CoinGeek Conversations

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.”