CoinGeek Conversations

With his RelayX ‘superwallet’, Jack Liu is making the passage from the existing money world into Bitcoin as painless as possible - and ideally, invisible altogether. By integrating with mainstream products like WeChat and Alipay, RelayX sidesteps the usual off-putting signup procedures that deter countless potential users from entering the Bitcoin ecosystem.

And having got people onboard, Jack’s new venture, the CambrianSV Bootcamp, is all about encouraging entrepreneurs to provide new Bitcoin users with services which bring the Bitcoin world to life - new apps, products and services, all generating blockchain transactions. And that has the spinoff benefit of making mining BSV more profitable and therefore ensuring the security and continuity of the mining network.

So how can the work of Bitcoin entrepreneurs be made easier? Well, Jack says it’s partly a question of creating standardised tools on which new products can be built: “it’s just going to get a lot more efficient. We’re going to have some common protocols on the blockchain that define [things like] location, value, content ...You can have every single Internet 2.0 application be baked into the protocol level. And then every single application is a surface.” 

That means it will be easy for anyone to set up a new brand that accesses existing data on the BSV blockchain. For the user, the choice between services may be as superficial as a preference for one UX design over another, because the underlying data will be the same.

If BSV services are going to be easier to create than current online businesses, that should allow a much wider group of people to set up as business owners - without the multiple skills that have traditionally been needed: “previously,” Jack says, “if you wanted to build technology, you also had to learn how to do public speaking, to be able to face down the VC [venture capitalist] who’s giving you a bad term sheet ...to become a manager of people”. 

BSV will allow people with creativity, but not necessarily the traditional skills of entrepreneurs, to create “niche applications” because “being niche, being different is going to be valued”. The consequence of this movement will be to “reverse our society back to an age where they were bakers and different shops at the street level - you’re going to see that on the technology level, and that’s going to make the Internet so much more interesting.”

An Australian Bitcoin developer living in London, Steve Shadders is, at first glance, the typical geek, complete with goatee beard, glasses and ponytail. But it only takes a few minutes chat to get way beyond the stereotype. He thinks widely about the politics and economics of bitcoin, and he’s a former DJ, with a love of techno - a calling which he says delayed his entry into the world of software by several years.

“Shadders” as he’s known at nChain, the Bitcoin SV development company of which he’s Chief Technology Officer, operates in many dimensions. There’s an ideological side to him, the legacy of youthful, anarchistic attitudes: “as Bitcoin becomes more widespread,” he says, “it puts the power of economic sovereignty into the hands of people who currently don’t have it ...There is nothing more powerful that you can give someone than opportunity.”

The mission of nChain, according to its website is “to ignite global adoption and enterprise level of usage of Bitcoin”. To that end, Steve leads the nChain developer team behind a series of “upgrades” to the Bitcoin SV protocol (he prefers “upgrade” to “hard fork”). This year, we’ve had the Quasar upgrade, and next year will be Genesis. The idea is to bring the Bitcoin SV protocol back to how it was when Bitcoin started - hence the “SV”, Satoshi vision.  

Part of that process is to allow Bitcoin miners rather than developers to call the shots. As a developer, himself, Steve realises this has implications for him: “ultimately, my goal is to make myself replaceable and redundant - and I hope to achieve that within a couple of years”. By then, the governance role in Bitcoin will be handed to a group of people rather than a few individuals, leaving miners with the ultimate responsibility for the ecosystem.

Steve works closely with Craig Wright, nChain’s Chief Scientist. He admits that “it can be challenging to understand what Craig’s talking about sometimes”. About six months after Craig has raised a new idea, Steve says modestly, he finally understands “what he really means”. But it’s a privilege “to be able to pick his brains on a daily basis ...he’s thinking about things years before anyone else”. 

As for his own ideas about where Bitcoin is heading, Steve is an unashamed ‘Bitcoin maximalist’. He does accept that “probably the notion of private blockchains will be around for a while before the business world gets comfortable with the fact that public blockchains actually offer far more benefits than than the perceived benefits of keeping it private.” But in the end, he predicts, it’ll be “one coin to rule them all”. And he doesn’t expect Bitcoin SV’s rivals to be around “in five or ten years”. 

If BSV develops the way Steve predicts, he’ll go so far as to agree that the work of nChain today might be of interest to future historians. And he points out that “a lot of that work is going to be recorded there immutably, in the blockchain, so it will be easier for blockchain archaeologists to work out what happened”. It’s just another advantage of blockchain technology!

“We think of ourselves as an ecosystem company,” says Lorien Gamaroff, founder and CEO of CentBee, the Johannesburg-based Bitcoin wallet business. “We’ve decided to think holistically and try to tackle the end to end journey of a user where they would actually be able to acquire Bitcoin very easily and then hold it, and then, most importantly, use it.”

