well. So one of the huge parallels has to do with the idea of decentralization generally,” Jimmy said. When you think of an accounting ledger, you might imagine that would involve “one big server somewhere with a big bank looking after it”. But with the design of Bitcoin, “we can do that in a completely new way, in a decentralized way, in public. That's pretty cool. That's pretty fascinating. And I think a lot of those kinds of vibes around decentralization are something that are held in common.”
Jimmy is adamant that blockchain would not be a good idea for Wikipedia. That’s partly because he’s sceptical that there is a demand for a micropayments technology: “the consumers don't want it. They don't like it. It feels funny to them. One of the great things about, say, Netflix is you pay your monthly fee, which is quite nominal, really ...And there's something nice about that it's already paid for. And I just watch as much as I want. A lot of Amazon services could be implemented on a micropayment level because they've already got our credit cards. They can sum it all up and bill us at the end of the month for our usage on Kindle or something like this… It seems to me that by and large, consumers are sceptical of that model. It doesn't feel right to them.”
For all that, Jimmy admits to being interested in Bitcoin technology and compares what’s happening to the kind of enthusiasm he saw around the open source movement: “I think that now the energy around blockchain and a lot of the people, they are quite optimistic people and they are looking for new innovative solutions. And I mean, this is the important thing, I'm known as a critic but one of the things that's really important here is to say, look, I find the technology fascinating. I mean, the whole idea of blockchain is just... I mean, when I first saw it and first understood, I was like, well, this is the first, like, really different idea I've seen in a long time. It's super-interesting.”
Welcome to Top Picks. Throughout the month of August, we will revisit past CoinGeek Conversations. With so many great interviews to choose from, our first Top Pick is Lawry Trevor-Deutsch, of United Corp, who has a greener way to mine Bitcoin.
The World Economic Forum does much more than organise its annual Davos meetup. The not-for-profit foundation calls itself “the international organization for public-private cooperation”. As such, it investigates and promotes ways to make the world a better place, including in the field of blockchain.
Sheila Warren is the WEF’s Head of Blockchain, Digital Currency and Data Policy. She talked to CoinGeek about her view of the prospects for the blockchain economy solving some of the problems of ‘surveillance capitalism’, by letting individuals own their own data.
She admitted that she doesn’t see any revolution happening in the short term: “am I optimistic about it? No, I would not say I'm optimistic about it. I'll just answer that question bluntly. However, that does not mean I don't think it is very much worth paying attention to and even fighting for.”
It’s partly that, through contacts with big companies and governments, Sheila has become aware of “the sheer volume and flow of that data”. But individuals have to take responsibility too: “I don't necessarily feel like the vast majority of people really care. And the reason I feel that way is because I think we've all seen how quickly people are willing to sign away their rights.”
But Sheila is ultimately optimistic about new data practices that blockchain will allow, and has “a short to medium term pessimism”. In the long run, she believes a new generation is coming that will “really take advantage of the elements of the blockchain ...to do this in a different and better way.”
But WEF isn’t waiting for that day to arrive. Sheila’s group is responsible for several blockchain field trials, such as one in Columbia called the Transparency Project, which worked with the government’s Inspector General's office to set up a blockchain procurement process for the awarding of contracts to provide school meals across the country.
Blockchain would help ensure that the bidding process was followed correctly, with a mechanism to time-stamp bids, for instance, so they couldn’t be changed retrospectively - which had been a problem in the past: “there'd be almost a mock proposal, if you will, like a straw man submitted that would then get changed out with corrupt actors, with different motivations for that. So the idea here is the immutability of the record provided an opportunity to basically ensure that there wasn't that kind of change happening downstream, or if there was some sort of change of the record, you could see that. It would be recorded in a way that was very easy to spot.”
The aim was to keep the technology in the background as far as possible, which Sheila believes is a general principle in encouraging mass adoption: “we'll have arrived when it's invisible and you don't need an understanding of blockchain to use most systems.”
“Our goal really is to normalise this technology and take away any fear around it and get people to understand that really it's like any other technology. It's got significant benefits, new benefits. It also has some challenges - and those are being addressed. But our hope is that over time, people will stop talking about blockchain, they'll just be using it without even knowing it.”
The European Union takes an active interest in Bitcoin and blockchain, with multiple initiatives to study, encourage and, potentially, to regulate the sector.
At the heart of this work is the European Commission’s Digital Innovation and Blockchain Unit, whose head is Pēteris Zilgalvis, a political scientist and lawyer and, quite recently, a visiting fellow at St Antony’s College, Oxford where he wrote about fintech and blockchain.
Pēteris is keen to stress that the Commission is not intent on regulating unless there is a clear reason to do so. The overall approach, he says, is that “first of all, we don't rush in”. The subject of Bitcoin and blockchain have been followed by officials within the European Commission for at least seven years, so “if it was ever true that 'if it moves, the European Commission regulates it', it hasn't.”
So, “while ...we support investment and infrastructure, for instance, in artificial intelligence, blockchain, IOT, 5G, we're not going to have a regulation on blockchain - the same way we don't have a regulation on transistors or on servers or on other items of technology.”
The focus will be at a higher level, in the applications working on blockchain, such as tokenization products. But again, the emphasis will be on waiting to be sure of what, if anything, is needed. In relation to smart contracts, for instance, “the question is still very open. Does anything need to be said about it legally? But we're asking, especially in the cases of small cross-border use across the 27 countries of the EU for instance, if there are problems that perhaps need to be addressed to ensure you don't have to have a different type of smart contract or a different registration in many different jurisdictions.”
A more pro-active EU approach is seen in the European Blockchain Services Infrastructure, an initiative through which the EU member states are setting up their own blockchain network with “nodes at the country level, probably ministry level, eventually municipality and regional level. So hundreds and maybe even thousands of nodes.”
With more than 30 nodes in the network initially, the project will be in deployment this year, starting with projects in a number of areas of interest to public service providers: “regtech, ...diploma certification and also self sovereign identity and audit document authentication and publication.”
Another approach involves money from the European Investment Fund to back blockchain startups. This part of the fund is now worth 100m Euros, but will rise to 400m soon. It’s already backing Helios, a decentralised platform for building social media apps, for instance.
Pēteris stresses that it won’t be him or other EU officials deciding which startups to support. Rather, the money “goes out to venture capitalists who make the choices with no interference from us”. He draws parallels with SBIR in the United States, the Small Business Innovation Research programme which has been funding research and development in small companies in the States since 1982.
Being blockchain-agnostic, the EU is not able to back BSV specifically, of course. But what about, at least, the idea that a single blockchain, in principle, would deliver the best results for the ecosystem as a whole? “I think almost everyone agrees, whichever analysis you read, that there will be less blockchains than there are now or less blockchain pr
If Bitcoin SV succeeds in the way its developers and entrepreneurs hope, it will be the biggest change in technology infrastructure since the mass adoption of the Internet more than 20 years ago. But will ordinary users be open or resistant to that kind of change?
Lee Rainie of the Pew Research Centre studies public attitudes to technology and has been responsible for more than 650 reports based on Pew surveys of people's online and Internet usage. So how does he see the prospects for Bitcoin and blockchain entering the mainstream?
“We live in an environment where people's trust in each other and in institutions is declining, particularly in the developed world,” Rainie says, “and so blockchain has been held out as a really interesting alternative way to rebuild trust, using technology as the centrepiece of mediating interactions between people ...Some of the most interesting applications of blockchain are not about cryptocurrency, they're about trusted systems of documentation and smart contracts.”
If that promise could attract users by mitigating their fears about trust, Rainie does not go so far as to suggest that technology could solve all the problems: “this can't just be done by technology. You can't flip a switch and all of a sudden trust is restored and systems operate beautifully. You need human actors to design those systems, monitor those systems, explain those systems.”
In terms of mass adoption, Rainie says that it may not be a question of waiting for the ‘killer app’ that will act as a tipping point for wide acceptance of the technology: “it possibly won't be sort of a big bang moment where all of a sudden a critical mass of people are using it. And then the rest of the world says, 'oh, we've got to get on board'. It might be more evolutionary.”
It could be that adoption will first happen at an industrial level - more ‘behind the scenes’ - in sectors like supply chain and the financial markets.
Then, unlike the Internet, where users are aware of the technology, people may not even realise that they’re using blockchain: “there will be ways in which people's finances absolutely are underpinned by blockchain technology. There are ways in which their interactions with government agencies, when they want to get a national identity card for their newborn child - now, that's going to be probably a blockchain system. But if you ask them in a survey, 'are you a blockchain user?' they might not say yes.”
If blockchain isn’t adopted by a ‘pull’ factor of attraction, it could be nudged forward by reservations about the tech giants, and the whole ‘surveillance capitalism’ model of targeted advertising and data collection.
Pew’s latest research didn’t poll the public, but instead was one of a series of studies that Rainie has ordered as Director of Internet and Technology Research, soliciting views about the future of technology from almost 700 experts, whom the report describes at “'technology innovators, developers, business and policy leaders, researchers and activists”. The study found that the experts “very explicitly invoked how blockchain can be a restorative to people having confidence that their data were treated well and that their interactions with other people were being chronicled and mediated in a responsible way, that there were fewer opportunities for bad actors to step into the middle of the process.”
In that respect then, Pew is reporting an optimistic view of the prospects for blockchain among a wide range of people who should be well placed to predict the future. On the other hand, it seems the experts themselves aren’t too confident about their own powers of prediction. Rainie investigated that in a previous study: “one of the things that we asked in years gone by was whether these experts
There’s been plenty of talk about how there should be blockchain solutions to the Covid crisis. Now, finally, there’s action. The Bayesian Group, a Toronto-based AI and blockchain-oriented markets analyst, is launching a token on the Bitcoin SV blockchain that will allow the monitoring of individuals’ self-reported health updates and offer ‘heat maps’ of localised virus outbreaks.
Bayesian’s Eric Bernhard said that users would be invited to update their status daily with a simple message about how they were feeling which could be delivered over many different communications channels, including social media and texts.
Then if “you're sitting at home and wondering whether or not you should go to the grocery store,” Bernhard explained, “you go check out the Covid token heat map and you can zoom into your area and know that the 3000 people around you have said, ‘I'm feeling OK’.”
The idea is to make a forward-looking, preventative model - as opposed to Internet tracing apps which are retrospective, in that they start with someone who already has the virus and go back into their history to see who they have been in contact with.
By putting individuals’ results on the blockchain, the Bayesian app will solve many of the problems around data ownership and privacy that limit the utility of other models. By working with a decentralized system, Bernhard says, “that means that nobody owns the data. There's no ownership”. And that allows that results to be shared, to the benefit of the whole population, as opposed to apps controlled by, say, the NHS or John Hopkins University, when “no one gets access to it except the people that are allowed access”.
To make the app work globally, Bayesian is partnering with a wide range of organisations who will receive users’ health update messages. That could be via Twitter, Slack or through an email provider. Users are just asked to respond to a very simple question like “how are you feeling today?”. And to overcome language barriers, their answer can be given on a numeric scale. In developing countries, users can simply text their response on a feature phone.
Initially, Bayesian will be subsidising the project by paying its blockchain transaction fees: “we want to contribute to the ecosystem of Covid data, because we think it’s beneficial.” Eventually, there might be income from corporations who could use the data to help with business decisions such as when to open stores, for instance.
The Covid project hinges on the willingness of ordinary people to spend time sending it data. However simple it’s made, will people choose to participate? “Our challenge,” Bernhard says, ”is to communicate the benefits to people [by saying] ‘take five seconds while you're waiting. You have extra time because you're not commuting or you're on your walk ...just take five seconds, go into the same places that you already go and just make a quick status update. And that can help your entire community and protect your family, because the more information you know about the areas around you, the better it is for your family.”
It’s been a busy couple of months for the gaming platform company Kronoverse. They received fresh investments from Persimmon Hill Ltd as well as a third investment from Calvin Ayre, founder of Ayre Group and CoinGeek. They are also set to announce the open beta date for their skill-based fighting game CryptoFights.
David Case, Kronoverse’s Chief Architect, said that their platform will enable developers to build on the Bitcoin SV blockchain rather than the traditional networking layer of cloud servers. For gamers, it’s a new era of digital ownership of in-game assets and the chance to profit from trading items through a marketplace.
After two and a half years of research and development, building their flagship game CryptoFights, Kronoverse is fully utilising BSV’s software development capabilities: “I fell in love with blockchain and the whole concept of having these immutable ledgers,” said David. “That brings so much value to competitive gaming because you’re not relying on an authority of some company’s database to tell you what happens.”
But why BSV over the other blockchains? It comes down to scalability. As with many developers, Kronoverse’s journey started on Ethereum. But the Ethereum main chain was “very slow and very expensive” and David found its Proof of Authority system (an algorithm that increases the speed at which transactions are validated) was unsatisfactory compared to the principle of Proof of Work which governs the BSV blockchain: “as you start building these other things that ride on top of it, well then you end up having to recreate the blockchain again.”
“In Ethereum you have this concept of ‘every validator needs to process every transaction in the exact same order’ - which means that from a development standpoint you’re always single threaded.”
It was Bitcoin SV’s UTXO model which was the clincher. UTXOs (unspent transaction outputs) are processed continuously and are responsible for beginning and ending each transaction. “Rather than being single threaded you can be as multithreaded as there are different UTXOs in the database, so you can process billions of things at the same time” said David. That eliminates the speed limitations they experienced on other blockchains.
As well as the fixed protocol, “the main killer feature on BSV that put it over the top, was opening up the opportune storage space. So, instead of having 200 bytes of data in one transaction, we can now put 100,000 bytes of data” allowing Kronoverse to put real, useful information on chain. In practical terms, that means each move a player takes in CryptoFights is permanently stored, publicly, on the blockchain.
The source code to the game is also publicly available on the blockchain, which is revolutionary in eliminating in-game cheating. For gamers who purchase in-game items, the Kronoverse platform will allow true ownership of their gaming assets. In traditional centralized gaming, you never actually own the items that you purchase. For example, if there is a server issue or a gamer’s account is compromised or suspended, players risk losing their items. On the blockchain, purchased items will remain in a player’s control, even if they’re no longer playing a specific game, allowing them to trade or sell the items for profit. Kronoverse’s marketplace provides a space for trading gaming items but players can choose whether to use it or trade elsewhere.
Understanding how to work on blockchain can seem like a different language for game developers, David said. But the Kronoverse platform unlocks the game developer experience on BSV. The platform provides developers with the tools to build their games on the blockchain by allowing them to use simple JavaScript without having to worry about blockchain technicalities.
In the first of two CoinGeek Conversations about gaming and Bitcoin SV, we talk to Gu Lu, the founder of Satoplay. Next week, we hear about Kronoverse from the company’s Chief Architect, David Case.
Gu Lu is an entrepreneur with an impressive track record in the gaming industry, having worked as a game developer for more than a decade, for the likes of UBISoft, the French game publisher, and CCP Games, an Icelandic company.
Since 2018, he’s been immersing himself in blockchain technology, and then, as he says “I found BSV, so I’m here. That’s it!”
The idea behind his start-up, SatoPlay, named after Satoshi Nakamoto of course, is to develop games that are different from the existing betting and gambling businesses that are using blockchain technologies.
“We want something more widely adopted,” he says, “more casual, more child-friendly. That’s why we don’t do betting or gambling. SatoPlay should be game-centric, not money-centric.”
By making SatoPlay a platform, rather than releasing individual games, Gu Lu says he’ll be able to provide continuity for players, because they’ll be able to maintain their gaming records and resources on the platform even as particular games go in and out of popularity.
Having initially experimented with EOS, Gu Lu is impressed by his BSV experience. Already transaction fees have fallen: “when we first used BSV transactions to save players’ game data on chain a few months ago, it cost us 1000 Satoshis per transaction. Now, with Merchant API, the cost is reduced to 50.”
And he has high hopes for the Metanet as “a natural for structuring an expressive and flexible layout of a lot of game data.”
As BSV develops, so will SatoPlay, with an ambition, eventually, to be creating open worlds as part of a “large scale, in-game virtual economy”. For that, Gu Lu will be drawing on some of his experience in the more conventional parts of the games industry, where he was a 3D game programmer and “happened to know some VR traits as well”.
It’s still early days for SatoPlay, but Gu Lu already has his own in-house game tester - in the form of his nine-year old son. His feedback? “The games are enjoyable, but he doesn’t know how to use BSV.” And he already wants to create his own game for SatoPlay.
So you want to take out a Netflix subscription, top up your phone’s pay-as-you-go credit, buy music or give someone Uber vouchers? Now you can open up your Centbee wallet and purchase all those products and more with BSV.
It’s another step forward for the South African business co-founded by Lorien Gamaroff. Lorien explained that rather than trying to convince individual retailers to accept BSV, they realised they could “become a service provider ourselves ...if we actually bundled value added services directly into the wallet”.
As a result, when you click on the Menu button on the Centbee home screen, the list that opens, containing all the usual wallet options like Send, Receive, and Transactions, also includes Buy. Pressing that reveals a list of mainstream services that you can spend money with through the wallet app.
“So now what we've got,” says Lorien,”is a reason for somebody to have Bitcoin - and not just for speculation”.
