CoinGeek Conversations

When you set up a blockchain mining pool, there’s plenty of complicated technology involved. And if it’s just you and a few colleagues and friends, when you switch it on for the first time, it’s not immediately obvious whether it’s working. Your computers have to compete with others on the network – the Bitcoin SV network in this case – to ‘win’ the next block on the blockchain. But are they in the game? 

 At the start of his GorillaPool enterprise, its founder Kurt Wuckert Jr. says, “we weren't even sure if we would build a block. We didn't know that we had it right. And then within about an hour of us putting it up, we found a block, which was our only indicator”.

It was the fulfilment of a long-held ambition for Kurt, CEO of GorillaPool, as he explains on this week’s CoinGeek Conversations; “I was very interested in doing some of these things that I've theorised in Bitcoin for a very long time and said, you know ‘what we need is an active public pool in BSV. We need a pool that is run for the sake of doing cool stuff …I really wanted to test theories and really push the limits of Bitcoin.”

A mining pool combines the efforts of a group of mining computers, sharing the rewards between members whenever any of them wins a block. GorillaPool is open to all: you can join up your own computer to the pool - but we’re talking industrial strength computers here, not just your laptop - or you can pay Kurt and his colleagues to set it up for you, renting the hardware and running it. It will cost you between $3,000 and $10,000 depending on market conditions, to put yourself into the Bitcoin business.

As to whether or not it is profitable, Kurt says that depends on timing: the price of the specialised ASIC chips that power mining computers fluctuates with the market price of Bitcoin - because everyone wants them when it’s profitable to mine. So Kurt’s advice is to buy your equipment when the market is low, and sell when it’s high:

“I've been in mining since 2013, and so this is now my fourth bear market. And what I've seen is that the people that really grow are the people that at the top of the bull market are selling their coins, but they're also selling off their fleet. They're selling their ASICs because they might have bought an asset for $2,000 at the bottom of the bear market, but they can sell it used for eight to $10,000. And it's going to be obsolete in the next cycle anyway …And so if you do that, I've seen a lot of people do really well.”

If you have faith in the long-term value of Bitcoin SV, would you be better off simply buying some when the market is low, and waiting it out? Kurt believes mining is a better option because it forces a kind of self-discipline, making you, effectively, invest regularly, in the form of electricity bills to keep your computers running, and reaping the occasional reward when the pool wins a block. No matter how you might intend to make regular savings, it usually doesn’t happen, but if you’re in a mining pool, it happens by default: “it really is the opportunity to just put it on cruise control, let it do the work and it's disciplined for you”.

On next week’s CoinGeek Conversations, Kurt talks about one of his other roles, as CoinGeek’s Chief Bitcoin Historian. 

SLictionary, a dictionary platform powered by Bitcoin SV, wants to compete with traditional dictionaries to become the premier dictionary in the world. Similar to how Oxford English Dictionary was compiled, SLictionary uses a crowdsourcing method in collating words and definitions. However, SLictionary does not follow an authority like the OED does on who gets to decide on its content. On SLictionary, it’s the votes of the users combined with the machine’s learning algorithm that fills in for the traditional editorial experts. 

On this episode of CoinGeek Conversations, SLictionary co-founder Jack Pitts tells Charles Miller “we [SLictionary] are just the platform provider for the real keepers of the English lexicon, and the real keepers of the English lexicon have never changed, it has always been the English [English-speaking] people.” 

SLictionary introduces features never seen before in any word-defining platform. For instance, a ‘celebrity auction’ that allows users to own and monetize word definitions created by an individual who invented the word or is considered expert of the subject. As Jack suggests, these bespoke definitions will set SLictionary apart from other dictionaries.

For as little as a penny, Jack says users can immerse themselves in a unique and entertaining dictionary experience. “We make it not only easier for you to get a great definition but you get one that you really engage with where there's a picture or a video or a celebrity,” he says. These features are expected to enhance every user’s experience and entice more people to use the platform. “If there's a bit of entertainment in the dictionary, along with the kind of factbook nature of it, I think a lot more people would really enjoy using the dictionary,” he notes.

