CoinGeek Conversations

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. 

Season 3 of CoinGeek Conversations starts next week. Here's a quick preview.

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.