It’s a service that will have real practical value in Africa, where many people buy utilities with prepaid credit: “when you run out [of electricity], your meter will switch off and you'll have to go and purchase more electricity to top up”. That means finding a vendor, probably someone in a store or at a particular location, where you pay, and receive a pin code to enter on your meter at home. Of course, it could be a considerable journey, and stores aren’t always open.
Now, instead, you can choose a certain value of electricity to buy through your Centbee wallet, and the wallet will return the pin code for you to enter on the meter.
The secret to the range and depth of the businesses with which Centbee is integrated lies in the establishing of connections with service providers who already deal with multiple companies. “We didn't want to go and have to convince all the utilities across the country to sell us electricity for Bitcoin, or the mobile telcos, or all the other digital service providers like Google and Netflix. So what we have done is we've found partners that already have those integrations into those service providers. And we've got the relationship with those middlemen service providers.”
Whilst Centbee has deep roots in Africa, for Lorien, the experience they are gaining there is just the first stage in a bigger plan: “We don't see ourselves just as a South and Southern African company. We do see ourselves as a global company. And now that we've worked out these models, we've managed to develop the technology and we also figured out what sorts of relationships are required to be able to roll these services out, we're certainly going to now look to expand into many other countries”
Bitcoin’s peer-to-peer node design solves security problems, Dr Craig Wright explained. Even if more than half the nodes are compromised - which would be hard -, the network can still be recovered: “if there's a single uncompromised node, it provides a legal evidence trail. So when people say ‘a 51 percent attack’, it's actually more resilient than even that. If you have one percent of the network providing actual valid information and not the attack, you now have a legally verifiable evidence trail that can be rebuilt.”
In a wide-ranging interview in front of an audience of developers and entrepreneurs at the Cambrian SV event in Lisbon in February, Dr Wright, Chief Scientist of the London blockchain and Bitcoin research company nChain, was talking about the fundamentals of Bitcoin - his creation as Satoshi Nakamoto, back in 2009. He was in conversation with Ryan X. Charles, the founder of Money Button, who wanted to learn more about Dr Wright’s thinking when he created Bitcoin.
Dr Wright said that unlike security attacks on Windows or Linux, where the discovery of a single vulnerability can cause widespread problems, the development of a network of mining farms for Bitcoin SV means that an attempted attack would be the equivalent of “having to attack multiple companies with multiple different security policies, multiple implementations. And that’s far more difficult”.
And as the BSV ecosystem develops, its distributed nodes will become increasingly differentiated, making it even more secure: “in the future, I see the one [BSV] protocol, but I see individual mining farms will start developing their own software. Some of this already happens and it will be a more effective and efficient version for them ...and that will make it more and more complex for anyone attempting to attack the network.”
What’s more, the incentive design behind the node system means that its size self-regulates as individual nodes join or leave: “if you have, say, 100 distributed global nodes in big companies and data centres ...imagine what happens if something happens to one of the nodes - they're suddenly taken out in a disaster or hacker attack or something like this ...The profitability remains the same overall. So those other remaining nodes earn more. And this is the wonder of economics. So people see profit and once profit is distributed and noticed and seen, then other people will go, ‘oh, it's time to turn on my node’ ...And the network will self-heal because people will will see the money and see the suddenly increased profit margin from mining this area and will have idle machines that they turn on.”
After discussing the security design of Bitcoin, Dr Wright went on to explain how, in contrast, private blockchains fall far short of what he had built with Bitcoin: “a private blockchain is an anathema. It's anti security ...It just means you've massively misunderstood the entire technology and have just used jargon to make up some junk because the entire security of the system is [based on] publishing widely.”
Blockchain technology is moving from the periphery to the centre of the financial world. As a former Executive Director of the IMF and an Alternate Member of the Governing Board of the Swiss National Bank, Thomas Moser is somewhere near that centre. He also confessed to finding blockchain technologies “fascinating”, and has done for a long time.
Back in 2013, he wanted to buy some Bitcoin, not for speculation, but “because I wanted to go buy a coffee”. He checked with the compliance department in his bank but was told he could only buy Bitcoin if he held it for at least six months - to avoid falling foul of regulations that stop bankers speculating.
So Moser passed (“which was probably a mistake”) but continued to follow Bitcoin and blockchain even though it seemed to have little to do with the work of central banks.
Today, the two sectors are starting to converge. Moser offers insight into a groundbreaking initiative in Switzerland. It’s called SDX (Swiss Digital Exchange) and is a system which will put “the entire process from trading, processing, settlement and then also custody services, all on a blockchain.” SDX is a project run by SIX, a Swiss public-private partnership which provides financial market infrastructure in the country, including to the stock exchange.
Moser is a realist about blockchain technologies and says that having looked at experiments by the Bank of Canada and the monetary authority in Singapore, he concluded that they were “really not more efficient compared with the current system”. That’s because “with modern infrastructure, payments between banks at least and within a single country are extremely efficient.” But he has high hopes for projects like SDX, particularly if they can capitalise on blockchain’s strengths, one of which, he notes, is its ability to make cross-border payments.
When it comes to Bitcoin SV, Moser says the Swiss National Bank is “basically blockchain agnostic”. But the bank does want to work with existing ‘private sector’ blockchains rather than creating its own.
In the long-run, Bitcoin and central banks may find themselves in competition, rather than working together. Moser asks “what preserves the value of the money that you use better? Is it a central bank with its monetary policy or is it basically code - that you have something encoded that just provides you a very stable growth of the money supply?”
It’s too early to say how that will play out, Moser says. But he doesn’t believe future rivalry between central banks and blockchain technology is likely to be around the presence or absence of regulation: “sometimes I have younger people come to me and say ‘the state comes now and regulates and kills everything’. And I usually say ‘the funny thing is, it's the companies, it's the customers that ask for regulation they ask for protection. They want to have legal certainty.’ And what's difficult is just to figure out how this new technology fits with the old regulation and how we can actually integrate two things.”
Moser has been in discussion with Craig Wright: “he came to the Swiss National Bank about a year ago ...and I asked him I said 'as a central bank, if I issue a digital currency, I will probably do it in a centralised way. Why would I need the blockchain?' And his answer to me was, amongst different things he said, transparency. You know, you get full transparency in the blockchain. So I think these are all questions that will clearly occupy us in the future."
What’s wrong with Silicon Valley? Dr Katy Cook, a psychologist, interviewed more than 200 tech industry workers, to provide a kind of psychoanalysis of its culture. The results are not encouraging, although she stresses that the people themselves aren’t the problem: “no-one I met was evil ...Every one of them was a nice person”.
Cook is interested in the values and motives of the big tech companies, where, she says, there’s been a profound shift. The original, somewhat hippyish values - things like sharing, freedom and the open source source movement - have been replaced by a new set centred on profits, shareholder value and market dominance. That change “represents what we might expect from any person or group in a position of unchecked power”.
She describes it as a “hyper-capitalist system ...this kind of extractive advertising-based world.” In her book, The Psychology of Silicon Valley, Cook diagnoses the root of the problem as a lack of emotional intelligence within some of these companies. As a consultant, it’s something she is in the business of trying to help companies tackle.
But Cook’s thesis has implications for all of us as she also claims that the products of the big tech companies reflect their values. Brilliant minds are at work but they are drawn from a narrow range of backgrounds. The lack of diversity in the Valley leads to the extraordinary concentration of resources on ‘problems’ that would hardly be recognised beyond its narrow wealthy, mostly-male demographics.
Cook has some fun with this, describing the startup that created a service which sent a car to your car at home to fill it with petrol, to eliminate the ‘pain point’ of having to visit a garage. Or there’s the expensive high tech Juicero kitchen gadget which empties an expensive, specially-produced bag of fruit juice into a glass - when it turns out that you can easily do that yourself by squeezing the bag, with no help needed from a machine.
When it comes to the growing Bitcoin SV ecosystem, Cook suggests that in terms of values, there are lessons to be learnt from the Internet and Silicon Valley experience: “you have the advantage of having witnessed the last 20 years - and the pitfalls of not behaving in a way that's legally responsible [or is] ethically dubious. I think you have a good model for how not to act too which is just as important”.
Indeed, some painful examples of tech companies that found themselves in trouble could act as powerful warnings: “no-one wants to be on the cover of Time magazine looking like a battered man like Mark Zuckerberg”.
On the other hand, like it or not, millions of people have been forced to rely on the tech companies in a way they never have before during the pandemic lockdowns. Cook notes that Silicon Valley “hasn't had a lot of bad PR” in the past few months.
But users have had a chance to test tech services beyond what they probably ever wanted: ”I think the fact that we're spending so much time on technology makes a lot of people cognizant of the fact that they would rather spend time with people in real life and would rather go out to a restaurant or have an in-person conversation. It doesn't feel emotionally good to be in front of a screen as much as we are right now.”
You can download a free ebook version of Katy Cook’s ‘The Psychology of Silicon Valley’ from her website and find a link to order a print copy on Amazon.
Jackson Laskey is a piano-playing, poker-playing New Yorker who runs Unbounded Capital, a venture capital and hedge fund that invests in Bitcoin SV.
All three of his areas of expertise contribute to each other. Winning at poker has provided the income he needs to live in New York and be a jazz pianist - which doesn’t pay well. And being able to size up his opponents round the card table has contributed to his venture capital work. “Certainly developing a good poker face has been a useful skill in dealing with entrepreneurs,” he admits.
Before moving his VC fund to BSV exclusively, his instincts about people were useful: “getting bad feelings from a lot of entrepreneurs we were dealing with I think saved us a lot of money.”
Now in the BSV world, he says that kind of intuition “hasn't been a skill I've needed as much”. He sees BSV as associated with “a tendency towards honesty”. But it’s not a get-rich-quick scheme: “people say Bitcoin SV is an intelligence test. I think that's true. But I also think it's a values test because you're not signing up for an easy way to make money.”
There’s another way that poker has helped his business life: it provides a kind of controlled experiment in risk-management. Jackson’s critique of investors in the wider crypto sector, beyond BSV, is that they’re been results-oriented when they should be process-oriented. And that’s another thing that poker can teach you:
“The pacing is fast enough to teach good lessons where in the investing world, sometimes, you can wait a decade for a bet to pan out. Yet it's slow enough that it forces one to be extremely diligent about being process-oriented and not results-oriented. And I think identifying results-orientedness in the crypto space was a big part of how we got to the point where we're at. It was very obvious to us as poker players that the strategies being employed couldn't be correct.”
By creating a combined venture capital and hedge fund, Jackson believes he can mitigate some of the structural weaknesses of traditional VC funds, where there’s pressure to invest in startups as quickly as possible, whatever their quality, because the business model is all about raising money and deploying it. By adding a hedge fund where investors’ money can also be used, “we're not pressured or incentivized to try and deploy as much as possible into businesses we've selected in the early stages ...we always have something to do with our capital.”
VC funds are often viewed with suspicion in BSV startups, partly because they’re associated with tech giants in Silicon Valley whose model is very different. Some BSV entrepreneurs believe they are creating businesses that will generate money from day one and that VC money won’t be needed.
Jackson acknowledges many of the criticisms of the traditional VC industry but believes Unbounded Capital still has plenty to offer: “I do think there's a really huge opportunity for businesses in this space and those businesses will need funding in some way - or at least many of them will.”
There are more problems that Bitcoin could solve than Craig Wright, nChain’s Chief Scientist, can ever deal with: “I have an infinite amount of things that I would happily have people doing. I just don't have the resources to have an infinite number of people working for me. But the reality is there are so many different problems.”
Dr Wright was answering questions from the audience at the Cambrian SV developers conference in Lisbon in February, in a session chaired by Money Button’s CEO, Ryan X. Charles.
He criticised some of the big companies backed by Silicon Valley investors, such as Uber and WeWork - the latter for its self-image as a tech company at all (“I mean, 'we're a technology company because we put sensors on the doors'. I mean, really?) Some tech companies pick non-problems, he said: “problems that are being created so that they can raise money. And what you should be doing is problems that are real problems - and the world is full of them.”
For Craig, there’s too much emphasis on winning venture capital: “ignore the Silicon Valley idea of you just raise money. What you really need to do is find a way of making something profitable.”
As to where he was putting his own research efforts, in answer to a question about the use of blockchain to design secure voting systems, Craig talked about ways of establishing pseudonymous identities and did admit that “there are some areas that I'm working on at the moment doing all these things. So I know a little bit about it. But because I'm a nasty person who patents everything, I'm not going to actually tell you all the solutions we've got until they're ready.”
Getting down to the basics about the way he, as Satoshi Nakamoto, had designed Bitcoin, Craig talked about SPV - Simple Payment Verification -, the system that allows transactions between Bitcoin users to be made directly, peer to peer, as set out in the original White Paper. Whilst blockchain nodes record every transaction on every block, that’s not practical for every user: the system wouldn’t scale if that was required.
Instead, the individual user has “a lightweight client that doesn't have the full node, doesn't keep all the blocks, just maintains block headers and its own information. So it scales a lot better because rather than having to have petabytes of information for every phone in the future, then all you need is the block information, because the reality is that you don't need to or want to validate every single transaction on earth.”
Originally, this kind of peer to peer transaction was thought of in terms of IP to IP address, but Craig said there are other systems that could also be used. He mentioned, as an example, a distributed Bluetooth network called Bridgefy, which he said could be useful if a government was trying to close down the Internet: “what do you do? You just turn on Bridgefy and you hop between phones. And you end up with a wide distributed peer network and SPV could be built on something like that as well. So I said IP to IP, but I'd like to see Bridgefy. And I'd like to see all these other protocols as well.”
Craig explained that it wasn’t just financial transactions that could use such a network. Messages could also be attached to transactions and “no one on chain will ever know. So we can privately maintain information as well as publicly exchanging.”
In 2003, Jeff Chen single-handedly built his own web browser, Maxthon. With its customizable interface, the fast, secure and ad-free web browser drew the attention of investors and Jeff turned it into a profitable business. Today it serves 100 million monthly users in over 140 countries.
Now Jeff has discovered the capabilities of Bitcoin SV and is building the latest version of his browser on the BSV blockchain, as well as creating a revolutionary internet domain-name system where all the information will be stored on the chain.
Speaking to Charles Miller in this week’s CoinGeek Conversations, Jeff explained what drew him to Bitcoin SV. “With BTC, it’s not possible to do it because it cannot scale. I observed and learned BSV for around 6 months; I understand its technology and the potential. I started thinking about how to integrate the browser with blockchain and to present that in a very user-friendly way.” Jeff hopes to create a global public data storage service which is “transparent and traceable.” In turn, the browser can be a platform for other developers to create more innovative products on blockchain.
One of the key advantages Jeff sees in using the blockchain is that money can be fully embedded into online activities. So, how will micro-payments on the new browser work? “We’ll integrate traditional wallets. People don’t have to remember a private key or a public key, all those kinds of scary terms. You use it as normal, as you use Facebook or Twitter using an account and password to log in. And you can top up some money [using fiat currencies or cryptocurrencies] to get points ...to consume all the blockchain features.” Jeff is keen to allow those who aren’t into cryptocurrency to also “get value from blockchain. We want to embrace them”. By providing payment access to BSV applications, such as Twetch, Jeff hopes to make it “very easy for people to enter this blockchain world”.
In 2005, after securing its first investment, Maxthon was “the world’s first browser that had cloud service integrated into it.” This enabled bookmarks to be saved to the cloud and to be shared with various systems, which is now commonly available on the world’s biggest browsers. Once Maxthon hit 7 to 8 million users, it piqued the interest of businesses and investors resulting in contracts with Google and Yahoo allowing Jeff to grow his team of developers. That was the story of Maxthon: from personal project to a business with bases in Hong Kong, Beijing and later in San Francisco.
Alongside replacing the current mx5 browser (as well as subsequent versions of the software) on blockchain, Jeff is developing a new system for domain names, which he sees as an area ripe for updating. “The domain system was designed in the nineteen eighties. …It’s a very centralised system controlled by thirteen route servers, mostly in the US, with some in Europe.” Jeff points to the inefficiencies in the domain resolving capabilities, using this chain of DNS (domain name system) servers. Regardless of an individual’s internet speed, if there’s any issue with the route server, everyone’s website access slows down. By using blockchain to de-centralise the system, each node would be capable of storing all of the information - effectively redesigning the domain name system on blockchain, making it faster and more secure. “That’s the design of BSV and that’s why we want to create big blocks” says Jeff.
Recognizing the scaling power that exists on Bitcoin SV and its ability to resolve the issues with the current internet “I think the vision of Dr. Craig [Wright], that in the future there will be only one chain, I actually believe it. It’s the rule of the internet.”
Jeff Chen is a true innovator. Today, the stage is set to use blockchain to improve the internet user experience and the domain name system. Watch this space.
Jerry Chan’s new job as CEO of the Canadian technology company TAAL is not just a great opportunity for him, but also a kind of liberation. Jerry’s career has included spells at big investment banks Goldman Sachs and J.P.Morgan. Since he got interested in Bitcoin, around 2015, he has championed financial and technological innovation in the corporate world. But it’s been an uphill struggle:
“It's always been a very big drain on my time and resources, having to convince upper management of building prototypes to do something new,” he says. “It's not really politically easy to start a new business line which will cannibalize your old ones, the ones that have been producing for you over decades. So therefore it's always gonna be a challenge politically.”