CentBee’s first, and most visible product, was its wallet. Then it produced a voucher system which lets people buy Bitcoin from a network of 50,000 retail outlets across South Africa. That also allows Centbee users to issue invoices and be paid by customers who visit any of those outlets - as demonstrated in a case study they filmed. Coming next will be a cross-border remittance solution, to let people send money from one country to another faster and more cheaply than with conventional methods.

Lorien says that Centbee isn’t focussed on existing Bitcoin enthusiasts, especially currency speculators, but instead “we are very interested in trying to get the world to adopt Bitcoin.” And he predicts that more and more people will recognise the efficiency of using Bitcoin - especially its speed of transaction. 

“I always feel very lucky [being born in Africa] and having this wonderful opportunity to take this novel new technology and to fix the way things are.” Lorien thinks that the success of Bitcoin in Africa will act as an example to the rest of the world, which will “take note”. In Africa “I have unique opportunity” says Lorien, “that’s why I’m so excited about Bitcoin, and always have been.”

Being brought up in Zimbabwe, with its hyper-inflation, was “what got me thinking about money in general”, Lorien says, “where it comes from and what gives it value”. And then “this idea of Bitcoin just landed in front of me, and it seemed like such a wonderful solution for a country like Zimbabwe - the idea of a sound digital money.” In comparison to the volatility of the Zimbabwe dollar, Bitcoin’s occasional ten per cent up or down in a day is nothing, Lorien jokes. 

The development of Bitcoin reminds Lorien of the early days of the Internet, when he was a computer science student. Now with Bitcoin “we have another technology; it’s in its infancy; it’s confusing to most ...if it unfolds in the same way as the Internet, then there must be the possibility that it will change the world.” In relation to Africa in particular, “I don’t know how anyone can not see the opportunity there to help a huge number of people with Bitcoin.”

Although Lorien sees opportunities for Bitcoin in situations where the local currency is unstable or untrusted, it’s not the case that Bitcoin would take an anti-government or anti-state role: for one thing, its ability to integrate taxation offers capabilities that traditional currencies can’t offer. “Taxation on Bitcoin is extremely easy. If you think about a smart contract that could pay a tax, collected directly on the transaction for that good, as a sales tax, that’s a very efficient mechanism of tax collecting”. Maybe one day, tax authorities will actually require businesses and individuals to pay tax using smart contracts, Lorien suggests. 

It’s Lorien’s perspective as an African entrepreneur that gives Centbee its distinctive culture, with ambitions to build from its current staff of ten to becoming a big player in the future, combined with an awareness of a bigger social mission:   

“In Africa, poverty is everywhere, it’s all around you. It’s impossible to ignore it. It makes you a lot more grateful for what you have.” Lorien hopes that Centbee will, in its own way, both change Africa and change ideas about Bitcoin: “I don’t want people to look at this as something that is only for speculating on or money-laundering. I want people to see how good it is - and that’s wh

Persuading businesses to put their data on a public blockchain shouldn’t be a big deal, says Joshua Henslee. After all, it’s not long since they overcame their objections to storing their data on cloud servers instead of locally on their own computers. 

Joshua is an IT professional from California who mostly works with Microsoft products. He believes the future for his clients, and for his own success as a consultant, lies with blockchain solutions using BitcoinSV (BSV). 

While private blockchains may sound appealing to cautious businesses, Joshua believes they’re not worth investing in. They’re effectively adding IT resources to business costs, whereas a public blockchain like BSV could produce savings throughout the business: “you’ll be able to streamline business processes such that you’ll have cost savings elsewhere. So even though you’re adding a tiny bit of cost, you’ll more than recoup that and have gains in other parts of your system - financial, supply chain, communication with vendors."

This conversation was recorded at the CoinGeek conference in Toronto. 

nChain is the London-based research powerhouse behind BitcoinSV. Its mission is to “ignite global adoption and enterprise-level usage of Bitcoin”. To make that happen, nChain has set up a professional services unit to reach out to businesses and encourage them to design and implement blockchain projects, with Osmin Callis as its Business Development Manager. 

In this podcast, Osmin talks about how she works with businesses, their assumptions about Bitcoin, how she tries to steer them towards nChain's solutions and the benefits she sees for the world economy in the long term from the widespread adoption of Bitcoin and blockchain solutions. 

The nature of Bitcoin makes the startup business more efficient than for other tech areas, because much of the work has already been done, says Ryan X. Charles, founder of Money Button. 

“Why are we able to move so quickly with such a small number of people? Because we understand what Bitcoin offers us ...The magic is Bitcoin: that’s what’s actually doing all these things. So with fewer people and less money, we can go further.”

Money Button has only two other staff besides Ryan. Both are located in Argentina, while Ryan is in the States. 

Ryan believes the prospects for BitcoinSV (BSV) are being seriously underestimated: “we’re the only ecosystem that’s building really functional apps right now. We’re radically more healthy than most people understand.” 

Alongside Money Button are plenty of businesses being built on BSV: “look at all these little projects. They’re really little, but they’re little seedlings that are doing everything right. They’re creating real products and real little businesses. They’re going to grow up. That’s the reality.”

