CoinGeek Conversations

Many farmers in Africa are unbanked and may not even have access to the Internet. But the tech startup E-Livestock Global is offering a blockchain solution for such customers that makes use of an RFID system to trace cows’ histories, enabling buyers to learn about a cow’s health records among other valuable information. 

For a subscription fee of just $2 US, a cow is implanted with an RFID tag and its history is updated throughout the animal’s lifecycle. The electronic ID system adds value to the livestock, says company CEO Chris Light. 

Chris, a technologist whose background is in the international development sector, tells Charles Miller on this episode of CoinGeek Conversations, “by getting health care and having it through our system, we're offering [farmers] healthier cows and reduced mortality.”    

Chris says the platform is designed with the farmers’ digital and financial inclusion in mind. As he points out, “some of the pilot farmers, they don't use technology and they're not in the banking system… but they don't need to have a cell phone to use our system, they just need to be enrolled in it.”

With the use of blockchain technology, E-Livestock Global delivers an identification system for livestock much as humans can be identified through passports and ID cards. With the use of their service, buyers will be able to purchase cattle remotely and not have to fly to Africa to inspect the animal in person. They simply need to check the data recorded on blockchain.  

“We use the blockchain for provenance,” Chris says, “so you can't fudge the record - which wouldn't happen with the paper systems.” 

A pilot study tested their platform in Africa with ten thousand animals. But as Chris reveals, they have access to a market of livestock of up to 25 million to date and plan on branching out to four countries. And it’s not just cows that their system can help with. He says it also works with sheep, pigs and goats: “our system is ready to do all that.” 

The company is hoping to make a public announcement in the near future about the work they are doing with the London-based blockchain development business, nChain. “I think we will get into payments ...we're going to be a little less supply chain but a little more of value add,” he notes. 

With E-livestock Global’s digital system in place, not only will the animals benefit but so will the company’s customers, says Chris. “We envision as we get to scale that we're going to have different customers, we're going to have commercial farmers, smallholder farmers, governments and large organizations.”

At present, cows have ear tags to help farmers identify cattle for their records. But with E-Livestock’s vision, these may not be necessary in the future. So MOOve on over ear tags! Blockchain RFIDs might be here to stay!    

The Bitcoin Association should be focused on advancing and improving the way Bitcoin SV works rather than just trying to sell the technology, according to Jad Wahab, the Association’s Director of Engineering.  

 Jad believes that the role of the Switzerland-based non-profit organisation is to act as a middleman and establish connections with different partners in the space, with a view to making the system as functional to the outside world as it can be. 

 One of the partnerships that the Bitcoin Association has formed that Jad is particularly excited about is the work that it’s been doing with nChain and the IPv6 Forum, as he discusses with Charles Miller on this week’s CoinGeek Conversations. 

 The three organisations have been working together to integrate Bitcoin SV with IPv6. IPv6 is the updated version of the internet protocol, which was created in 1998 because the original internet architecture (IPv4) was due to run out of IP addresses, which ended up happening in 2011. 

 Jad explains that by using IPv6, Bitcoin can become truly peer-to-peer in the way it was originally invented to be, as there are enough IP addresses for every device that is connected to the internet.

 “If you don’t have a unique address then it’s not a direct peer-to-peer, it’s not going directly from me to you, it has to go from me to the central hub to your central hub, that’s where the peer-to-peer aspect is missing,” he says. 

 Another project that BA has delivered that Jad is confident will have a positive impact on the digital currency space is the software Blacklist Manager, that was released at the beginning of October 2022. 

 Blacklist Manager is a listening tool that can be run by miners to enable nodes to add digital assets identified in a court order to a freeze list. This means that lost or stolen Bitcoin can now be recovered through a legal process, a potentially game changing development which will bring digital asset technology within the remit of the law. 

 “We live in this world where you’ve got law and legal systems in place, you know, Bitcoin doesn’t magically create a new world that lives outside of the purview of existing legal systems that we have right now,” Jad says. 

 Jad believes that it is projects and partnerships like these that will make Bitcoin appealing to outsiders and will lead to its widespread use in the world. He says that he can see Bitcoin SV being more easily deployed in developing countries where traditional systems of money are less widely accepted. 

 For example, he talks about his hometown of Beirut, where the currency has lost more than 90% of its value and citizens no longer use credit cards because they don’t trust the banks, saying that he thinks that the lack of financial infrastructure and confidence in legacy systems will make it easier for new technology, like Bitcoin SV, to fill the gap.

One of the biggest challenges for companies looking to start out on their own can be a lack of demand for a product or service and this is what the Block Venture Studio has been created to solve. 

 Venture studios are organisations which help founders build start-ups based on what corporates need. They help businesses come up with an initial idea which will suit the market and assist with product development.

 This differs from incubators which are meant for entrepreneurs who already have an idea for a business but need support in getting it off the ground.  

 “The start-up itself is built for the corporate so the corporate is the shareholder, the corporate is the one that’s funding it,” Ari Kuqi, Director of Research and Development at Block Venture Studio, explains to CoinGeek’s Charles Miller at the company’s launch event in London. 

 The studio is the new division of the Satoshi Block Dojo, the successful global blockchain incubator which has taken the Bitcoin SV world by storm since it was set up in 2021 by Craig Massey. 

 And like the Block Dojo, it recognises the power of using Bitcoin SV to build out solutions. “We think that Bitcoin SV is the only blockchain that actually offers the utility that are promised by so many blockchains,” says Ari. 

 Charles meets some of the corporates that the Block Venture Studio are engaging with about potential solutions, including Kim Dingler, CCO at ITV Studios Entertainment, who is exploring ways that world-famous brands can be monetised using blockchain technology. 