Now at last, at TAAL, he doesn't need to persuade a conservative boss that it’s worth pursuing radical new ideas: “the thing which immediately made me jump at this role was the chance to have the reins of a company in the space that has the right vision.”
So what is the vision for TAAL? Well, the company formerly known as Squire Mining is making a major pivot, away from mining and towards transaction processing on the Bitcoin SV blockchain. That means adopting a business model which looks to transaction fees for income instead of the traditional miner’s income from block rewards, which Jerry calls “a subsidy model”. Block rewards are currently going through one of their occasional step-change halvings, because of the way Bitcoin was originally programmed, making all miners of the Bitcoin blockchain suddenly less profitable and any alternative therefore more attractive.
As befits a former member of the financial establishment like Jerry, TAAL Distributed Information Technologies Inc., to give it its full name, is very much a play-by-the-rules company. It’s publicly listed on the Canadian stock exchange for instance.
Jerry believes that TAAL’s very conventionality is showing the way to other mining businesses: “the miners are going to have to come out of the dark. Come out of the mines, as it were, and be transparent, be above board ...they have to come out of the woodwork and actually run a legitimate business very much in the open”.
But does TAAL want competition from other, equally forward-looking transaction processors? “I honestly welcome more players that jump in,” Jerry insists, “this is an industry where I do believe that the more players there are, the bigger the pie grows, the more profitable we all become. And so I don't intend to drive a strategy with a goal of monopoly, for instance. Because growing the ecosystem and the market is more important than growing any one company.”
Nevertheless, TAAL is positioned well to defend itself against competitors. It’s just signed a “strategic deal” with nChain, the London blockchain research and development business, which, Jerry says, “gives us access to licence some of the patents that they have, which are very, very applicable to the transaction processing business.”
One aspect of TAAL’s business model that is largely out of its hands is the size of the market for transaction processing. That depends on the development of the Bitcoin SV ecosystem. “We're definitely at the mercy of the actual ecosystem producing the amount of transactions that are required in order for transaction processors to remain profitable.” Jerry sees a four-year window in which that must happen, starting this year.
There are hopeful signs, with the US healthcare company EHR Data, for instance, talking about the possibility of generating up to 32 billion transactions a year if they can put America’s prescriptions on chain. It sounds a huge job, but Jerry is confident it can be done: “totally possible, totally&
For Stephan Nilsson, CEO of Unisot, the Bitcoin SV supply chain business in Norway, these unusual times are providing a chance to explain to potential customers the benefits of tracking their products on the blockchain.
With industries and consumers nervous about the supply of products that they need, people want to know more, says Stephan: “where does it come from? How secure is it? How safe is it? And that’s exactly what we deliver to them.”
Unisot is using fish, a traditional Norwegian business, as a demonstration of the potential of its Bitcoin SV-based system, but “most of our customers in the seafood industry have been hit rather hard because all the restaurants are not buying any fish any more.” That has made some time for deeper understanding of their needs: “we are very fortunate that now we can have a dialogue with our customers.”
Stephan was talking to CoinGeek producer and presenter Natalie Mason in the second of CoinGeek Conversations’ catch-ups with BSV professionals around the world, to see how they are coping with anti-Coronavirus measures in their country. Also, Charles Miller spoke to Brendan Lee, Training and Development Manager of the Bitcoin Association, in his home outside Brisbane, Australia.
“Most of Australia is in quite a severe lockdown,” said Brendan - but actually a little less strict than in the UK, Charles noted. Brendan’s family are allowed two visitors from another household, which isn’t the case in the UK.
And “I’m eating better at the moment than I normally do because we’re cooking all of our food,” Brendan said, “we’re not going to be starving any time soon”. After a couple of years of intense work, Brendan is looking forward to spending more time with his family. There are plans for a camping trip to the bottom of the garden. Until now, any free time has been devoted to home schooling their two children, aged four and seven. It’s been something of a revelation: “my hat goes off to primary school teachers,” Brendan admits.
Coming back to Bitcoin, there is an overlap between Brendan’s educational role at the Bitcoin Association and his time with his children. “My four-year old uses Handcash. She can send money to her brother.” It’s made Brendan think more about Bitcoin education at all levels: “I’d love to be trying to have this material being taught even at high school - because I think Bitcoin is going to become crucial in the IT industry. Any project that uses the Internet and is exchanging information is going to be making use of the ledger ..so the sooner we can teach those young, up-and-coming kids…”
It’s said that you should never waste a good crisis. Nobody could accuse Stephan or Brendan of that.
Today, when people ask “how are you doing?”, they expect an answer. The question is now more than just a polite alternative to clearing your throat before the conversation begins.
And everyone’s answer is different. At best, you may find yourself in a physically cut-off world, except from those you live with - who you may be getting to know even better than you thought possible. But you may also be more in touch with long-lost friends and family members around the world, just to ask them “how are you doing?”.
This week and next, CoinGeek Conversations is putting that question to some of our friends near and far, starting with Ryan X. Charles, the founder and CEO of Money Button in California, and Lise Li, China Manager of the Bitcoin Association, in Beijing. Podcast host Charles Miller is joined by CoinGeek’s new producer Natalie Mason, to compare their calls to Ryan and Lise.
Ryan spoke to us from San Francisco. Having been under lockdown for a month, California being the first state government to enforce restrictions of movement, he talks about the effect that has had in comparison with other states and what permanent shifts may happen to the world of work.
Looking at the long-term implications worldwide, Ryan shared his view on the importance of regular testing and authentication to combat future pandemics. To be able to open up global travel again, he says, “we’re going to need to know if you’ve had a virus or not. This will not be the last pandemic and we need global infrastructure to be prepared for the next one”. How may this look in the future? “Your ID card may end up telling you whether you have been tested for and whether you have or have had viruses in the past.”
From Beijing, Lise provides a note of optimism since the city, and indeed the whole of China, is gradually easing the virus lockdown, although ordinary life is still far from normal: “if you want to dine in a restaurant, at every table there should be no more than two people,” Lise says. And the tables themselves need to be separated by two metres.
Lise is still only leaving home if there’s something she has to do. Nothing is back to how it was but “it’s much better than it was one or two months ago”.
Daniel Diemers started out as a coder in the Eighties. Interested in the interactions between international gamers in the earliest stages of online multiplayer gaming, he studied trust-building among virtual communities as his PhD subject. Digital native Daniel was able to grab the attention of big corporations, even back then during the first dot-com era.
Fast forward to today, and as a business strategy consultant, Daniel makes the world of blockchain accessible to the world’s biggest corporate players. “Digitalization for corporations is quite a complex thing,” he says. “It’s not just blockchain; they're looking at other technologies depending on the industry - drones or robots or augmented reality, virtual reality. So, in the boardrooms today the heat is rising because the exponential technologies are coming with full force.”
The “fascinating thing about the blockchain ecosystem” is the high levels of engagement and communication online. “They interact almost like tribes”, says Daniel, “and of course, now it touches the borders of the large corporates. And they're looking at this and they see it. It's a different language. It's different values.”
In this week’s CoinGeek Conversations podcast, Charles Miller asked how Daniel’s discussions of blockchain play out in the boardroom. They involve dispelling the hype, myths and negative perceptions, Daniel replied, whilst also showing the opportunities. “Ignore all the Silk Road stories. Topics like criminals and fraud; this has been riddling our industry now for the past years. It's no secret. I mean, that was in the past. We’re going into the future …As a strategy consultant, when I work with clients, I always look at the opportunities. I look at growth …I try to take a fair and square look at it, saying these are the opportunities. You can either wait or you can dive in now and give them the options.”
For Daniel, the most important sell is also the hardest one: a global logistics solution that exists on chain. “I see a risk in that most pilots are not that spectacular. Because if you don't pursue the big vision but you go after a very small little tiny use case, then they jump on a permission blockchain for that and they don't see the benefit of doing this on a large scalable one …And of course, results can’t be that spectacular because it's just a little thing. You're not swimming out in the ocean. You're just dipping in the hotel pool. And that's just not the real thing.”
Looking to a future world, in 10 to 15 years, that may be shaped by self-driving, Daniel lays out a compelling example of why the system would require a public blockchain, relying on large scalable micro-transactions, rather than a private, permission-based one.
“Imagine in just the city of London, if all cars were moving in sync using AIs. How do you do all these micro-transactions? How do they communicate with each other? If there's going to be a master database sitting here somewhere in the city, I mean, that's a recipe for disaster. The database goes down. Hackers can penetrate it. So then probably it will be a large, scalable, microtransaction-enabled blockchain required. And this is probably where, of course, BSV comes in. But to get there, that is a big step because you need to convince the car makers, the road toll, the government, the city of London, responsible for the traffic lights. The ecosystem needs to be complete and to build that; that's a very bold vision.”
So how do we get there and what do corporates need to see when it comes to choosing a blockchain? Daniel points to solid regulations and legalities “and then they want to see how big the ecosystem is. I think this is also very important, and that's something where BSV has to grow …They want to know there's a steward of the protocol or there's mechanism built or there's companies like nChain where I can go in and find qualified people that can help m
Venture capital funding has played a huge role in the success of high growth businesses over the past decades. Instagram, Uber and Snapchat are just three relatively recent venture capital (VC) winners, with earlier examples Amazon, Facebook and Google rolling off the tongue as easy as ABC.
But will venture capital be as relevant to the Bitcoin economy as it has been to the giants of Silicon Valley?
In the second instalment of the CambrianSV debate series, CoinGeek’s Charles Miller pitted two brains from the Bitcoin bootcamp in Lisbon against each other to argue their cases and share their views on the topic. Aaron Burns, CFO of social media platform Twetch and Jackson Laskey, a venture capitalist for Unbounded Capital, went head to head in a heated session.
Favouring a return to angel investors over VCs, Aaron was adamant from the start that venture capital would be of “very little importance” in the Bitcoin world. He pointed to the sour taste felt by many in Silicon Valley when start-ups put in the hard work, only to have “three fat cats come in with some smooth talk and get you to sign a contract and give away 35% of your company for peanuts”. Then if the company fails, it’s burdened with returning the cash.
Jackson prefaced his opening argument by noting that the room was rightfully critical of the way some venture capitalists have operated, particularly in Silicon Valley, up to this point. Nevertheless, he was adamant that leaving VCs out of the equation would be a mistake, “akin to the ‘full node’ fallacy of everyone needs to run their own node, or the ‘decentralised everything’ fallacy that has sort of destroyed Ethereum.”
The heat turned up when Jackson attempted to squash Aaron’s argument outright, by stating that angel investors are the same as venture capitalists. Aaron was quick to fire back at this, calling out the VC industry as wolves in sheep clothing; or as he put it, VC’s “place bets on a million horses and they’ve rigged the entire game in favour of themselves”.
Charles brought the debaters back to the central issue of whether the Bitcoin economy will allow start-ups to liberate themselves from needing VCs. Aaron pointed to the number of millionaires in the Bitcoin world and thus the option of finding investors with an actual interest in the futures of those that they put their money behind. And whilst Jackson acknowledged that the lower development costs associated with building businesses on chain may allow people to make revenue quicker, this was a far cry from the realities of turning into profit-making entities.
Jackson explained that the job of VCs is to identify ventures that are less risky than the market perceives. Speaking to a room of people who have chosen to build on BSV, Jackson said: “don’t you think everyone in the world is going to say, that’s crazy. That’s incredibly risky. You’re building on an industry that’s not established. You’re not building on the major chain. But I’m here and I know there’s no risk on building on BSV... I can give you guys money at a more favourable rate than almost anyone else can.”
The recent Cambrian SV Bootcamp in Lisbon brought together about 30 developers and entrepreneurs from around the world. As well as writing code to make their businesses more interoperable, there was time for wider discussion, some of which took place in two debates where issues were aired in front of the rest of the attendees.
The first of those debates makes up this week’s CoinGeek Conversations podcast. It’s between Ryan X. Charles of Money Button and Jimmy Odom of Bittboard (right and left, above). Their subject: how different are Bitcoin businesses from any other kind?
For Jimmy, Bitcoin businesses are different because of their being able to link data and money: “I think that this is the first time that we've had the ability in human history to truly associate the value of information. Before, there would always be guardrails or gatekeepers or intermediaries who would assign the value of information. But Bitcoin being the open protocol that it is, gives not only the ability to assign that value, but to evenly distribute the information behind the assigning of that value.”
Ryan was less inclined to see Bitcoin businesses as fundamentally different because “it's actually the same rules of business and the same rules of economics that it's always been”. He warned that where Bitcoin entrepreneurs (or those in the wider crypto sector) had seen themselves as outside of the ordinary rules of business, it had resulted in dodgy ICOs and scams and that “some of those people have actually gone to prison”.
Although the tech giants have come in for plenty of criticism from the crypto world and elsewhere, Ryan said that “although I think that Google and Facebook has done a lot of things wrong, a lot of businesses in crypto have done things way worse than Google and Facebook, at least on a smaller scale.”
For Jimmy, “neither Google nor Facebook were ever propositioning themselves as moral standard bearers”. Ryan saw the basic problem as being that they “sort of slyly cover up some of the things that they're doing ...I think they don't quite get the morality right. I think that has a lot to do with the fact that they can continue with business models that are ultimately, I think - I hate to be extreme - but I think will ultimately fail. They can't just sell other people's private data and have that be the way things work forever”.
Jimmy sees Bitcoin as more like a natural phenomenon than an ingenious piece of technology, describing it as “this really fascinating discovery - because I don't think it was invented”. The morality that Bitcoin promotes through the way it works relates to his strong Christian faith, with Bitcoin and Christian morality in sync and relating to “the higher power”.
More than once in the debate, Ryan said that he wanted to “both agree and disagree” with Jimmy’s view, but he went along with the idea that Bitcoin promotes better behaviour by businesses: “I think it actually does encourage a better morality because companies basically have to be more transparent and accountable than they used to be. So it encourages the right thing.”
Brad Jasper is an American developer with a track record of creating interesting projects - everything from an app to turn videos into podcasts to a website to help remote workers. Now he’s focussing on Bitcoin SV with his latest project, Bit.sv, a platform for every kind of digital content creator, including coaches, journalists, artists or traders, allowing them to offer premium content, monetized with Bitcoin SV.
Bit.sv is Brad’s second BSV project, the first being Open Directory, where you can earn money for submitting useful or popular links. He says it’s “Reddit on the blockchain”. Although Open Directory is still active, Brad says he’s now committed to making Bit.sv a success, because it’s “the big one”. After working on many different projects, he thinks he’s found the sweet spot between what he wants to make and what people would pay for:
“If I could work on one idea for the rest of my life it would be this one. I really care about getting creators independent ...I think the most impactful thing I can do is to work on my best idea, which is to get as many people as possible working on their best ideas. And that's just about the longest lever I think I can pull. I've got other projects but this is the top of the mountain. This is the mission.”
The idea of Bit.sv is to provide a way for the makers of specialist content to reach niche audiences and be paid for their work. As Brad explains: “with advertising, you need relatively large audiences. And that's actually pretty difficult to grow for most creators. So the kind of niche content that a lot of people are interested in, the long tail content where a lot of the stuff kind of bubbles up into the mainstream, it's really difficult to make a living doing that kind of thing. Bit.SV is really a platform to incentivise the kind of interesting, weird, fun, cool content that we all really want, but it's difficult to make the time for.”
It’s easy to see why creators would like a chance to be paid. But will customers be willing to pay for things they might otherwise expect to see for free? Brad is confident: “the content just has to be better. It has to be better than anything you can get anywhere online for free.” Finding those niche markets is going to be key: “so if you're a yoga teacher, not just doing yoga, but yoga for programmers who spend ten hours a day at the computer. Putting things in people's language adds value for them and people I think are willing to pay for that.”
As for the business model of Bit.sv, the creators can decide how much, if any, of their content they want to offer for free and then set up a paywall at whatever price they choose. “We take a 10 percent cut from the paywalls and there's going to be some other services on the site that we'll take a similar cut for.”
Brad doesn’t only want to be the business owner, but plans to contribute content to the site too: “I'd also just like to be a creator on Bit.sv, to be kind of Creator Zero and show people how it's done and make an independent living from it myself. I think there's a lot of really interesting opportunities for creators that I'm excited to kind of burst open the doors and let people start playing with it and see what they do.”
Encyclopaedias once came as expensive books in many volumes - until the 1990s, when they moved to CD-ROMs, which were smaller, cheaper and included more pictures, and video.
But putting an encyclopedia online was better still, because it could be constantly updated. That was the vision of a former Chicago day trader Jimmy Wales when, in I999, he created - Nupedia. But Nupedia’s software and its editorial processes were so complex - that he started again, with Wikipedia.
This time, anyone could contribute articles and edit them. Jimmy rejected the idea of supporting the business with ads, and Wikipedia.com became the not-for-profit Wikipedia.org. Today Wikipedia is far bigger than any traditional encyclopedia has ever been, with more than 52 million articles in more than 300 languages, attracting one and half billion unique visitors a month. They are also its editors, and pay for it through voluntary donations.