Jack was also keen to point out that “the English language is fluid and it's going to suffer from all kinds of changes.” With the help of blockchain technology, SLictionary will be able to document the evolution of a word based on how people view it at any given time. As Jack says, “that's what the blockchain is all about.. blockchain is about preserving things in posterity so that we don't lose them.” 

Jack offers advice to Bitcoin entrepreneurs, saying “if you're thinking about starting a business because of Bitcoin, I think you're not really doing the right thing, I think you have to start with your passions and find something that you wish to fix in the world.” 
 

Despite Jack’s extensive background in finance, it’s his interest in vocabulary building that prompted him to create SLictionary. At present, approximately 2,000 word definitions, all coming from the BSV community, can be found on SLictionary. Jack plans to market outside the BSV community in the next year to onboard celebrities who are known to be inventors or experts on particular words.

Jack believes that by doing so, a level of intrigue among word nerds and geeks will take shape and entice them to join the platform. “I think once we get going and we show students in colleges, universities and high schools that they can make money defining words in a competitive environment, I don't think there's any stopping it, really, I think this is happening, it's just a question of how fast.” 

Dr Craig Wright is looking at a screenshot of the early Bitcoin website which someone has posted on Twitter. It’s from January 3 2009. He remembers what was going on at that time: “first launch of the code, making sure everything ran. The first set of problems shortly after that week, when it needed to be restarted.”

Dr Wright, who signed himself “aka Satoshi Nakamoto” on the previous week’s CoinGeek Conversations, this week reminisces about how it all began. He was testing his systems, with the transaction in question being one he was sending to himself between two of his own computers.

He is happy to admit that the Bitcoin website “demonstrates my lack of design skills”. There were other features he would have liked to have added but it was early days and “you can forgive me for not having everything perfect”.

He says he would probably have been making this particular transaction in the computer room he’d constructed in one of the outbuildings of his Australian farm, some hours drive from Sydney. It would have been a very techy scene: “computers, printers, more computers, screens everywhere. And me in the middle with roller-type chairs so I could get back and forth between the sites.”

So it must have been a big moment when the Bitcoin software was finally working? “Having it actually run, yes, it was good,” he says, adding with a smile, “having it crash shortly afterwards wasn't”.

A Eureka moment in fact? “Yeah, I'd say that would be the way you would look at it. I mean, I had been working on trying to find a solution to micropayment problems since 1997. So yeah, it was nice to finally have something that worked.”

To devise Bitcoin as a technical and economic system, Dr Wright had studied in a wide variety of fields: “Bitcoin is really a combination of computer science and economics and game theory and by having a background on all of these topics it makes it much easier”.

On the question of who knew that he was Satoshi Nakamoto back then, Dr Wright says that it was more widely known than he realised at DeMorgan, the business he founded to exploit blockchain opportunities. He didn’t tell his staff that he had invented Bitcoin “but I found out later that they all knew anyway”.

It seems that the staff were keeping a secret from him, rather than the other way round, as he discovered when he questioned a colleague: “‘So you guys know that I'm Satoshi?’ He went,’well, yes’. ‘All right, so why didn't you talk to me about this earlier?’ He went ‘well, we didn't think you wanted to. Obviously you wanted to be private, so we just didn't tell’.” As to why he hadn’t told them himself, Dr Wright just says “I didn't think there was a reason.”

There may be a chance to hear from some of those who knew Dr Wright at this time when he calls witnesses to the appeal hearing in Oslo later this year in the case which he is defending against Magnus “Hodlonaut” Granath. The appeal follows the original case heard in September 2022 at which several character witnesses gave evidence on his behalf. In the re-run, Dr Wright promises there will be “more” such witnesses talking about his work on Bitcoin. 

