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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”.