Jimmy Wales spoke at CoinGeek’s London conference, where he reflected on what Bitcoin SV supporters have in common with the early proponents of a free, online encyclopedia - since Wikipedia’s feasibility was just as much of a challenge to conventional wisdom as the notion of a global Bitcoin economy is today.
“I think that there's definitely parallels and there's differences as well. So one of the huge parallels has to do with the idea of decentralization generally,” Jimmy said. When you think of an accounting ledger, you might imagine that would involve “one big server somewhere with a big bank looking after it”. But with the design of Bitcoin, “we can do that in a completely new way, in a decentralized way, in public. That's pretty cool. That's pretty fascinating. And I think a lot of those kinds of vibes around decentralization are something that are held in common.”
Jimmy is adamant that blockchain would not be a good idea for Wikipedia. That’s partly because he’s sceptical that there is a demand for a micropayments technology: “the consumers don't want it. They don't like it. It feels funny to them. One of the great things about, say, Netflix is you pay your monthly fee, which is quite nominal, really ...And there's something nice about that it's already paid for. And I just watch as much as I want.. A lot of Amazon services could be implemented on a micropayment level because they've already got our credit cards. They can sum it all up and bill us at the end of the month for our usage on Kindle or something like this… It seems to me that by and large, consumers are sceptical of that model. It doesn't feel right to them.”
Jimmy Wales, Founder, WikipediaFor all that, Jimmy admits to being interested in Bitcoin technology and compares what’s happening to the kind of enthusiasm he saw around the open source movement: “I think that now the energy around blockchain and a lot of the people, they are quite optimistic people and they are looking for new innovative solutions. And I mean, this is the important thing, I'm known as a critic but one of the things that's really important here is to say, look, I find the technology fascinating. I mean, the whole idea of blockchain is just... I mean, when I
Michael Hudson’s ambition is to popularise Bitcoin through the Gravity app developed by Bitstocks, the London company he founded back in 2014 and of which he is CEO. Although, to say that Michael wants to popularise Bitcoin to undersell the vision - which is nothing less than to change the world.
Bitstocks started by helping people to buy and sell cryptocurrencies. But today, through Gravity, it has moved on. No longer is the emphasis on well-heeled Western customers, to whom it acted as a kind of high tech stockbroker. Michael now has a far wider population in his sights:
“Even if you want to have £1 in circulation, I want to facilitate you. And that vision goes much broader than, say, your traditional Western client. This really segues into 'well, how do we integrate with people in Africa? How do we integrate with people in Asia, South America?' But not just from 'I want to sell you some Bitcoin and I want you to utilise Bitcoin'. How do we empower them to be employed by what it is that we're doing?”
That is still for the future, but next month, Gravity’s launch will be extended from the UK to the rest of Europe.
Michael’s mission is crystallised in the slogan “educate, empower, evolve”, each of which relates to part of Bitstocks’ work - Gravity being “empower”, for instance. Education comes through the company’s media department, producing podcasts and videos, which Michael sees as a critical part of the business.
And then there’s “evolve”, which is perhaps the most ambitious element, if still a little hazy: “the evolve aspect, I haven't spoken about much, but that's about what can we do as a company or organisation, a collective, to entice people to join us on this mission for the betterment of humanity and to invest in technologies that are in the betterment of humanity. Because I've said and I've maintained quite aggressively that Bitcoin is one component. There are other things required in coordination, in combination with Bitcoin that really will have some massive breakthroughs for humanity.”
As to what those other things are, Michael suggests “energy” (yes, everything starts with “e”). The broader vision, loosely, ‘making the world a better place’, might feel like a quite different business idea from letting people buy and sell Bitcoin more easily. But Michael says that Bitcoin is integral to all Bitstocks’ work:
“Bitcoin allows you as an entrepreneur to think in a different way. It allows you to realise 'oh, wait, that is possible. Oh, we can do this in an ethical way', which is the most important aspect. Because if Bitcoin is a beacon of light, great. That's one thing. But how long is it gonna shine for? What's going to prevent it from shining? Why didn't it shine before? Why hasn't shone in eleven years? We've only had a dim light which has allowed shadows.”
Thirty years ago, in 1990. George Gilder wrote Life After Television, predicting the effect of the Internet on the media, society and the economy. Gilder, formerly an economist and speechwriter for Republican politicians, became as interested in technology as in economics.
Ten books later, he wrote Life After Google, heralding what he sees as the next tech revolution, around Bitcoin and blockchain. Speaking at CoinGeek’s London conference, Gilder shared a platform with Bitcoin creator, as Satoshi Nakamoto, Craig Wright. Gilder explained how he expects Bitcoin to solve major problems created by the Internet and the international money markets.
In conversation for this podcast after the event, Gilder reaffirmed his excitement about the potential of Bitcoin and blockchain technologies.
“Bitcoin is indispensable to fixing the world’s economy and Internet security,” he said. “The great vision of Bitcoin SV that Craig Wright has launched ...is micropayments.” Today, with the data and advertising model of the tech giants, people are paying “through the nose ...with distraction, with time - in all sorts of ways”.
Gilder compared favourably the leaders of Bitcoin whom he'd met at the CoinGeek conference with those he wrote about ahead of the Internet revolution: "in general, the cryptocurrency movement is smarter and more sophisticated about computer science, more alert to the flaws in the international economy and more shrewd about new entrepreneurial and business models".
Alex Fauvel is a technologist and entrepreneur with a passion for Bitcoin - and Bitcoin SV (BSV) in particular. His Two Hop ventures, based in the Netherlands, is a fund that invests in companies that are building “on BSV and BSV only,” Alex says. “We are not interested in any other technology - other than what Satoshi created.” The fund has given itself 18 months to raise money from investors, and is aiming for 40 million Euros to invest in a portfolio of around 15 companies.
Two Hop is aiming to invest in businesses that work in the infrastructure layer, rather than consumer apps. “There’s much more value there,” Alex says. Although, in the end, value on Bitcoin may migrate to consumer products, for the moment “users don’t trust it” - so, for now, consumers shouldn’t even be aware of the technology behind Bitcoin-powered services that they’re using.
It’s the opposite to the trend in Internet companies like Amazon which started as a consumer business but now makes its largest profits from infrastructure, in the form of Amazon Web Services.
“What we’re really looking for at Two Hop is something that the Internet cannot do, that people aren’t even necessarily aware of, but they need desperately,” Alex says.
Alongside the venture fund, Alex also has a BSV-based business called Pixel Wallet, which has a technology that conceals blockchain data in picture files. It provides a solution, Alex says, to “the problem of encryption eventually being broken through the passage of time”. Alex is thinking in terms of the next hundred years, during which time computing power will become ever greater.
The technology behind Pixel Wallet uses the ‘random’ quality of a photographic file to hide the blockchain information within a much larger data set. Steganography, as the process is called, has the equivalent function of data masking processes that are used by the credit card industry, but it’s “data masking on steroids”.
“The reason why we invested in Pixel Wallet is because to legally own a digital asset is very, very difficult right now ...And that technological problem is not likely to be solved by technology. It’s more likely to be solved by law.”
To get Pixel Wallet going, Alex says, “we’re trying to convince BSV startups that this is possible, this is compliant and this is in their best interest.”
Alex’s background is in technology, having studied mechanical engineering at UCL in London. But he says he’s “always wanted to get into business”. He became nterested in Bitcoin while still at university in 2013: “I was just absolutely fascinated by it - because no-one knew how it worked ...everything about it was unknown.”
Today, he’s just as enthusiastic and has a big vision of Bitcoin’s potential: “it’s something we interact with as a tool, and it shows us what we are, how we interact with one another.” As to where we should look for big breakthroughs in the use of Bitcoin technology, Alex points to replacing remaining paper requirements: “I’m quite shocked at how paper-based business is still”.
The Bitcoin revolution is most often discussed in terms of technology or finance. But for George Siosi Samuels, its success will depend as much on the human dimension. George is managing director of a consultancy called Faiā, which offers the usual mix of blockchain integration and community management.
George argues for more emphasis on the users of Bitcoin SV: “it’s so classic in the technical world to think that how you will get adoption is by selling the technical benefits. But if you’re looking for global adoption, if that’s our mission, you have to remember the end users. What are they motivated by?”
While Bitcoin miners may have a purely capitalist motive - to make money -, the users’ priorities are more complex: “remember that not everyone is motivated by money. And when we’re looking at branding and communities, you’ll find that a lot of time, people will ‘work’ for things other than money.”
If you’re selling the technical benefits of Bitcoin SV, George says, that’s only one part of what the customer’s decision will be based upon. A consumer’s choice might be to impress one’s boss, for instance. And so “I think there’s not enough focus on the people aspect”.
George makes an analogy with the rivalry between Apple and Microsoft, where Apple “made [their brand] mean a lot more”. They understood that “people will buy for simplicity, not for all the technical features. The average person doesn’t care.”
In terms of the people who work in Bitcoin SV, George is cautious about labelling them as a community: “I have seen that when things get really tough, the ‘community’ splits very easily.” If relationships are purely transactional, motivated by money, that isn’t the definition of community that George wants to use.
George says that in time Bitcoin will become less prominent in discussions about its applications - in the same way that “when we’re talking about business on the Internet, we don’t need to mention the Internet. Bitcoin is the plumbing system: it’s boring, and simple, but it’s so vital.”
Just as PCs used to be sold to consumers by boasting that they had ‘Intel Inside’, “maybe at the beginning if we want to say ‘Powered by Bitcoin’ or something, we can, but I do envision the future where it just fades into the background - and that would be a good sign.”
It’s the same with how Faiā works to change culture in a community, George says: “when you’re looking to intentionally create a culture within a community, you do all these things at the beginning and you’re very vocal about it. But the intention is that you then sort of fade away in the background, and the culture does its thing.”
So now we just need to “start focusing more on the products and the ecosystems that will really take Bitcoin to the next level.”
In the first episode of a new series of CoinGeek Conversations, Daniel Connolly, Lead Developer for Bitcoin SV at the London blockchain research and development company nChain, talks about the forthcoming hard fork in the BSV blockchain known as Genesis. Daniel explains what it means for miners, businesses and individuals and about the new opportunities he sees it offering for the BSV ecosystem.
It’s been quite a year for Bitcoin SV - its first full year since its emergence in the split from Bitcoin Cash in November 2018. Since then, developers have been busy creating new apps for BSV and nChain has been working on restoring the protocol to its original ‘Satoshi vision’.
As the Bitcoin which is truest to Satoshi Nakamoto’s ideas as outlined in the White Paper, BSV’s big blocks are designed to easily and cheaply accommodate the huge numbers of transactions that will be required to fulfil the vision of a global electronic cash - and much more than that too.
Many of the leading thinkers in the BSV ecosystem have been guests on the CoinGeek Conversations podcast over the year. In a special festive edition, Charles Miller invited Chloe Tartan and Jack Davies, researchers at nChain, the London Bitcoin SV and blockchain development company to look back and reflect on a year of achievements for the BSV ecosystem.
Chloe and Jack picked some clips from the podcast and discussed the issues raised. Here are some of their comments. If you’d like to see the full episodes from which the clips are taken, they’re still available, both as audio podcasts and videos - just click the links below:
Jack Liu: Just by living, you’re going to be making Bitcoin transactions
Chloe: “With the internet of things booming and artificial intelligence, technology is becoming so integrated into our lives.”
Jack: “I think [Jack Liu] is definitely right in saying that a big part of Bitcoin is the fusing of money and data. There’s going to be a whole range of new use cases for different kinds of data.”
Stephan Nilsson: BSV can fix the world’s supply chains
Jack: “There are so many different blockchains and things that claim to be blockchains, competing as projects for new use cases and applications ...We’re still trying to educate even developers on what the best way to use blockchain is.”
Lorien Gamaroff: How Bitcoin can help fix things in Africa
Chloe: “I absolutely love what Centbee are doing in South Africa. Blockchain for me stands for financial inclusion and that’s something that they’re tapping into - the whole concept of ‘banking the unbanked’ is so exciting and so powerful.”
Lise Li: Why Bitcoin SV will succeed in China
Jack: “We released some documentation [about the Metanet] earlier this year, and then within a few months, there’s multiple applications coming out of China from people using it. The rate of building in China is quite impressive.”
Matt Dickson: BSV is the logical choice for gaming
Chloe: “Some of the work we’ve been doing at nChain has been in generating randomness in a provably fair way, and ensuring that it’s a transparent game. By doing that on the blockchain, which is the unified source of truth, we can apply that to any game.”
Craig Wright: Bitcoin is not a cryptocurrency
Jack: “One of the main realisations I had this year listening to Craig was that it’s not necessarily that decentralisation causes the bigger properties of Bitcoin and blockchain; decentralisation is an outcome of how the blockchain works.”
Sometimes high and low tech ideas feel like they were made for each other. That’s what Lawry Trevor-Deutsch found when he combined an old, mechanical cooling system with a cryptocurrency mining facility. The result is the Blockchain Domes Heat Station which he operates for United American Corp near Montreal, Canada.
The key technology is a Victorian one, Lawry says. The Canadian well is a ventilation system that draws air through underground pipes, from which it emerges into a building at a constant temperature - crucially, much cooler in summer than the air temperature in Canada. The Blockchain Dome contains thousands of mining computers which need to be kept cool. So as the air from the underground pipes emerges beneath them, it heats up and therefore rises.
And here’s the second clever part of the system: the air heated by the computers is piped through greenhouses, providing the plants with warmth in Winter and cooler than outside air in summer. And because the air is flowing and dry, it prevents mold and deters pests.
So the Domes business has two sources of revenue: renting out its computers to crypto miners; and renting out its greenhouses to farmers. It pays nothing for the cooling that the computers need; and the warmth that the computers generate and send into the greenhouses has also been paid for in the electricity charges to power the miners.
“It really is a win-win situation,” Lawry says, “and at the same time we’re creating a much better environment socially and for sustainability. It’s creating jobs and it’s reducing the carbon footprint.”
Even the power the Domes use is environmentally-friendly because it’s hydro in Quebec. “Certainly, it’s a greener way to mine” at a time when “a lot of the criticism of blockchain in general has been over its power consumption”.
Currently, there are 6,000 miners at work and Lawry is considering two new properties which he hopes will be launched within the next year. And the company is expanding by using the same technology to power data centres too.
As far as Bitcoin SV, Lawry says he doesn’t know what his clients are mining. He’s just the ‘landlord’, with the mining clients and greenhouse occupants just his tenants. In thinking about growing the business, it is much easier to create domes in locations where there is cheap energy than trying to match economic energy supplies with an existing warehouse or other facility. “We will take the mining to the opportunity,” Lawry says.
The company has a patent pending for the whole process and Lawry is bullish about the future: “you look at companies like Amazon and this is a natural for them. They’re trying to reduce their carbon footprint - there’s the perfect example”. Now as the owner of Whole Foods, Amazon could combine their data centres with growing food in the greenhouse, in a low carbon environment.
“We’re trying our best to be environmentally friendly and make money at the same time,” Lawry concludes.
Connor Murray has spent hours thinking and talking about Bitcoin as the co-host of the podcast Bitcoin and Beyond, and before that too. But now he’s turning theory into practice, as he launches his own Bitcoin SV enterprise, TrueReviews.io, which he hopes will become a kind of BSV-powered TripAdvisor. It was hailed as one of the standout projects at the Bitcoin Association’s Pitch Day at the CoinGeek Conference in Seoul.
TrueReviews describes itself as “an online review platform that enables businesses to incentivize more reviews for their businesses and for users to earn Bitcoin and tokenized rewards for good reviews.” In other words, it turns today’s ‘free’ review sites into a real economy, with incentives and accountability for reviewers, readers and those being reviewed.
Connor says he got the idea when he was on holiday with his mother-in-law, who enjoys posting reviews on TripAdvisor. She’s “a great person” who writes positive reviews, but most people, Connor believes, only write unsolicited reviews when they’ve got a complaint. To get a more representative range of genuine responses, a new system is needed: if “they’re spending time on this - they should get paid for it.”
“In Bitcoin we talk about ‘how do we tie value to data?’ Well, that’s just what we’re hoping to do with reviews.” So if the reviewers are going to get paid, where is that money coming from? Connor says the businesses that are getting reviewed will pay. That will be better than businesses creating fake positive reviews, which is “very common” today, Connor says.
The reviews will be demonstrably more trustworthy by including details such as, in a restaurant, the time of the visit or what was ordered, all uploaded to the blockchain to prove that this wasn’t a fake review.
Connor sees TrueReviews as a new kind of service, valuable in its own right whether or not its users are interested in BSV: “I don’t want to build a Bitcoin app. I want to build an app that enables you to do something you couldn’t do before without Bitcoin.”
In his capacity as a podcast host, Connor has had several interviews with Craig Wright, the Chief Scientist of nChain and, as Satoshi Nakamoto, the originator of Bitcoin. He says that Craig “gets a very bad rap from people who have never even tried to communicate with him”.
But Connor says Craig is a great teacher: “he wants you to learn - and that’s what’s very misunderstood about him ...I’ve never found someone more willing to go out of their way to help you understand something. But he doesn’t do it in an ‘hand-heldy’ way: it’s a very Socratic method which is very frustrating sometimes, because he will say things that you don’t think are relevant or he’ll ask you questions where you don’t even know what he’s getting at.”