The UK government has announced a consultation on crypto regulation. Dr. Wright believes that rather than new regulations, the priority should be to enforce existing financial laws because crypto is not outside the conventional financial system: “I mean, we should just actually start applying the rules and the argument that it's new, that it's online... It's really not.”

As far as Bitcoin SV is concerned, new regulation should be welcomed, and probably won’t require changes: “it'll just make our life easier as everyone else has to now start doing things that we've been doing already.”

On the first of a new series of CoinGeek Conversations, Dr. Wright defends his sometimes aggressive style on social media. He admitted that “some of it” might be seen as the digital equivalent of yelling, but insisted that was “usually only when there's trolls and you want to shut them down”. 

On a recent YouTube interview he’d had some harsh words about Binance. On CoinGeek Conversations he backs up his view by describing an experiment he’d conducted to demonstrate how someone could make use of it in a way that could allow money laundering: 

“I set up in one day 10,000 email addresses and registered 10,000 accounts on Binance from the US, both in the US and the foreign Binance where I had a two BTC limit. And in theory, their argument is that they have AML provisions, but that's $40,000 an account. So that's $400 million a day that I could transfer. And I could have added more accounts.”

Another way of showing that the ‘crypto’ sector isn’t operating as it should – if further proof is needed for anyone reading the news recently – is that there are more Bitcoins in total that are claimed to be on exchanges than the 21 million that will ever exist.“I mean in some of these like FTX and Binance together, there were over 40 million Bitcoin being sold …And even when you account for the same thing being sold in multiple exchanges, like some people argued, it's still too much Bitcoin.”

As for selling blockchain solutions to industry, Dr. Wright believes there’s a big marketing job to be done by nChain and others: “if there's no one telling them, then how do they know?” He compared this phase of developing the­ blockchain sector to his experience of the early days of the internet, when there were “big, massive conferences, multiday events” to which he was invited. “I went to parties by Cisco [and] from Sun. I got flown around the world when I was young because of Digital Equipment Corporation.”

In that spirit (without the free air travel), the London Blockchain Conference is coming up from May 31 to June 2.

In a second CoinGeek Conversation show next week, Dr. Wright discusses the origins of Bitcoin and explains how he set it going from his farm in Australia. 

To celebrate the end of 2022, the team behind CoinGeek Conversations brings you a festive special edition: the CoinGeek Conversations Christmas Quiz. 

Diddy Wheldon from Women of BSV, Becky Liggero from CoinGeek and Alessio Pagani from nChain were all put through their paces by CoinGeek’s Charles Miller. 

The contestants’ knowledge was tested on subjects including music, Bitcoin SV and former CoinGeek Conversations guests. 

It was a competitive affair as there could only be one winner, so the guests had to be ready to ring their buzzers as quickly as they knew the answer. 

Please watch and find out how you score. Thank you for tuning in to CoinGeek Conversations this year, happy holidays and we will see you in 2023 when the show returns for its next sparkling season. 

On this week’s episode of CoinGeek Conversations, Charles Miller meets three entrepreneurs from the Bitcoin SV incubator Satoshi Block Dojo, each developing a new platform that could change the way we live and work.

Do you want to create an NFT but know nothing about blockchain? If so, listen up! With HQNFTs, you can create artwork on the blockchain without having to write a single line of code. As HQNFTs CEO Divya Prashanth says “it’s a one-stop shop NFT ecosystem.” 

With the platform, Divya blends her passions for art and technology. While she believes that NFTs bring awareness of blockchain technology, she says most artists are still disenfranchised. “When I talk to my artist friends, it's become very evident that the biggest blocker is blockchain itself …there’s only a few hundred thousand blockchain developers when compared to about 18 million web developers and the costs are way too high,” she explains. 

Divya thinks that the art industry should follow companies around the world in adopting Web3 and blockchain technology: “if brands and companies do not take Web3 seriously they will probably be left behind.” 

The idea is simple: “we are the Wix of NFTs - it doesn't matter what the utility is, it could have no utility or it could have a utility, you can just come in onto our platform, create an NFT collection and spin it off onto your own contract."  HQNFTs currently uses various blockchains. As Divya states, “we love all blockchains.”
 