In this podcast, Ryan also talks about Paymail, a new Money Button product that was launched at the CoinGeek conference in Toronto, where this conversation was recorded. 

As the founder and CEO of the new gaming platform company Kronoverse, Adam Kling could hardly be more upbeat about the prospects that the BitcoinSV blockchain will unlock: “we haven’t seen anything like this in gaming - and it is sci-fi”.

The idea is that all your actions as a gamer will be recorded on the BSV blockchain. And that’s why BSV supporter, and owner of CoinGeek, Calvin Ayre invested in Kronoverse earlier this year. Using BSV will transform all aspects of gaming, Adam believes: 

“We need to innovate and evolve what games are,” he says. With BSV as a ledger of ownership and a medium of exchange, gamers can acquire and trade virtual items and can keep an identity across different games. “Gamers don’t really have the concept of item ownership. They don’t really get it yet.”

There’s still everything to play for in exploring what blockchain can offer: “we’re so new into this. There’s not really any big blockchain games out. I think in the next five years or so we’ll see what’s working and what’s not working”.

Kronoverse is a member of the Blockchain Game Alliance and Adam is aware that big gaming companies like Ubisoft and EA are actively exploring the possibilities that blockchain offers: “they know the next evolution is the game multiverse, and how games are going to become more like social networks”. 

The Handcash team met after Alex Agut posted a message on Facebook, looking for a developer to help with a startup he had an idea for. Rafael Jimenez Seibane replied, and since then, Alex says, they have had “a few startups and companies and products together for a few years”. Alex is “the business guy” and Rafa is “this very methodical developer”, Alex says, “and we’ve learnt from each other”. 

Their first impression of Bitcoin was that although it was described as “electronic cash” it looked more like “a complicated banking app or something, for developers. It was more like the raw material for a consumer app”. 

There was three ‘pain points’ for ordinary users: backups; sending money online using addresses (“because we don’t like addresses,” said Rafa); and how to improve in-person payments.  

“So we thought why can’t we create a great product that’s focussed on sending money by NFC [contactless payments]?”. If you could transfer money just by bringing mobile phones close together, that really would be like electronic cash. Four or five months later, they had their first beta version. 

The idea was inspired by a Black Mirror story that Rafa and Alex had seen: “in one of the episodes,” said Rafa, “there was a contact app, so people, just by approaching their phones, could swipe their contact information - it was just a really cool concept”.

Rafa managed to make the idea work for real - and so they were able to exchange contacts, like in the TV show. So then, “we just had to replace information with [Bitcoin] addresses.”

Although we are “just a couple of guys from Spain,” Alex says modestly, “the secret ingredient” is that “we try to focus on one problem at a time ..and try to make that value proposition work.” If they develop a feature that isn’t popular, they’ll drop it, however useful they personally think it would be to users. 

One feature of Handcash that Rafa describes as a “beautiful” tradition which has emerged on Twitter is for people to publicise the Handcash handle of a new user and invite other users to  send them some BSV. Alex says that people whose handles appear in that way get “a lot of money” and “that creates a bond with our brand.”

“We would like to be the Tesla of money,” says Alex. It’s a comparison they have thought through: “[Tesla] are not trying to create the best electric car,” says Rafa, “they’re trying to create the best car.” “We want to create the world’s best money with Bitcoin,” Alex picks up, “the goal is to create the best money product, but it just happens that the best choice for that is Bitcoin”. 

The challenge given to contestants in the first CoinGeek hackathon was to create a project that would encourage more people to use BitcoinSV for the first time - to promote ‘onboarding’ in the jargon.

The winner, announced at CoinGeek’s recent Toronto conference, is a project called UptimeSV, from a team in Australia. The idea behind Uptime is to pay people for the use of their computers and mobiles to run tests on websites and IP addresses. 

The leader of the Uptime team, Brent Bevear, explains in this podcast that “we wanted to give people a way of completing jobs to earn BitcoinSV because I think that’s the most significant way that you can get a lot of people interested”. Uptime will offer the chance to earn “a little bit of money in the background” doing something useful.

Kate Hiscox is the founder and Chief Executive of Drive Markets, a fintech startup that operates a crypto and fiat exchange as one of an emerging suite of financial products. 

Kate’s company recently announced an investment from Calvin Ayre, the owner of CoinGeek and a leading backer of Bitcoin SV. Drive Markets is planning to process its transactions on the Bitcoin SV blockchain. 

The integration of Bitcoin with existing financial institutions, structures and regulations was one of the themes at CoinGeek’s recent Toronto conference. Kate spoke at the conference and Drive Markets is a great example of that integration, since Kate stresses the experience of her team in the conventional financial sector, and the way her company wants to offer the kind of tools and facilities for crypto that are available to those in the existing financial markets. 

Kate Hiscox spoke to Charles Miller about plans for her business, backstage at the Toronto conference, for this CoinGeek Conversations podcast.