But Craig’s insights into economic systems through the design of Bitcoin are “profound”, Connor says: Bitcoin is “a system that disincentivizes attacking it through economic means ...And that means we can build incredibly complex systems that have security rooted in economics”.
RateSV deals in financial information: specifically, the exchange rates between cryptocurrencies and fiat currencies or other cryptocurrencies. Each pair - BSV/US dollar or whatever - creates an endless stream of data from the changing values offered by exchanges. And that stream of data can be bought on RateSV, and then sold, if you are lucky enough to find a buyer. RateSV will upload your data to the BitcoinSV blockchain, and it’s yours to try to exploit, now or in the future. You buy it by the day.
Ho Tsiming is the founder and CEO of RateSV. He explains that the data streams are sold through an auction mechanism: you bid to buy the data, and own it if you win the auction.
Because the data comes in greater detail than is available for free - in five minute intervals -, there’s a potential market for it. For instance, someone might want to study the market movements on a day of particular turbulence. Using RateSV, the buyer doesn’t have to pay for a service that would give them much more information than the particular details they are looking for. BitcoinSV makes small transactions possible and efficient, and its blockchain stores and distributes the data.
As Tsiming explains, “we could be an agency, to bridge between the people who want to provide the data and the people who want to consume it”. His own background is in working for a crypto exchange, so he has a good understanding of the data that RateSV is offering its customers.
Uploading the data to the blockchain provides a level of security that customers will require, Tsiming says: “they need to believe that this data is true. And we need to give them proof. The proof is that we upload at the very time it’s happened. And you can verify it on chain. If you want to check at any time, you can check.”
The current version of RateSV is just the start of Tsiming’s ambitions for the business. “We are planning to add the stock market and foreign exchanges,” he says, “it’s in the schedule and we are going to implement it very fast.”
At the moment, there’s still development work to be done before you can actually sell the data you have bought on RateSV: “there are some technical problems we need to solve,” Tsiming admits. But even if you can’t immediately make a profit on the data you buy, don’t worry because the way RateSV works, and the way the blockchain works too, is that the data will be there forever, to be exploited by your potential customers for years to come.
Bitcoin SV is coming to slot machines. A startup called Bitboss has developed software that will sit inside the machines and allow gamblers to collect their winnings on their phones. It’s more secure for the user, makes it easier for the casino to keep accounts and offers the prospect of gamblers being able to carry on playing online when they have left the arcade.
BitBoss describes itself simply as “technology for gaming” and its slot machine product is just one line it is developing. Matt Dickson, the company's co-founder and CEO has a background as an attorney and in the financial markets in New York. He then founded a company that leased slot machines throughout the United States. He took the company public in Canada and eventually sold it to a Las Vegas business.
Matt was in charge of technology and innovation for the company and in that capacity, he says, he “became more and more engrossed in this whole idea of blockchain technology and what it could mean for real money gaming”.
It wasn’t in the cryptocurrency that Matt saw potential, but the blockchain: “I never focussed on the monetary aspect of blockchain technology. It was all about the underlying use of the blockchain to enable more efficient transactions, more secure transactions, basically unifying the gaming space in general”.
While Matt is hugely confident about the potential of blockchain solutions, he admits that persuading potential customers to change to a new and very different system is an uphill battle: “the greatest challenge so far has been that people have invested massive amounts of money into client-server architecture ...And now you’re coming along and you’re saying ‘hey guys, you don’t need to do that any more. We have a new way to do it. And people generally don’t want to get up to speed on new things when something they have is working and making them money.”
But Matt believes that BitBoss’s proposed slot machine software has such obvious advantages that it will win through: “there’s ten million slot machines in the world. They all run on a common protocol. And we can easily route cryptocurrency or tokens on and off slot machines. We hope to replace the ticketing system so that when you’re at a slot machine and you hit Cash Out, you don’t get cash any more, you don’t get coins, you get a paper ticket. And we think that BSV is the ideal replacement for that.”
The economic logic is also compelling. While a slot machine costs $25,000, BitBoss’s device will only cost $100. It makes use of the slot machine’s existing screen and the customer’s phone. “Any casino can use it, it can go into basically any slot machine in the world. And now, all of a sudden, your customer has a crypto wallet, unbeknownst to them ...and now it’s very easy for the casino to offer other services using those credits.”
During the Internet boom of 1995 to 2000, there was talk of a “goldrush”, as ambitious startup companies hurried to claim new online territories - whether it was to be the leader in pet food sales, email or online entertainment.
Today’s Bitcoin startups show some of the same tendencies. Who’s going to be the biggest Bitcoin SV-powered social media provider? Who’s going to be the YouTube? And who’s going to be the search engine?
CityonChain is a Chinese startup that has something in common with Craigslist, in that it’s planning to provide local information and services. But its goldrush opportunities are not for itself, but for its individual users. It offers them the chance to buy and sell a kind of city franchise - the right to ‘own’ each city, build its CityonChain traffic and business and to be a kind of online mayor/CEO for the place.
The startup began just a few months ago, by posting a map of the world and inviting people to pay it a dollar to ‘buy’ any city. Yes, you could own New York City for just a dollar - and nobody else would be able to have it - on CityonChain, at least.
Then the fun starts. As the owner of a city, you can decide whether to populate its site with messageboards, photos or information about local businesses or to take sponsorship from anyone who wants to appear on your site.
Or you can act like a money-making property mogul and sell the whole city to a new owner for a profit. If you look at the CityonChain site, you can see the transactions that have taken place on each city. For instance the Chinese city of Shanghai was bought for $1 on June 11 this year, sold for $1200 on June 12 and then for $3500 on October 24. The owner is now saying it’s not for sale. Each time there’s a transaction on the site, CityonChain takes a small cut.
Ivy Dang is CityonChain’s Chief Marketing Officer. She says that city owners can generate revenue from a variety of sources. For instance, they can initiate ‘city chats’ - messageboards devoted to particular subjects, created by the city owner. “When people chat, they also generate revenue for the city owner.” That’s because they have to pay a little - in BSV, through Moneybutton - to post. But if they receive ‘likes’, then they’ll be paid back in return. And each time, both the city owner and CityonChain also get a small slice of the payment.
Ivy says that CityonChain is a sign of the growing reputation of Bitcoin SV in China. While the BSV community is busy with development, producing products and creating value, rival cryptocurrencies are only focussed on speculation: “buy and sell, and they just want the price to be high - they don’t care about the technology, they don’t care about the future”.
CityonChain is hoping to raise money to hire more developers and has big plans for the future, says Ivy. They’d like to attract more Internet users who are new to BSV - and that means simplifying the process that’s required before a new user can get started on the site.
Entrepreneur Stephan Nilsson claims that in efficiency terms 80 per cent of supply chain operations are waste. It’s “making the whole world economy stagnate,” he says. Nilsson should know because he worked in the industry before he founded his startup, UNISOT. He still works in it - except now UNISOT is offering a blockchain solution to address that inefficiency.
UNISOT will be a “communication layer” using the Bitcoin SV blockchain to record operations performed by different businesses on a unified system that they can all trust.
“We humans, we have Facebook and Twitter and all of these social media. We are sharing tons of information with each other,” he says. “Companies are not doing that - because they only have this EDI [electronic data interchange] communication, which is slow and expensive. That is what is missing in the industry.”
Nilsson’s ambitions combine success for UNISOT with a wider, more philanthropic approach: “we don’t do this just to make a ton of money and get out of it. We actually have a purpose of making the world and the supply chain better.”
If he can persuade companies that currently use different systems to record data in a single supply chain to move onto UNISOT’s BSV-based system, he’s convinced it will mean greater security for all of them: “if all the different providers in the supply chain are using this system, then it gets very hard for one actor to manipulate the information.”
And he sees his own efforts to utilise the BSV blockchain as just one example of a general trend towards creating accountable data - and that’s a shift from the emphasis on Bitcoin as an alternative currency. “Instead of this digital currency that we were talking about in the beginning, it’s now a data layer.” But “the unique thing is that we have built in payment systems, which means that we can now start monetising information.” The Internet revolution allowed anyone in the world to publish information. “But if anyone can publish anything, we also get a lot of very bad information in there. What we need to make the Internet good again is to actually value information.”
In selling his ideas to business, Stephan has found he’s up against some preconceptions that he has to dispel. “Most of the big companies today have already been educated by IBM and the big companies that you should have a private blockchain. Then we have to start educating them in the problems with private blockchains and why we are using a public blockchain. As soon as you say it’s Bitcoin, the question is raised about its inability to scale, and that ‘it’s only used by criminals, you can’t store information there’.
But the facts usually allow the discussion to move on: when they hear that today BSV is doing 15,000 transactions per second, he says, “most of the time we get a positive outcome from that.”
UptimeSV is an Australian startup which won the CoinGeek Hackathon earlier this year. Its cofounder and lead developer, Dean Little, sees the work that Uptime will do as a way to increase the value of the whole Bitcoin SV ecosystem.
The idea is to offer a service that allows businesses to check their online presence in different places, on different devices and conduct other technical tests. To do that, Uptime will recruit an army of ordinary people who will allow their devices to be used for testing. In return, they’ll receive micropayments in Bitcoin SV.
Dean has high hopes of big businesses becoming Uptime customer: “if you onboarded Google ...the effects are beyond just the income that Google is paying you to do these tests. Because now [Google] is aware of this global, scaleable platform that they can build their business on and by doing so, they’re increasing the value of your investment in BSV.”
That’s where the idea of the BSV ecosystem comes in - because all businesses that work with BSV will benefit from others using it at the same time by increasing the value of the network: “even if my business is out-competed by someone who does it better than me, I still benefit as a holder of BSV.”
There’s a big emphasis on storing transactional data on the BSV blockchain at the moment, but Dean says there’s no conflict between thinking of BSV as a data storage solution and as money: it’s both. “The unique thing that makes this system work is that you have the ability to value information on a very small scale ...until now there’s been no way to value it. We’re monetizing useful information. We’ve got data everywhere, on everything. The problem is filtering out what we care about and what we don’t.”
As an Australian, Dean has a different perspective on BSV than that of a European or North American. “There’s a lot of things happening in the East that the West is not aware of. And I think more and more you’re going to see these things coming out.”
So how should the rest of the world prepare for those kinds of development? “All I can say is “learn Chinese”! It’s really amazing to see how quickly they’re building things on this platform. There’s some really creative stuff coming out of some Chinese teams that I’ve been speaking to.”
When Dean says he’s been “speaking to” Chinese teams, he means in their languages. He speaks Mandarin, Cantonese and Hakka. There’s no question, Dean is something of a languages sponge: “I like languages. When you do business with people, you learn a couple of things to try to befriend them and over time you learn a couple more little things and all of a sudden, ‘oh, I can speak this language’.” Dean admits that ‘coming to Korea, it’s the first time I’m going to a country where I don’t speak the language.”
But by the end of day one of the CoinGeek conference in Seoul, South Korea, Dean had taught himself to order a beer at the bar in Korean. In fact, he says, without a hint of boasting, that he’d already learnt that on the plane from Australia.
Lise Li has all the right credentials for her new job as China Manager for the Bitcoin Association. She has worked in ecommerce, she has been Chief Operating Officer for a Bitcoin mining pool, but, most important, she believes in the potential of Bitcoin SV in China.
It’s partly a matter of culture. As a resident of Beijing, she says that when she’s had foreign friends visiting they are “shocked” to see that Chinese people will only take their phones when they go out. They don’t bother with wallets because they’ll be able to pay for everything with apps like Alipay and Wechat Pay. Whereas, in Europe, especially in Germany, she’s noticed that “everyone loves to pay in cash”. Their phone-friendly lifestyle will make the everyday use of Bitcoin less of a change for Chinese people. Besides, “the young generation accepts new things fast, and they love tech”.
Whilst there are still regulatory restrictions slowing the development of Bitcoin in China - such as the ban on converting fiat currency into crypto - officialdom appears to be softening its attitude. The new Special Economic Zone announced this year for Shenzhen is to include plans for research on cryptocurrencies.
And there are already Chinese BSV startups such as the social network WeiBlock which are offering new kinds of online services - in this case, a Twitter-like experience, but one in which BSV’s microtransactions create an economy out of the social comment: say something that people find interesting or approve of, and you will be rewarded with money, not just ‘likes’.
Lise describes her job at the Bitcoin Association as one of “gathering pioneers” to share their expertise and experience with Bitcoin SV. She believes that BSV development in China is “a more active field” than in other countries - with many university students taking part in projects. And in terms of hardware, she says that “almost all” the manufacturers of mining equipment are in China.
Lise predicts that data storage will be the most important use of BSV, more important even than its use as money. And although she is promoting BSV activities in China, her vision for the future is international, nothing less than to “build a globalised business ecosystem”.
The integration of blockchain technologies into mainstream business, both as money and for data recording, continues apace. A Vancouver entrepreneur, Zdravko Loborec, is the founder of REM Loyalty, a provider of ‘off the shelf’ loyalty programmes for all kinds of business.
REM Loyalty boasts more than 300 well-known brands that its users can spend its tokens on. But it sells to businesses who want an easy and efficient way to set up a loyalty programme without having to start from scratch.
REM’s customers can reassure their end users that the scheme overcomes most of the problems associated with loyalty programmes. As Zdravko explains: “the biggest problems in loyalty rewards that people complain about is that their points expire, they can’t transfer them to other people, they don’t convert to cash. Well when you build your loyalty point actually onto the blockchain and turn it into a form of cryptocurrency, all those problems go away.”
The company has created its own currency, the REM dollar, which is itself a cryptocurrency, but can be converted into BSV or other currencies on the company’s platform if the user chooses to redeem it.
The other side of REM Loyalty’s relationship with blockchain is that it is used to record transactions of its token: “it’s made things a lot more efficient,” Zdravko says.
One of the company’s clients is a Canadian property management company, RentPerks. They used REMs to reward their clients for ‘good behaviour’ - things like getting a clean inspection report or paying their rent on time. But the renters can do more than that if they choose: they can use the platform to exchange BSV for REMs and use them to pay their rent.
Another client is a travel agent, where, similarly, REM can be used to book flights and holidays.
Zdravko says that what excites him about the business is the possibilities for new levels of efficiency: “no-one likes to swipe their card and lose four or five per cent - and it happens to us all the time”. With blockchain, the charges are far lower. But what’s important to the customer is the end product, not the fact that it’s built on blockchain, because “they don’t care”.
That message came through before the company asked its developers to “unblockchain” its apps. It was a response to clients’ confusion with earlier versions - when they were “coming back and saying ‘we don’t understand what you mean by download a wallet’ ...and there was a lot more than that.”
REM Loyalty has “eight large commercial clients in various parts of the world ...we’re got deals in place with Mastercard and Visa - so in 104 countries we can already convert at any point in time up to $1000 from REM into cash at a 1% conversion rate.” The company is self-funded and has never had to raise money from outside investors. Zdravko says it has been “revenue-positive” since its first year.
Brendan Lee is gathering together the collective wisdom around Bitcoin SV (BSV) and making it digestible for developers - both for newbies and for the battle-hardened.
“I wanted to take my knowledge of Bitcoin and get it out to as many people as possible,” he says.
BSV is still less than a year old, since its fork from Bitcoin Cash, so it’s surprising how much there is to learn and to impart. But at the CambrianSV Bootcamp in Bali recently, Brendan, the new Training and Development Manager for the Bitcoin Association, demonstrated the fruits of his studies in a series of well-received seminars for the 30 or so developers who were attending.
He’s also taken on a second new job, as Head of Technology for Faiā, a management consultancy that works with companies who may be taking an interest in the potential of Bitcoin for the first time. For complete newcomers, Brendan admits there are often some prejudices to overcome. The “civil war” in Bitcoin is “very hard to explain to people”. But “as soon as you start talking about an honest money system, that’s transparent, where transactions are instant and extremely cheap ...people actually hear that and they go ‘wow, I want to learn more’.”
One example of a consultancy project that makes use of Bitcoin is the development of a system to allow the automatic payment of royalties to an artist by an end consumer - making use of Bitcoin’s ability to pay out to multiple parties from a single transaction: “the fan pays the artist directly”.
In his work for the Bitcoin Association, Brendan says that what’s being built today still needs to achieve “feature parity” with existing applications on the Internet. “But once we get to the point that they do achieve feature parity, and start executing features that are in addition to what’s already available, we will see a moment where people start sitting up and listening” because they’ll have learnt that “if you use this application on Bitcoin, you can earn money really quickly”.
Brendan admits that there isn’t yet a defined body of knowledge around BitcoinSV. In preparing his sessions for the Bali Bootcamp, he’s been “scouring the Internet” and talking to researchers at nChain to make sure that “my ideas and understanding of things is correct”. The result of the work will be a series of educational resources that the Bitcoin Association will release “so that people who are new to Bitcoin can come in and learn about these concepts - a lot of which are extremely important to understand if you are looking to build an application that works on top of Bitcoin”.