Bomi Mosuro’s heart was set on building music software since his teenage years. And he’s turned his dream into reality through his company The House of Sounds.

The House of Sounds is developing a number of platforms that can assist artists in the music industry. One such  platform is Beat Lab – a project management tool for an organized music-making process. It helps collaborators work seamlessly together while creating a song or a soundtrack. “It basically synchronizes people …the tool helps them get in sync,”  Bomi says. 

Beat Lab allows it’s users to communicate, send messages and exchange files all in one platform. Some have likened the platform to Trello, a tool used for managing projects and tracking workflow and tasks. But unlike Trello, Beat Lab will have other special features such as a social platform where users can discover other collaborators in the music industry.  

A rapper by profession, Bomi shared his strategy in song writing. His use of sound mimicking is incorporated into another software he is developing called Fluid Flow. Bomi describes Fluid Flow as “a songwriting tool that is powered by artificial intelligence.” Aside from the mimicking, the software will offer other features that will help ease the pressure on songwriters.   

Payments infrastructure platform Intrasettle is onboarding multiple CBDCs into a single ledger allowing cross-border payments and other kinds of financial exchange. “The idea here is very simple,” says its CEO Kumaraguru Ramanujam. “We want to have multiple central banks issue central bank money in this platform so that we could encourage instant settlements and cross-border payments on one platform.”

How does it work? As Kumaraguru explains, the money issued on Intrasettle is “basically a representation of the CBDC, so it's a tokenised cash on our platform for them to get the benefits of having multiple CBDCs in one.”  The platform can be likened to a foreign currency exchange for CBDCs except that it can also be used for securities settlements, bonds settlements and anything to do with cross-border cash. 

Kumaraguro admits that there are several projects like Intrasettle undergoing pilot testing at the Bank for International Settlements. So what makes his platform unique? He plans to use Bitcoin SV technology on 

On this episode of CoinGeek Conversations, Charles Miller hears from three tech entrepreneurs who are completing the Satoshi Block Dojo incubator programme. Before they pitch their Bitcoin SV business ideas to potential investors, Charles gets an exclusive account of their plans.   

First up is Michael Olagunju. His platform, AirMaths, provides school students with access to quality maths and STEM education. The business idea came from Michael’s own experience at school, when his parents couldn’t hire a tutor to boost his grades - which he needed for a ticket to a top university. 

Luckily, they discovered Exam Solutions a platform that offered free bite-sized videos to help students like him achieve their academic targets. With Exam Solutions’ help, Michael won a place at university and achieved a first class honours degree in Maths - from which he went on to a trading career. 

But Michael then returned to his passion for education by acquiring the Exam Solutions business after quitting his trading job. With the help of Satoshi Block Dojo, he plans to take the already-busy platform to the next level. As he explains, “the idea is to be able to understand the true learning experience of a child, but also their true skill level”. Identifying these factors will assist them by providing the student with precise learning targets. It’s much like trading he says, “it’s all about trying to understand the true value of the market.. and from that, you can inform your decisions.”

AirMaths will be launching a subscriptions model that will target schools and students between the ages of 15 and 18. For as low as £10 a month, he says, students will be able to access the platform’s features and receive payouts in exchange for entering their test scores. He notes that having access to students’ test results helps the platform verify their learning programmes. “It's quite a data-dependent process where we constantly need to compare our model to the their real grades - and in order to get their real grades …we're incentivising students with payouts.”   

As he explains, “being able to make those payouts to our clients via the Bitcoin SV blockchain as a micropayment is cheaper than doing it via, say, PayPal.” 

 Next up is Annie Siara, founder and CEO of Lunique, an online retail platform that aims to bring the luxury shopping experience into the Metaverse.  Just like a high end retail store, Lunique offers a VIP shopping experience for its targeted young affluent consumers. The personalised experience includes an avatar who will assist each consumer in a customised fashion.

