CoinGeek Conversations

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.”