But Brendan is making no claims to be the final authority on the matters he’s teaching: “I’m working this out as I go along, and I have learnt so much in the process of putting these lectures together. What I’m really hoping for is that at some point someone comes to me and says ‘hey, I was thinking about what you said but here’s an even better way to do it’. That to me says that I’ve hit the right notes, I’ve got the creative juices flowing.”
Take a listen and all will be explained. Normal service will be resumed next week. Thanks, Charles
As a newly-appointed executive for the Bitcoin Association, Jerry Chan is confident in the prospects for BitcoinSV. The former Morgan Stanley and SBI executive has followed Bitcoin through its many incarnations from the early days and says he’s simply guided by the technology.
Whilst Jerry is a strong supporter of BitcoinSV (BSV) - which is promoted by his new employer - he insists that he’s very “anti-cultism”, in the sense that he just wants to “support the technology that works”. Now the Bitcoin Association manager for Japan and South Korea, Jerry predicts that the technology behind many of BSV’s rivals will fail.
Whilst the use of Bitcoin for financial speculation has been“the first use case”, Jerry sees the future as very much the merging of the “bit” (data) with the “coin”. “It’s a hybrid - it’s literally a merging of data and value,” he says.“Bitcoin brings value to the Internet, it brings value to data.”
The strategy for BitcoinSV should be to make sure that the network scales - which nChain is busy with - but to be “completely agnostic” as to its uses.
On the question of private blockchains, Jerry is relaxed about their use by big businesses who only deal with a limited number of outside partners. But he believes that in time, those private blockchains will be absorbed into public chains: “there is room for some private blockchains in those cases, but I believe that if you look even one step further ...eventually, you’re going to need one public one to glue them all together”.
“The ownership of data is one of the things that plagues the Internet age,” he says. And data laws need to be clarified. But blockchain solves many of the problems because “the owner of the data is the only one with the keys”. So worries about the responsibilities of cloud companies are largely eliminated: instead,“the liability is on yourself”. You could say ‘you have only yourself to blame’. To that end, wallet security needs to be looked at, with new ways for individuals to look after their crypto keys.
In the near future, Jerry hopes to see a big tech company like Amazon or Google start to use Bitcoin. By eliminating data centres, they could operate more efficiently - doing away with expensive infrastructure. Instead, data would be saved on the secure and “almost free” blockchain. That would be a “really, really powerful” change for business.
It would add up to “a revolutionising of the Internet monetization model”. Instead of the advertising model, users would be rewarded for sharing their data. “Ecommerce is just going to get better. People are not going to have to deal with advertisements; people are just going to sell their data directly.”
One of the most talked-about BSV startups is Twetch - a kind of blockchain-based Twitter in which you get paid for creating content - if it’s popular. At the CambrianSV Bootcamp, participants had a chance to learn the full story behind the business.
One of the reasons Twetch is talked about is because it’s been intriguingly secretive. But we now know, from his Bootcamp presentation, that its co-founder and CEO is Josh Petty, an American entrepreneur with a history of previous startups and tech consultancy. Until recently, the only public information was that Elon Moist, a Twitter handle with a Kermit the frog profile pic, was the CEO of Twetch.
Twetch is also talked about because of its ‘invitation only’ joining policy, which creates a waiting list and, inevitably, interest and anxiety amongst people who feel excluded. And finally, Josh proudly explained, it’s talked about because Twetch is a name that “everyone hates” - and that’s just another marketing tool in itself.
As for the product, Josh sees it as much more than a BSV-based version of Twitter. He calls it “the interface to Bitcoin”. It’s creating “an attention economy: the more attention you get, the more money you make”. There’s no charge for just looking at the Twetch feed but if you want to interact or create content, you pay a small fee. And you’d want to do that because if someone engages with your content, you get paid.
In other words, it’s a real alternative to the prevailing ad-supported, data collecting model of existing social media - a working solution to the well-publicised critiques of social media offered by commentators such as Jaron Lanier and Shoshona Zuboff. Twitter “is like a communist state,” Josh says - in the sense that the users get no reward for their efforts, but the overarching entity does. With Twetch, “the individual has power now”.
With his RelayX ‘superwallet’, Jack Liu is making the passage from the existing money world into Bitcoin as painless as possible - and ideally, invisible altogether. By integrating with mainstream products like WeChat and Alipay, RelayX sidesteps the usual off-putting signup procedures that deter countless potential users from entering the Bitcoin ecosystem.
And having got people onboard, Jack’s new venture, the CambrianSV Bootcamp, is all about encouraging entrepreneurs to provide new Bitcoin users with services which bring the Bitcoin world to life - new apps, products and services, all generating blockchain transactions. And that has the spinoff benefit of making mining BSV more profitable and therefore ensuring the security and continuity of the mining network.
So how can the work of Bitcoin entrepreneurs be made easier? Well, Jack says it’s partly a question of creating standardised tools on which new products can be built: “it’s just going to get a lot more efficient. We’re going to have some common protocols on the blockchain that define [things like] location, value, content ...You can have every single Internet 2.0 application be baked into the protocol level. And then every single application is a surface.”
That means it will be easy for anyone to set up a new brand that accesses existing data on the BSV blockchain. For the user, the choice between services may be as superficial as a preference for one UX design over another, because the underlying data will be the same.
If BSV services are going to be easier to create than current online businesses, that should allow a much wider group of people to set up as business owners - without the multiple skills that have traditionally been needed: “previously,” Jack says, “if you wanted to build technology, you also had to learn how to do public speaking, to be able to face down the VC [venture capitalist] who’s giving you a bad term sheet ...to become a manager of people”.
BSV will allow people with creativity, but not necessarily the traditional skills of entrepreneurs, to create “niche applications” because “being niche, being different is going to be valued”. The consequence of this movement will be to “reverse our society back to an age where they were bakers and different shops at the street level - you’re going to see that on the technology level, and that’s going to make the Internet so much more interesting.”
An Australian Bitcoin developer living in London, Steve Shadders is, at first glance, the typical geek, complete with goatee beard, glasses and ponytail. But it only takes a few minutes chat to get way beyond the stereotype. He thinks widely about the politics and economics of bitcoin, and he’s a former DJ, with a love of techno - a calling which he says delayed his entry into the world of software by several years.
“Shadders” as he’s known at nChain, the Bitcoin SV development company of which he’s Chief Technology Officer, operates in many dimensions. There’s an ideological side to him, the legacy of youthful, anarchistic attitudes: “as Bitcoin becomes more widespread,” he says, “it puts the power of economic sovereignty into the hands of people who currently don’t have it ...There is nothing more powerful that you can give someone than opportunity.”
The mission of nChain, according to its website is “to ignite global adoption and enterprise level of usage of Bitcoin”. To that end, Steve leads the nChain developer team behind a series of “upgrades” to the Bitcoin SV protocol (he prefers “upgrade” to “hard fork”). This year, we’ve had the Quasar upgrade, and next year will be Genesis. The idea is to bring the Bitcoin SV protocol back to how it was when Bitcoin started - hence the “SV”, Satoshi vision.
Part of that process is to allow Bitcoin miners rather than developers to call the shots. As a developer, himself, Steve realises this has implications for him: “ultimately, my goal is to make myself replaceable and redundant - and I hope to achieve that within a couple of years”. By then, the governance role in Bitcoin will be handed to a group of people rather than a few individuals, leaving miners with the ultimate responsibility for the ecosystem.
Steve works closely with Craig Wright, nChain’s Chief Scientist. He admits that “it can be challenging to understand what Craig’s talking about sometimes”. About six months after Craig has raised a new idea, Steve says modestly, he finally understands “what he really means”. But it’s a privilege “to be able to pick his brains on a daily basis ...he’s thinking about things years before anyone else”.
As for his own ideas about where Bitcoin is heading, Steve is an unashamed ‘Bitcoin maximalist’. He does accept that “probably the notion of private blockchains will be around for a while before the business world gets comfortable with the fact that public blockchains actually offer far more benefits than than the perceived benefits of keeping it private.” But in the end, he predicts, it’ll be “one coin to rule them all”. And he doesn’t expect Bitcoin SV’s rivals to be around “in five or ten years”.
If BSV develops the way Steve predicts, he’ll go so far as to agree that the work of nChain today might be of interest to future historians. And he points out that “a lot of that work is going to be recorded there immutably, in the blockchain, so it will be easier for blockchain archaeologists to work out what happened”. It’s just another advantage of blockchain technology!
“We think of ourselves as an ecosystem company,” says Lorien Gamaroff, founder and CEO of CentBee, the Johannesburg-based Bitcoin wallet business. “We’ve decided to think holistically and try to tackle the end to end journey of a user where they would actually be able to acquire Bitcoin very easily and then hold it, and then, most importantly, use it.”
CentBee’s first, and most visible product, was its wallet. Then it produced a voucher system which lets people buy Bitcoin from a network of 50,000 retail outlets across South Africa. That also allows Centbee users to issue invoices and be paid by customers who visit any of those outlets - as demonstrated in a case study they filmed. Coming next will be a cross-border remittance solution, to let people send money from one country to another faster and more cheaply than with conventional methods.
Lorien says that Centbee isn’t focussed on existing Bitcoin enthusiasts, especially currency speculators, but instead “we are very interested in trying to get the world to adopt Bitcoin.” And he predicts that more and more people will recognise the efficiency of using Bitcoin - especially its speed of transaction.
“I always feel very lucky [being born in Africa] and having this wonderful opportunity to take this novel new technology and to fix the way things are.” Lorien thinks that the success of Bitcoin in Africa will act as an example to the rest of the world, which will “take note”. In Africa “I have unique opportunity” says Lorien, “that’s why I’m so excited about Bitcoin, and always have been.”
Being brought up in Zimbabwe, with its hyper-inflation, was “what got me thinking about money in general”, Lorien says, “where it comes from and what gives it value”. And then “this idea of Bitcoin just landed in front of me, and it seemed like such a wonderful solution for a country like Zimbabwe - the idea of a sound digital money.” In comparison to the volatility of the Zimbabwe dollar, Bitcoin’s occasional ten per cent up or down in a day is nothing, Lorien jokes.
The development of Bitcoin reminds Lorien of the early days of the Internet, when he was a computer science student. Now with Bitcoin “we have another technology; it’s in its infancy; it’s confusing to most ...if it unfolds in the same way as the Internet, then there must be the possibility that it will change the world.” In relation to Africa in particular, “I don’t know how anyone can not see the opportunity there to help a huge number of people with Bitcoin.”
Although Lorien sees opportunities for Bitcoin in situations where the local currency is unstable or untrusted, it’s not the case that Bitcoin would take an anti-government or anti-state role: for one thing, its ability to integrate taxation offers capabilities that traditional currencies can’t offer. “Taxation on Bitcoin is extremely easy. If you think about a smart contract that could pay a tax, collected directly on the transaction for that good, as a sales tax, that’s a very efficient mechanism of tax collecting”. Maybe one day, tax authorities will actually require businesses and individuals to pay tax using smart contracts, Lorien suggests.
It’s Lorien’s perspective as an African entrepreneur that gives Centbee its distinctive culture, with ambitions to build from its current staff of ten to becoming a big player in the future, combined with an awareness of a bigger social mission:
“In Africa, poverty is everywhere, it’s all around you. It’s impossible to ignore it. It makes you a lot more grateful for what you have.” Lorien hopes that Centbee will, in its own way, both change Africa and change ideas about Bitcoin: “I don’t want people to look at this as something that is only for speculating on or money-laundering. I want people to see how good it is - and that’s wh
Persuading businesses to put their data on a public blockchain shouldn’t be a big deal, says Joshua Henslee. After all, it’s not long since they overcame their objections to storing their data on cloud servers instead of locally on their own computers.
Joshua is an IT professional from California who mostly works with Microsoft products. He believes the future for his clients, and for his own success as a consultant, lies with blockchain solutions using BitcoinSV (BSV).
While private blockchains may sound appealing to cautious businesses, Joshua believes they’re not worth investing in. They’re effectively adding IT resources to business costs, whereas a public blockchain like BSV could produce savings throughout the business: “you’ll be able to streamline business processes such that you’ll have cost savings elsewhere. So even though you’re adding a tiny bit of cost, you’ll more than recoup that and have gains in other parts of your system - financial, supply chain, communication with vendors."
This conversation was recorded at the CoinGeek conference in Toronto.
nChain is the London-based research powerhouse behind BitcoinSV. Its mission is to “ignite global adoption and enterprise-level usage of Bitcoin”. To make that happen, nChain has set up a professional services unit to reach out to businesses and encourage them to design and implement blockchain projects, with Osmin Callis as its Business Development Manager.
In this podcast, Osmin talks about how she works with businesses, their assumptions about Bitcoin, how she tries to steer them towards nChain's solutions and the benefits she sees for the world economy in the long term from the widespread adoption of Bitcoin and blockchain solutions.
The nature of Bitcoin makes the startup business more efficient than for other tech areas, because much of the work has already been done, says Ryan X. Charles, founder of Money Button.
“Why are we able to move so quickly with such a small number of people? Because we understand what Bitcoin offers us ...The magic is Bitcoin: that’s what’s actually doing all these things. So with fewer people and less money, we can go further.”
Money Button has only two other staff besides Ryan. Both are located in Argentina, while Ryan is in the States.
Ryan believes the prospects for BitcoinSV (BSV) are being seriously underestimated: “we’re the only ecosystem that’s building really functional apps right now. We’re radically more healthy than most people understand.”
Alongside Money Button are plenty of businesses being built on BSV: “look at all these little projects. They’re really little, but they’re little seedlings that are doing everything right. They’re creating real products and real little businesses. They’re going to grow up. That’s the reality.”
In this podcast, Ryan also talks about Paymail, a new Money Button product that was launched at the CoinGeek conference in Toronto, where this conversation was recorded.
As the founder and CEO of the new gaming platform company Kronoverse, Adam Kling could hardly be more upbeat about the prospects that the BitcoinSV blockchain will unlock: “we haven’t seen anything like this in gaming - and it is sci-fi”.
The idea is that all your actions as a gamer will be recorded on the BSV blockchain. And that’s why BSV supporter, and owner of CoinGeek, Calvin Ayre invested in Kronoverse earlier this year. Using BSV will transform all aspects of gaming, Adam believes:
“We need to innovate and evolve what games are,” he says. With BSV as a ledger of ownership and a medium of exchange, gamers can acquire and trade virtual items and can keep an identity across different games. “Gamers don’t really have the concept of item ownership. They don’t really get it yet.”
There’s still everything to play for in exploring what blockchain can offer: “we’re so new into this. There’s not really any big blockchain games out. I think in the next five years or so we’ll see what’s working and what’s not working”.
Kronoverse is a member of the Blockchain Game Alliance and Adam is aware that big gaming companies like Ubisoft and EA are actively exploring the possibilities that blockchain offers: “they know the next evolution is the game multiverse, and how games are going to become more like social networks”.
The Handcash team met after Alex Agut posted a message on Facebook, looking for a developer to help with a startup he had an idea for. Rafael Jimenez Seibane replied, and since then, Alex says, they have had “a few startups and companies and products together for a few years”. Alex is “the business guy” and Rafa is “this very methodical developer”, Alex says, “and we’ve learnt from each other”.
Their first impression of Bitcoin was that although it was described as “electronic cash” it looked more like “a complicated banking app or something, for developers. It was more like the raw material for a consumer app”.
There was three ‘pain points’ for ordinary users: backups; sending money online using addresses (“because we don’t like addresses,” said Rafa); and how to improve in-person payments.
“So we thought why can’t we create a great product that’s focussed on sending money by NFC [contactless payments]?”. If you could transfer money just by bringing mobile phones close together, that really would be like electronic cash. Four or five months later, they had their first beta version.
The idea was inspired by a Black Mirror story that Rafa and Alex had seen: “in one of the episodes,” said Rafa, “there was a contact app, so people, just by approaching their phones, could swipe their contact information - it was just a really cool concept”.
Rafa managed to make the idea work for real - and so they were able to exchange contacts, like in the TV show. So then, “we just had to replace information with [Bitcoin] addresses.”
Although we are “just a couple of guys from Spain,” Alex says modestly, “the secret ingredient” is that “we try to focus on one problem at a time ..and try to make that value proposition work.” If they develop a feature that isn’t popular, they’ll drop it, however useful they personally think it would be to users.
One feature of Handcash that Rafa describes as a “beautiful” tradition which has emerged on Twitter is for people to publicise the Handcash handle of a new user and invite other users to send them some BSV. Alex says that people whose handles appear in that way get “a lot of money” and “that creates a bond with our brand.”
“We would like to be the Tesla of money,” says Alex. It’s a comparison they have thought through: “[Tesla] are not trying to create the best electric car,” says Rafa, “they’re trying to create the best car.” “We want to create the world’s best money with Bitcoin,” Alex picks up, “the goal is to create the best money product, but it just happens that the best choice for that is Bitcoin”.
The challenge given to contestants in the first CoinGeek hackathon was to create a project that would encourage more people to use BitcoinSV for the first time - to promote ‘onboarding’ in the jargon.
The winner, announced at CoinGeek’s recent Toronto conference, is a project called UptimeSV, from a team in Australia. The idea behind Uptime is to pay people for the use of their computers and mobiles to run tests on websites and IP addresses.