Annie believes that new technologies such as blockchain can help solve real world problems. In this case, it’s a matter of improving customer service – in the context of a looming recession. “Luxury brands cannot decrease their prices because it decreases their brand value, so they need to increase the value that they provide consumers,” she notes. 

High value goods purchased through Lunique will be given a ‘birth certificate’ that will be stored in the BSV blockchain. As she points out, the certificate “acts as a proof of receipt as well as proof of authenticity for that product.” This would allow consumers to resell the product with confidence as data from the purchase is stored in the ledger and cannot be changed.

Finally, Borja Burgillos talks to Charles about 5tars, a platform that gives football enthusiasts a chance to predict the outcome of a real game and earn from it. He wants to take casual gaming to a whole new level by using Web3 and blockchain. 

Every participant who wishes to join must pay a fee to enter a virtual arena that is connected to an actual game taking place in the real world. A participant is now able to place their bets based on their predictions. A participant’s earnings will depend on the total community of people who p

The capability of the Bitcoin SV blockchain to power a new internet will be realised when consumers see just how efficient the technology is, according to Jack Davies, Senior Researcher at nChain. 

 Jack believes that mainstream adoption of complex, blockchain-based technologies, like Web3 and the metaverse, will ultimately be driven by a killer application or implementation that will make using the internet easier for ordinary people. 

 “At the end of the day, the nuts and bolts of the problem will come down to how do you get this in the hands of everyday people and users, how do you get them to see the value that we’re talking about.” 

 As he tells Charles Miller on this week’s episode of CoinGeek Conversations, this is a subject he understands deeply, thanks to his work on the Metanet, a protocol developed by nChain’s Chief Scientist, Dr. Craig Wright.  

Jack sees the Metanet as a perfect example of how to build interoperable websites and systems using the BSV blockchain. He says that while the idea of putting data on the blockchain might seem commonplace now, when he first joined the company in 2018, it was “quite niche.” 

 One of the features of Bitcoin SV that Jack thinks is most valuable is its capacity to conduct peer-to-peer transactions. This creates an internet of value – a network where assets and money can be transferred over the internet between peers without the need for trusted intermediaries. 

 This combined with Bitcoin SV’s scaling ability will allow for the easy application of micropayments, which Jack believes will be game changing in allowing people to monetise content on the internet. 

 He says that allowing customers to pay tiny amounts online to read articles or watch videos they’re interested in is more efficient and appealing than traditional advertising or subscription-based models. 

 Jack says that this incarnation of the internet, where users can communicate and transact directly with a native monetary system is what’s so appealing about concepts like Web3 and the metaverse and all stems back to the Bitcoin White Paper, which first appeared in 2008. 

 He is a big believer in a regulated digital asset industry and points out that another advantage for retail customers is that Bitcoin SV is much more pro-regulation than other digital currencies, especially BTC. 

 “It’s a good thing that people will see through some narratives. Like the idea of BTC as digital gold has clearly not played out particularly well in the last year. I think it’s down by some very large percentage right, again, not good for retail consumers.” 

 Indeed, BTC prices have been highly volatile this month following the collapse of FTX, one of the largest digital currency exchanges, and it has seen a nearly 70% drop in value since its all-time high last November. 

 This is disastrous for any retail customers who have put their faith in BTC and demonstrates exactly why Jack is right to say that stricter regulation is necessary to build a strong and reliable BSV ecosystem.

When you’re asked to do a survey online, what is your reaction? For most of us, it’s an eyeroll and clicking through the questions as fast as possible. But what if you were incentivised for taking part? That might make a difference. 

 That’s the idea behind CoinSurvey. The company, which took part in the second cohort of the Satoshi Block Dojo, wants to use rewards to help survey creators get more responses from their customers.  

 Ole Knutli, CEO and Co-founder of CoinSurvey, explains that the start-up is using the scaling power of the Bitcoin SV blockchain to allow clients to offer varying amounts of money to those who take the time to answer questions. 