The leader of the Uptime team, Brent Bevear, explains in this podcast that “we wanted to give people a way of completing jobs to earn BitcoinSV because I think that’s the most significant way that you can get a lot of people interested”. Uptime will offer the chance to earn “a little bit of money in the background” doing something useful.
Kate Hiscox is the founder and Chief Executive of Drive Markets, a fintech startup that operates a crypto and fiat exchange as one of an emerging suite of financial products.
Kate’s company recently announced an investment from Calvin Ayre, the owner of CoinGeek and a leading backer of Bitcoin SV. Drive Markets is planning to process its transactions on the Bitcoin SV blockchain.
The integration of Bitcoin with existing financial institutions, structures and regulations was one of the themes at CoinGeek’s recent Toronto conference. Kate spoke at the conference and Drive Markets is a great example of that integration, since Kate stresses the experience of her team in the conventional financial sector, and the way her company wants to offer the kind of tools and facilities for crypto that are available to those in the existing financial markets.
Kate Hiscox spoke to Charles Miller about plans for her business, backstage at the Toronto conference, for this CoinGeek Conversations podcast.
“Three is kind of a lucky number,” says Jack Liu, “you’re not really going to get a fourth chance, fifth chance, a sixth chance - so I look at it as like this is all or nothing.”
Hong Kong based entrepreneur Jack Liu sees the opportunities offered by Bitcoin SV (BSV) today as being the third and final chance to realise the potential he’s always seen for cryptocurrency.
After the decision was made, years ago, not to scale Bitcoin (BTC) and then the problems with Bitcoin Cash (BCH) that followed, Jack is now pinning his hopes on BSV. But to work, he says, reliable revenue streams must be developed for BSV - and fast.
“I think as much as today we sit here with amazing optimism for BSV, if we cannot get BSV adopted on a transaction level, you’re going to see divisions again within BSV. So you’ve got to get transactions going as soon as possible - and that’s where the urgency comes from.”
To that end, Jack and his team - formed since he left Circle just a couple of months ago - have already released two products, FloatSV, an exchange, and RelayX, a ‘superwallet’ that connects BSV with existing payment platforms such as Alipay and WeChat.
Jack’s concern is that transactions must sustain the network of BSV miners by providing them with micropayments. The danger is that the rival version of Bitcoin, BTC, is used purely as a store of value: “the great thing that banks would love to see is if they can make Bitcoin merely ‘digital gold’ - they would love that because it would not alter the world that we live in ...which is really not that interesting at all. If that was what you told me Bitcoin was going to be, I would never have joined this industry.”
Instead, Jack’s vision is to have BSV playing a part in every aspect of our lives, with micropayments being sent and received between people all the time - during work, rest and play: “I think in the future, if someone notices that you haven’t made a hundred transactions in a day, they might call the police and look for you - because just by living, you’re going to be making transactions.”
Although we may find ourselves making micropayments for things we now think of as free, Jack says that on the other side of the equation, “you probably will have hundreds more income streams daily”. But that doesn’t mean they’re all going to be big money-makers: “I mean income streams as in maybe you open a door for someone and they tip you one cent”.
But small payments made to people in developing countries for providing casual digital services, for instance, could make a big difference in those economies. The aim, Jack says, is for people to be able to start using RelayX with no BSV or fiat money. Instead, they would earn money through the app, and it would get into circulation that way.
BSV is uniquely able to make this possible because its rivals “never had the vision that Satoshi did for the entire system”. Instead, they’re marketing individual use cases, which, when the market changes, will have to pivot: “they’re kind of opportunistic blockchains” whose protocol will inevitably change, making them unsuitable for established businesses to build on.
The low transaction costs of Bitcoin SV (BSV) are paying dividends for a startup called FiveBucks. It’s a digital marketplace that connects service providers round the world with customers. The starting price for a job is just $5 US, paid in BSV.
The entrepreneur behind it is Getar Hoti, who started the business last year and has already attracted almost 500 people offering their services - everything from “I will create a powerful logo for your business” to “I will record a professional British voiceover” and “I will talk to you in Italian on Skype for 15 minutes”.
Thanks to the use of BSV, no money goes to payment processors. FiveBucks only charges 10% for connecting the freelancers with customers, not the 20% that “most freelance platforms charge,” according to Getar, “and long term, with what’s happening on BSV, we plan to decrease this more and more”.
Since the arrival of BSV after the hard fork from Bitcoin Cash last year, “we have been doing great, because in BSV you have this stable ecosystem, stable protocol, a strong market.”
WeatherSV uses the Bitcoin SV blockchain to store data - detailed hourly weather readings for thousands of locations around the world - and to collect payments from its users via MoneyButton. It's a project of Paul Chiari, director of Tableland IT in Queensland, Australia. Paul is interested in how 'internet of things' systems could be used in his rural area to collect and amalgamate data for farmers. WeatherSV is an experimental project through which he's been learning about the potential of BSV, in collaboration with developers like unwriter, who have contributed open source software for BSV blockchain users. Paul says that the work of unwriter and others means that "the heavy lifting is being done, and you've just got to jump on board and have a go". So far, WeatherSV has received 500 subscriptions to activate weather reports in different locations.
There’s no question the corporate world is serious about blockchain technology. Exhibitors at the recent Blockchain Expo in London included multinational tech, finance and consultancy firms.
But what stage have big companies reached in developing blockchain projects? And are they ready to accept the original Bitcoin vision of public blockchains - rather than working on ‘in house’ private blockchains? Many in the Bitcoin world see the latter as like the so-called ‘walled gardens’ of online services such as AOL and Compuserve, which were popular before the Internet overtook them as the public grew more confident about going online.
CoinGeek spoke to two executives from the Boston Consulting Group (BCG) at the conference to understand their perspective on blockchain adoption.
The podcast also includes a detailed example of one blockchain project in an interview with Aisling McGibbon, senior product manager with PWC. It’s called Smart Credentials, and is a platform which allows users to get their qualifications validated by the bodies that issued them.
In a wide-ranging interview with CoinGeek, the businessman Calvin Ayre, a major supporter of Bitcoin SV and the work of Dr Craig Wright, says that a forthcoming legal case being brought to prove that Dr Wright is Satoshi Nakamoto, the creator of Bitcoin, could also lead to a ruling that would stop other cryptocurrencies using the name Bitcoin. To do so would constitute "consumer fraud", Ayre warned.
At London's Blockchain Expo, 16,000 people exhibited, networked or just gawped at stands promoting businesses that were too complicated or obscure to get their heads round. In this podcast Charles Miller tries to make sense of it all with the help of Osmin Callis from nChain, Richard Kastelein from Blockchain News and Sergio Rigert from Gingr - a Swiss startup that's putting prostitution on the blockchain.
Co-founder Widya Salim describes her business, Cryptartica as a cryptocurrency-based design platform. Designers can upload their work and put it on a product (just tee shirts at the moment, but with more kinds of products promised for the future). Then Cryptartica will produce the physical product, and either ship it to the designer to sell, or designers can just invite their customers to go to Crypartica and order the product for themselves. All transactions are done in Bitcoin SV (BSV) or Bitcoin Cash (BCH).
For now, Cryptartica’s website offers a range of designs around BSV and BCH - and even Craig Wright on a tee shirt -, but Widya is hoping that one day, the site will be “less niche” and its users will offer a wider range of subjects: “our whole idea is to have designers who are not just into cryptocurrency.”
Widya has been interested in Bitcoin since 2013. But in recent years, she’s been more involved because there’s been more emphasis on promoting adoption than just currency speculating.
By requiring her customers to trade in crypto, Widya may be limiting her market at the moment, but she says that she wants Cryptartica to help lower the barriers to entry for new users. For instance, if you’re a designer whose product sells, all you need to receive your payment is a wallet: you won’t need to use an exchange in order to acquire your first Bitcoin.
To set up the business, Widya has established links with a network of suppliers around the world who will manufacture and ship the products. In terms of sales patterns, Widya has noticed that when the value of Bitcoin decreases against fiat currencies, “people are less willing to spend, because a lot of people a lot of people still think in fiat currency”. But when the value of a cryptocurrency rises, then people start buying.
A London business incubator, State Zero Labs, has just completed its first programme, in which seven blockchain startup businesses were given 13 weeks of support, both human and financial. At the end, there was a Demo Day, in which each of the startups was invited to present their business to an audience of prospective investors, partners and employees. This week's Coingeek Conversations was recorded during the Demo Day and features interviews with three of the entrepreneurs on the programme, together with State Zero Labs' co-founder, Tazz Gault (pictured).
If you have ideas for a blockchain business, there's much to learn from the experience of these programme participants. And you could apply to State Zero Labs to take part in their next programme, or, if you can't wait until the Autumn, take part in the Bitcoin SV Virtual Hackathon, and perhaps win yourself some money and a trip to the CoinGeek conference in Toronto.
Mark Allison has been a freelance IT consultant for 20 years, specialising in data. He works for investment banks, retailers, insurance companies, hedge funds and payment processors. Many of the people he deals with are sceptical about Bitcoin - and have been more so since the crash in its value last year.
But Mark is optimistic about Bitcoin’s prospects and has been following the sector closely. Now he’s spending his evenings and weekends building products for Bitcoin SV (BSV).
“I see huge potential”, he says. Bitcoin could allow governments and banks to be more transparent. “If we do move over to Bitcoin as a currency ...I think everyone’s going to be better off.”
He understands the scepticism among his City and IT colleagues: “because BTC [Bitcoin Core] has these limits in place, it couldn’t scale, so people who did go out and buy Bitcoin and try to use it, were like, ‘well, it’s not actually very good, is it?’.” With transaction fees rising to around $50, its prospects for being used as a global cash seemed “ridiculous”.
But Mark says the limits on transactions and high fees were artificial and the appearance of Bitcoin SV (BSV) has given him even more hope because it returns to the ideas of the original Bitcoin White Paper, of which Mark is a huge fan:
“When you consider Bitcoin as a whole, I see it like a Michelangelo painting: it’s a thing of beauty. If you look at the economics behind it, all the incentives behind it - how the miners are incentivised - if you look at the computer science breakthrough that happened to solve the Byzantine Generals problem, if you look at the game theory behind it, if you look at the law: all of these elements all come together in one package, and it’s just a beautiful thing.”
The developers at nChain are removing many of the limits imposed on BTC, and then “Bitcoin can really realise its potential”. It will make business more efficient by reducing their costs. All it will take it one large business to start using it.
Dr Craig Wright, Jimmy Nguyen and others have spoken of the need to achieve massive scaling on the BSV network - and Mark agrees: “we need to scale now”. With the mining block subsidy being halved again next year in line with how Bitcoin was set up, eventually “if there’s not significant volume, then the miners are going to leave - so we’ve got this ticking time bomb”. The answer to that problem is BSV, Mark says. It’s not only a stable platform in terms of the protocol, but nChain is committed to scaling. “If we don’t scale, it’s going to fail,” Mark says. “We need to see consistent large blocks though real world usage”, for instance for data that needs to be immutably stored with proof of existence.
To help things along, Mark has been making his own applications for BSV. The first is a Chrome extension for the Handcash wallet. To make it, Mark had to teach himself Javascript, among other things, over two or three weekends. After about a month, he says, he “managed to cobble something together that kind of worked”. You can try the Handcash Handle Converter for yourself: it converts a Handcash handle into a Bitcoin address. Or, thanks to fellow developer Derek Moore, who made use of Mark’s open source project, you can get the same functions on a website, handcash.to.
Mark’s second project is an analytics database, SVCharts, which produces Bitcoin trends, such as mining fees: “ultimately what I want to have is a self-service analytics platform.” The project includes an interesting monetisation model using MoneyButton.
Dr Craig Wright is the Chief Scientist of nChain and the main creator of Bitcoin, he says, as the pseudonymous Satoshi Nakamoto. In a wide-ranging interview, Wright takes the chance to correct a few myths about Bitcoin’s origins and purpose.
First, he says that Bitcoin is not a cryptocurrency: “cryptography is secret writing. Bitcoin is the exact opposite of that. Bitcoin is basically a public ledger”. Wright makes a distinction between Bitcoin and ecash systems which use technology to “cryptographically hide something”. Instead, Bitcoin is a “chain of evidence” that is “pretty much everything that those other systems that aim for anonymous transfer are not”.
What’s more, Wright doesn’t even accept that Bitcoin is a currency since that implies a level of official acceptance - “something that’s used by the state”. In time, Bitcoin will be currency, he says. But first, he predicts the release of “tokenized fiat” by states, which will “use the capabilities of Bitcoin to print their own money on top of it”.
Thirdly, Bitcoin is not about “democratizing finance”. You can’t do that with Bitcoin, he says. The only kind of decentralizing that works will be achieved by sticking to a stable protocol: “you pull the developers from ever making a change”. In that sense, it’s about taking away the power of developers. Developers “are the cancer in Bitcoin”.
Two more corrections to conventional wisdom: Wright is sceptical about the potential future threat to crypto systems from quantum computing. “to create something that could attack Bitcoin in the mythical quantum computer world” would require an unrealistic area of quantum computer space: “it’s fud, it’s snake oil ...none of it will ever affect Bitcoin.”
Finally, on the widespread criticism of mining as a profligate user of electricity, Wright says Google uses “thousands of times more”, as do Visa and Mastercard. “People who want to attack the system make things up”.
Alongside Bitcoin as money is the use of the blockchain to store non-financial data. Wright is developing the blockchain-based Metanet, which he says that has the potential to threaten the ubiquity of the Internet and the dominance of the tech giants: “it changes everything in giving people control of their own lives. Rather than having people like Twitter or Facebook owning everything you’re doing, it now allows you to start creating your own space”. The bargain that users currently make with the tech giants, to sell their data in return for the services offered, is one in which users don’t really have a choice, Wright says: with the Internet so important in our lives, to decide not to use the big tech services would be “like saying ‘don’t use electricity’...You have to use it for work etc.”
But there is an opportunity for the Metanet because “the [online] model for advertisements is incredibly inefficient”. It leads to clickfraud, which the tech companies have to spend money fighting. He believes users would be prepared to make micropayments for search results rather than being stuck with the ad model in which they are selling they data. In time, he says you might only have to pay a thousandth of a cent for a set of search results.
He is currently writing openly about being Satoshi because, he says, “unfortunately I’ve got a whole lot of greedy con men who all want money”. As for the choice of Satoshi as a name, he says that it’s “a bit silly” but it’s the Japanese for ash. The idea, which he originally saw in The Economist magazine, is that new money will rise from the ashes. As for Nakamoto, that’s the name of a Japanese 18th Century philosopher. He doesn’t see any value in the figure of Nakamoto remaining enigmatically anonymous: “the myth
James Belding was an electrical engineer, working in the oil and gas industries in Australia when cryptocurrency caught his attention back in 2013. He was hooked - but it was only last year that he decided to devote himself full time to understanding how crypto works and to try to “add something to it, to make it better”.
He wanted to start a business to help people to set up smart contracts. But he found there wasn’t an easy way to add contracts to the blockchain: “I was getting a bit frustrated, thinking ‘surely someone’s going to come up with this’ … but no-one did. So I started designing it myself”.
James assembled a group of four colleagues with a wide range of skills, from the technical to the legal. The team, spread around Australia and Singapore, have worked together to create Tokenized, which he believes can become “a sort of a commercial Internet on which all commerce is done”.
”Tokenized offers protocols for over 40 separate kinds of contract, with all the necessary legal parameters specified. That’s meant he and his team have had to study commercial law, and have lawyers combing through their work, making sure it’s all watertight.
But Tokenized is not just for big financial or legal contracts: it could be something as ordinary as selling movie tickets. It’s a “structured template so that everyone involved in tokenized transactions knows what to expect.” It guides you to fill in the information that’s required in order for a contract to be valid. “I want to make it easy enough that anyone can do it and anyone can benefit from it.”
After the recent Bitcoin SV network upgrade which allows more data to be carried in an individual transaction, the Tokenised team have been upgrading their protocol to use the extra space to improve the legal and financial protocols that Tokenized will include. He says they’re “creating what we hope will be the backbone of a new global financial system, one that has no barriers to entry and is ultra-convenient and low-cost.”
And, using that extra space for data, a single token transaction can now involve different assets and different parties. This means, for instance, that you’ll be able to buy or sell shares or bonds on the blockchain, even if you’re nervous about converting fiat to crypto – because you’ll be able to trade with stablecoins, which are tied one to one with fiat currencies.
Tokenized will be releasing the documentation for the upgraded version of the protocol in the next couple weeks. And meanwhile they’re continuing to work on their commercial platform and will be announcing a release date soon.
Michael Hudson says he founded Bitstocks in 2014 to help the “everyday investor” understand cryptocurrencies. That meant trying to “get rid of all these nerdy, geeky terms” and offering advice to people who want to gain access to crypto markets.
This year he’s launching Gravity, Bitstocks’ own “holistic ecosystem”, which is the company’s next step in making the crypto world easy to use for experts and non-specialists alike. Gravity is “a modern interpretation of what banking should look like in a new Bitcoin world.”