 “Using the blockchain we can make incentives really, really cost-efficient, so you can add incentives as small as a cent, you can add incentives across every question, or you can change how much you want to incentivise them for different questions.” 

 One of the reasons that clients might want to have different rewards for questions is to remove bottlenecks in the survey, by ensuring more difficult or time-consuming questions are better rewarded. 

 Ole is also keen to diversify the incentives on offer to respondents, for example enabling tree planting as a reward as he believes that this will help entice a varied range of people to take part. 

 Ole explains that his background working as a consultant for several large municipalities in Norway has helped him to understand the importance of having accurate customer feedback. 

 While he didn’t work within the survey industry, he did rely heavily on customer feedback data and therefore appreciates just how vital it is for clients to know that actual customers are doing their surveys. 

 “If you want to do a survey about who made a purchase, you want to make sure that those answering the survey are actually the ones who made the purchase and today it’s a little bit all over the place and we think blockchain could be a very good way to tackle this problem,” he says. 

 CoinSurvey hopes to compete with industry giants like SurveyMonkey by focusing on this tracking element of the business, as the level of accuracy and transparency provided by using the BSV blockchain will set them apart from other companies.  

 The business is run by Ole, his brother, and a friend of his from college who he has partnered up with before to build a Norwegian crypto exchange called Bitruption, that is still licensed and in action today.  

 They joined together to take part in the Satoshi Block Dojo in the latter half of 2022 and since then have been focused on launching the product and working with clients. 

 But there are also plans to expand the business and introduce an audience panel that will allow users to sign up to the website and get paid for recording responses to general surveys, improving traffic to the site and facilitating BSV onboarding.

Bernhard Muller, General Manager and Founder of BSV payments processor Centi, thinks the key to creating a popular, scalable product is ensuring that anyone will be able to use it, not just people who are interested in Bitcoin. 

 “We really want to design a product for everyone, my mum, my brother, my uncle, everyone who doesn’t know about Bitcoin, who doesn’t care about Bitcoin even,” he says.

He believes that Centi’s simplicity will be its USP and will enable it to be rolled out to a range of different customers who haven’t necessarily used Bitcoin or integrated it into their business model before.

For example, he tells Charles Miller on this week’s episode of CoinGeek Conversations that he is purposefully targeting the media and events industries, through the launch of Centi’s ‘space concept’. This feature will allow merchants to customise pages on the app so users can buy tickets and merchandise quickly and easily online.  

“For example, if you want to sell a consumer a hamburger at the event, you can basically purchase the product digitally, directly in the app and then you just need to go and collect it rather than standing in line somewhere.” 

The peer-to-peer nature of Bitcoin helps to ensure that transactions are extremely quick and direct, and if both customer and merchant have Centi enabled, the funds go straight from one to another, without travelling through any custodians or middlemen. 

So far, there are three onboarded merchants who are using the service commercially; one is a bar, one is a ramen noodle store, and one is a clothes shop, but Bernhard hopes to have at least a thousand merchants by the end of 2023. 

While this might sound ambitious, he explains that they already have strategies in place to work with other partners who already have a long list of customers. 

 He also hopes that the straightforwardness of the product, thanks to a recent redesign, will prove to be a winning combination for commercial clients. But, just in case that wasn’t enough to attract new users, he’s incorporated a faucet into the app. 

 This means that anyone using the Centi app can receive 1 Swiss Franc (approximately 1 US dollar) just for signing up. Bernhard explains that faucets were big in Bitcoin in the early days and are aimed at getting people to experience the product without needing to connect their finances to the app. 

 He’s excited about the potential he sees for getting outsiders involved in Bitcoin SV and references the BSV Global Blockchain Convention as an example of how much opportunity there is, especially in comparison to how it used to be. 

 “The first conference we had in London after this whole split ordeal between BSV and BCH happened, I mean, it was a tiny group of people, I don’t know maybe a hundred, two hundred people that were there and now this has grown substantially with all these ambassadors and Block Dojos’ and Citadels.”