Michael has thought deeply about the theory of money - the intellectual framework through which the power of crypto can be explained: “money is just a measure of someone’s time and their skill. The more skill someone has, the less time it takes to perform a task. The more money you have, the more people you can hire with the skill, reducing the time. Money is a time measurement: the more you have, the more you condense time”.
Having been in crypto for five years - an eternity! - Bitstocks has experienced the rollercoaster ride of successive bull and bear markets. But Michael admits that the current downturn, stretching all the way back to the start of 2018, is different.
That’s because for the first time, there’s a level of “regulatory oversight” that’s never been part of the crypto world before. With more than 4000 cryptocurrencies out there, Michael predicts that “99 per cent of them are going to fall on the wrong side of regulation. So we see this as massively clearing up the market”.
In fact, Michael thinks that when it comes to the various competing cryptocurrencies, eventually “it’s inevitable that there’s only going to be one” - and Michael believes that will be Bitcoin SV (BSV). Success for BSV is all about encouraging more transactions, or “building density” in order to strengthen the network. BSV’s commitment to a stable protocol makes it the best candidate for that leading role: “you have to lock down the foundation, and then I’ll build my house on it”. All the other blockchains are “built on quicksand”.
Michael’s hopes for cryptocurrency extend way beyond London’s financial sector, and into the developing world: “Africa is a huge agenda for us here at Bitstocks”. Despite Western preconceptions, Michael says, African countries already have “the necessary prerequisites that allow them to step into modern banking”. For instance, with smartphones, you have “the hive mind of the world in the palm of your hand”.
The unique value of crypto as the basis of an economy is that “in crypto, there’s nobody to distort the value.” That’s partly because of the limited supply, for instance on the Bitcoin blockchain. That means that “as long as I’m measuring and weighting my time and skill in Bitcoin, over time, I know I’m always going to get a better return - because the value that I took initially, will be worth more four years down the road”.
In a wide-ranging conversation, Jimmy Nguyen, President of the Bitcoin Association and and Chair of the Strategic Advisory Board for nChain, discusses Bitcoin SV, nChain's business model - including the role of the many hundreds of patent applications it has filed - and the how things work between the "unlikely trio" of senior figures behind Bitcoin SV - himself, Calvin Ayre and Craig Wright. Finally, Jimmy gives his view on the endlessly fascinating question of Craig Wright being Satoshi Nakamoto.
Converting the fiat world to crypto isn't easy. This week's podcast shares the experience of four people from different businesses about what worked and what didn't in their dealings with a wide range of sectors.
Elizabeth White of the luxury retailer The White Company in New York established her business with sales of Lamborghinis and other high priced items to customers who already had crypto. For her, the challenge was to persuade retailers to accept it.
Heidi Patmore from the South African wallet company Centbee says you need to be aware of the priorities and concerns of large and small retailers, which are often very different.
Ina Samovich of Coppay, the Belarus-based payment gateway, says they'd found it takes an average of an hour for their sales rep to convince a store owner to accept Bitcoin.
And Martin Dempster of the Scottish drinks business, Brewdog has had direct experience on the front line from his company's opening of a new bar in London's Canary Wharf, where bar staff were trained to accept crypto from a Centbee wallet.
All four were speaking at the last CoinGeek Week conference in London, on a panel hosted by Jimmy Nguyen, President of the Bitcoin Association.
Dale Dickins is a Bitcoin evangelist: "I'm always encouraging people to use it". Women in particular understand, she says, that "when something is used it increases in value".
Dale discovered cryptocurrency through working with the open source community in Melbourne, Australia. But she was happy to move on from open source because she says that when she tried to put on events to bring open source people together, she found they were too shy and introverted to invite their friends along.
Since 2012, she's been running courses to introduce people to crypto, setting up each participant with a wallet and converting some fiat to crypto for them to 'play with' during a workshop.
Dale says she has lots of women on her courses and that they're mostly interested in learning how to use crypto in ordinary situations, like in a coffee shop.
When it comes to the subject of investing serious money in crypto, “I explain that it is extremely volatile” But she also explains how other currencies decline in value of time, which means we have inflation. “The probability that Bitcoin will increase in value over the next ten years is much higher than that the Australian dollar will.”
Dale has noticed that the participants at her workshops are more informed today than they were when she started them, and that they’re no longer wanting to operate outside of the established financial system:
“The questions are changing, in people wanting to be responsible around tax - whereas originally people [had] more the anarchist mentality, wanting to avoid banks”. Dale admits that her own sentiments have also changed in the same way and she now believes that “having tax included in every payment ...would be a great way to keep in real time”.
Today, Dale is sure that “to have this work in the world, it has to integrate ...it has to conform”.
Aside from her courses, Dale is converting the waiters and waitresses of Melbourne to crypto by offering them tips in Bitcoin - on condition that they download a wallet to receive it in.
Dominic Frisby is fed up with people who say they don’t understand cryptocurrency. He calls them “no-coiners” and accuses them of “deliberate recalcitrance”. He says they’re “just determined not to understand it, come what may.”
The problem starts when people insist on trying to get to grips with the code behind the currency, but Dominic says they don’t need to take an interest in that. With ordinary money, “nobody understands how money gets created, nobody understands quantitative easing”. Similarly, everyone is happy to use the Internet without getting stuck because couldn’t explain the finer points of HTML.
Frisby wrote his book, Bitcoin: the Future of Money, way back in 2014. It’s part history, part technology and part his personal story of exploration. Since then he’s followed the sector and appears at conferences (and the Edinburgh Festival) with his very own financial gameshow. Alongside that, he writes about money and - this is the unusual part - continues his career as a voiceover artist, which he’s been ever since leaving drama school.
His concern about the tech scene today is around how we give our personal data to the tech giants: “I just don’t think ordinary people realise how much of their privacy they have already given away.” When awareness of the problem reaches a critical stage, change will happen. Whether that hits the existing tech businesses or boosts the crypto and blockchain sector, “I’m pretty sure that the narrative that’s going to drive the next bull market in technology is privacy.”
As for his own complicated portfolio of skills and expertise, Dominic says it isn’t necessarily an advantage. In terms of marketability, “it often pays to do just one thing”.
There’s general recognition in the cryptocurrency world that if crypto is to achieve its potential, it needs to work closely with regulators. One of those trying to make regulation useful to crypto and crypto acceptable to regulators is Hans Henrik Hoffmeyer, COO of the Copenhagen fintech company Coinify.
Hans is bullish about his discussions with EU officials and politicians. “Most of the regulators I meet nowadays are keenly aware that this is actually a paradigm shift,” he says. There is “a profound understanding of this technology, and the implications and potential.”
That level of engagement and comprehension is new: “it has completely changed, and I have been surprised by the speed.” Hans says the EU is “keenly aware that if they apply a regulatory framework which is very hostile, then the business will in principle just move elsewhere.”
For instance, the EU has agreed to update its existing anti money laundering directive to include virtual currencies and cryptocurrencies. And companies like Coinify will now be registered with their national financial services authority. That’s “hugely important for the industry,” Hans says.
Coinify is a payment gateway, working with payment service providers to act as “the bridge between the traditional financial world and the new, emerging world of virtual currencies.” It specialises in helping people from the financial industry to get involved in cryptocurrencies and likes to think of itself as a “Mastercard for virtual currencies”. In other words, it acts as an intermediary between a customer and a retailer, allowing transactions to take place in different currencies - just as a credit card holder may have their account in pounds sterling or euros but is still able to use the card in the USA, to pay for something in dollars.
Currently Coinify accepts around 15 different cryptocurrencies, and offers transactions online, where Hans says the company has “very good traction”. It’s now also working with prototype systems to test ways of offering its services in physical stores.
For bigger merchants, Coinify offers a simple interface, a bit like Worldpay’s. But the majority of merchants work with Coinify through their existing payment service providers, which makes it simple for the merchant to add virtual currencies to their existing payment methods.
Hans says there have never been so many ways to pay for something - which may be good news for the likes of Coinify, allowing it to play a useful role in simplifying a complex range of choices for merchants and customers. Part of what Coinify offers is to take the risk associated with accepting volatile currencies on behalf of the merchant and the payment service provider.
Now Coinify is adding Bitcoin SV (BSV) to the cryptocurrencies it supports - although Han stresses that the business is “blockchain agnostic”. But with BSV “the attention that is given to the regulatory compliance side and to ensure transparency is something that we appreciate.”
Coinify doesn’t actually hold any currency - which makes it different from an exchange, which would be required to hold currency in order to carry out its business. Indeed, in its transactions, Coinify finds the best price by comparing between different exchanges to optimise deals for its customers.
Another part of Coinify’s business is closer to the end user. It gives wallet providers the chance to offer cryptocurrencies to their users without leaving the wallet. It’s called “in-wallet buy and sell”. It’s all part of Coinify’s efforts to make life simpler for its customers, many of whom may not be familiar with the new world of virtual and cryptocurrencies: “unless we help everybody from the past to be onboarded,” says Hans, “then we will fail”.
This is cool industry to be in, says Jack Liu of the crypto finance company Circle: “even fintech that’s not Bitcoin or not blockchain is not cool any more”. People who once dismissed the sector as a scam or a fraud, may say they’re still not ready to use crypto, but they now recognise that “this must be the future”.
Jack graduated from his Canadian university in 2010 and started working for Barclays Capital in Hong Kong. He liked wearing a suit every day and “the money was pretty good too”. But while the rest of his life was full of new technology, he says he found himself in a financial world that hadn’t changed much from the Wall Street described in Michael Lewis’ Liar’s Poker in the 1980s: “structurally, something was off in finance”.
He decided to quit his job and move to Silicon Valley and “see what was going on in the fintech world”. And that’s how he discovered Bitcoin, in 2013.
At the time, almost everyone in Bitcoin was from a technical, not a financial background. Jack wasn’t even sure he’d be able to get a job. But he started a blog to share his ideas about crypto.
One feature of crypto compared to other Silicon Valley sectors, is that it was global from day one. Jack’s international experience led to a job as director of strategy at the crypto exchange Kraken. At the time, it wasn’t clear how you could make money in crypto. There were really only two ideas, Jack said: “there was mining and there was exchange”.
Today, that’s all changed and Jack’s vision for the potential of the sector has increased dramatically: “money is just a representation of value”. Once you have money that can move instantly across borders and be transferred using microtransactions, “that can underpin an entirely different economic structure for all of humanity”.
And it’s not just the practicalities: Jack believes that the crypto revolution will be so profound that it will “improve the quality of living for every single person on the planet. It will do that even for people who don’t even know what Bitcoin is and will never own a Bitcoin.”
But how? Well, it would do that by allowing everyone to fulfill their potential by reducing the risks associated with pursuing the brilliant ideas that we all have, but mostly leave unexploited. Instead of having to give up your job to move onto a more interesting path, you’d “get paid every single minute” for making any kind of contribution - from flipping burgers to writing a brilliant book. And that’s because Bitcoin would provide an easy economic transaction path to every single person on the planet.
“Work becomes a hobby,” says Jack, “because for anything you do, you’re going to be able to get the appropriate value for that contribution. There’ll be no frictions in the Bitcoin world.” It’ll be like “the gig economy on steroids”.
If that sounds like something you might not want, don’t worry: it’ll release creativity and allow us to escape from crude materialism. It’ll be like “a digital Renaissance”. And Jack goes further: “it’ll have the kind of effect of making earth seem like heaven”, and the way we live today “will be looked at by historians in the future, [and] seem like hell”.
And if you do, by some misfortune, find that you aren’t able to work, as long as you have previously worked in a Bitcoin economy, you’ll be OK because the Bitcoin you have already earned will be worth more and more as time goes on.
Kristy-Leigh Minehan was into Bitcoin before most people had heard of it. She was getting paid in Bitcoin for developer work, and was pleased to be able to convert her first payment into enough dollars to buy one of Apple’s fancy new iPads. She loved her iPad. But perhaps not so much that she would have chosen it over the more than $200 million that those Bitcoins would be worth now.
Today, as Chief Technical Officer of Core Scientific in Seattle, Washington, Kristy-Leigh is still working in cryptocurrency and blockchain and is confident they’re going to be widely adopted. That will create opportunities for experts to build new kinds of servicing businesses that will integrate blockchain solutions, themselves getting paid with micropayments for each transaction.
“You’d go to a business, and you’d say ‘listen, I’ll build all of this out for you on a smart contract. And then every time that smart contract is processed, every time those rules are executed, I will take a very small per cent’ ...Multiply that by millions and millions of transactions per day - bingo! You’ve got a sustainable business.”
That’s just one example of a wider push that Kristy-Leigh would like to see towards “building infrastructure”. That means creating the kind of basic products that are taken for granted in other software areas. In blockchain and cryptocurrency, they would allow people to get involved more easily:
“We need to start building things like tools - debuggers, all of the basic stacks of software that traditional software development has. Build it from the ground up so that anyone - any teenager, any high schooler can jump in and start creating on the Bitcoin blockchain.”
Alongside the infrastructure, Kristy-Leigh wants the sector to work closely with regulators to build confidence with established public and private sector players:
“If the governments are saying ‘hey, we need KYC [‘know your customer’ - processes to guard against money laundering and other regulatory issues], we need to come over to them and say ‘OK, great, what KYC standards do you need, that still protects customers’ privacy, but allows you to get enough information to know what the sources of these funds are, and are people paying their taxes?’”
That kind of protection would lead to greater adoption of cryptocurrency by banks and governments and lead to people “letting it into their lives”.
Long term, Kristy-Leigh has a vision for national currencies to be conducted on a blockchain. Just as each currency note now has its own serial number, each transaction would be traceable on the blockchain. The physical aspect of money is “clunky and it’s prone to errors and it’s prone to laundering”. Instead, there’ll be a “digital-backed system with asset IDs that are tracked”.
It’s a big ambition because it would entail more discipline from governments: they wouldn’t be able to print more money to fix their problems. But Kristy-Leigh is bullish about the prospects: “all it takes is one country to adopt it and the rest will have to play catchup.”
Stephan Nilsson is working with fish farmers in his native Norway. He’s putting blockchain to use in a practical way - although his business sounds distinctly unworldly. It’s called UNISOT, which stands for Universal Source of Truth. Nilsson admits the name shows he’s “aiming high”. But then he insists he’s trying “to change the world” and believes he can “make a big difference”.
Nilsson’s background is in supply chain management. He worked for SAP, the German enterprise resource planning (ERP) business, as an integration consultant. Now he’s using that experience to revolutionise supply chains with blockchain technology.
Why blockchain? Well because it provides “immutable storage, where nobody can change things afterwards,” he says. “It’s more or less the only immutable system in the world.” And a single integrated blockchain avoids the problems that often arise between different company systems.
All suppliers who work together on the same system would still being able to set levels of privacy for their own data: “all the information that I put on the blockchain, I am still the owner of”. You can share the information with another company, but you still have the power to revoke access.
So how does this apply to the Norwegian fishing industry? Well, UNISOT is working with a company that offers a supply chain monitoring product using SAP. UNISOT is providing the blockchain functionality within that service. Integrating blockchain with SAP software is “actually very easy if you know what you’re doing,” Nilsson says. He laughs at his own confidence but adds that it’s only easy for him because he’s worked with SAP for 20 years.
So here’s what becomes possible with the UNISOT system: you can track a particular fish all the way from when it’s swimming around, to when it - or even just a small bit of it - appears on someone’s dinner plate. Using blockchain, all sorts of information, such as the precise history of a fish’s storage temperatures, can be uploaded, creating a kind of virtual fish whose every detail can be tracked.
And it all starts when the salmon are directed down a pipe and photographed in a way that makes each one distinguishable from every other - using a kind of ‘facial recognition for fish’. You heard it here first!
As the founder of New York's White Company, Elizabeth White set out to let the holders of crypto buy the luxury goods their new-found wealth allowed them to dream of.
White’s background was in ritzy brands and auto racing. She used that experience to sell cars for crypto. To date, she says her company has sold 51 cars, including a veritable traffic jam of Lamborghinis and a £4 million vintage Ferrari. But it’s not just cars: White can fix you up with a wide range of items, as long as they’re exclusive, and expensive such as an Ai Weiwei artwork which she sold recently for $1.7 million.
Now the White Company is expanding in new directions. It has announced a partnership with Mastercard, to create its own crypto-based debit card, the White Card. The initiative is part of a bigger plan to develop blockchain applications for business.
In this podcast, we find out from White, and her colleague Edgar Radjabli, about how they built a luxury retail brand based on crypto and how they're bringing crypto into the payments business.
Ryan X. Charles, the creator of Moneybutton and Yours.org, is something of a cryptocurrency veteran after five years in the industry. Now, a decade after Bitcoin was released, and after last year's 'hash war', he says he's looking forward to "really radical adoption" of crypto during the next decade:
“We’re going to go from the toy phase and the experiment phase and the learning phase into the reality phase - of actually applying this technology for real problems and real businesses and real customers in the real world.”
To help that along, he has launched Moneybutton, a micropayments app that aims to make paying and earning small rewards as simple as hitting the Facebook 'Like' button. In this conversation, Charles discusses his work on making onboarding new users to crypto easier and his ideas for how Moneybutton and other apps could enable whole new business models - in which everyone will be compensated for the talents and creativity they display online.