 She tells him about two projects the channel has been working on recently; a partnership between culinary reality show ‘Hell’s Kitchen’ and The Sandbox Metaverse and NFT artwork based on the classic TV show ‘Thunderbirds’. 

 Another interested executive is Rose Tighe from Sky Labs, who is looking at blockchain technology with a view to beefing up the company’s approach to piracy and copyright protection. And while she’s excited about the opportunities presented by blockchain technology, she’s also aware of the challenges that come with it. 

 “I will say loudly and clearly that a lot of consumers are already struggling with everyday technology within their homes and what I would hope is that whatever we do is usable and accessible by everybody,” she says. 

 Rose has come to the right place to find a simple solution that suits her organisation, as the Block Venture Studio has been built for exactly this purpose with products designed to be as functional as possible, showcasing the simplicity of blockchain technology.  

 “It should be about actually providing value instead of some random blockchain that’s more used for marketing or just to make shareholders happy that you’re innovating in blockchain,” says Ari Kuqi.  

 Overall, the launch event was an exciting chance for major corporates to discuss their needs with the Block Venture Studio and network with budding entrepreneurs, and we look forward to seeing the fruits of this new venture.

If you already know that when a computer goes online, it has an IP address - whatever that may be - then you are half way to decoding the mysterious acronym IPV6. The other half is easy: V6 is “version 6”. 

You may even have more familiarity with IP than you had realised if you are vaguely aware of TCP/IP - which is the way computers communicate, through “Transmission Control Protocol/Internet Protocol”. So, yes, IP is “internet protocol” - not to be confused with IP as in “intellectual property”, the main difference being that the latter provides far more work for lawyers than the computer kind.

I was lucky enough to have an explanation of IPV6 on this week’s CoinGeek Conversations from Alessio Pagani, a Senior Researcher at nChain, the London blockchain development company. Dr Pagani also has a PhD in Information Technology and is an IMI (Institute of Mathematical Innovation) Industrial Fellow at the University of Bath. 

Alessio explained that although IPV6 has been around for decades, most networks still use IPV4 - version four. (The other versions - 1, 2, 3 and 5 - which nobody has ever heard of, were test versions and never extensively used.)

IPV4 has worked well ever since it was developed in the 1970s. But Alessio says that a problem is emerging that was not foreseen back then: the IP address format relies on a 32 bit address - in other words, 2 multiplied by 2 32 times, which produces 4.3 billion possible addresses. And that’s just not enough for today’s connected world:

“We are seven billion on this planet. We have a lot of IoT devices. I read recently a report saying that by 2025 we will have more than 30 billion devices connected to the internet. If you think about smart watches, you think about TVs, everything is now connected to the internet. The problem is that we don't have enough space for that. So we need a larger address space.”

And that’s where IPV6 comes in, with a vastly increased capacity: 

“This could be done with IPV6. Now we have 128 bits, which means 340 trillion, trillion, trillion addresses.”

Unfortunately, changing to IPV6 isn’t just a question of flipping a switch, since new network hardware is required, which is expensive to buy and to install. 

Whilst there are good reasons for networks and businesses to switch to IPV6, nChain is interested because of the additional features it can offer for Bitcoin SV businesses - allowing direct micropayments between users in a way that was not completely secure on IPV4: 

“In the first node software implementation, there was actually a feature called IP to IP payments. Then this was removed because it was not safe. There were some techniques to steal payments and now we are trying to re-enable it, thanks to IPV6. There are some tricks to send payments using IPV4 …the problem is that this is not efficient. This could pose some security issues, so it's not easy to do it on IPV4. That's why we are focusing on IPV6.”

In that sense, IPV6 allows Bitcoin to fulfill its original vision, as headlined in the White Paper, which was headlined: Bitcoin: A peer-to-peer electronic cash system. 

Do you know how public and private keys are generated? Would you be able to verify a digital signature? If your answer to either of those questions is no, there’s no need to feel embarrassed as you are not alone! For all the articles and opinion pieces on the internet about Bitcoin, there is still a distinct lack of understanding around how the technology actually works.

Indeed, a YouGov survey from last year found that 98% of respondents didn’t understand basic crypto concepts.

This week Charles Miller has re-enlisted the help of Brendan Lee, Training and Development Manager of the BSV Bitcoin Association to help him get to the bottom of a few key concepts on this week’s CoinGeek Conversations.

When the two last spoke, back in February 2021, Brendan covered what really happens when a transaction is made on the Bitcoin network and how exactly coins move from one wallet to another. This time Charles wants to find out what a digital signature is and how it can be used to verify ownership of a Bitcoin address.

First, they discuss public and private keys, with Brendan explaining that the two keys exist as a pair, with the private key generated first and the public key produced cryptographically from the private key. 

The conversation then moves on to Bitcoin wallets, where an individual’s private keys are stored. Brendan says that Electrum, a wallet software that has some additional features, is a good way to allow users to demonstrate their ownership of keys by using those keys to sign messages and create digital signatures. 

Brendan explains that to prove ownership, a user needs to first pick an address and type in a custom message to generate a signature. Once this signature has been created, any other user can decode and verify the signed message provided they have the custom message, signature, and public key.

While the technology might seem complicated, Brendan says that the mathematics used to generate signatures and verify keys were not anything new when Satoshi utilised them in Bitcoin software. 

“He wasn’t doing anything significantly new; he was just taking something that existed already, was well-tested, very proven, highly trusted as a technique and then applying it as a digital cash system,” he says.

Charles and Brendan also do a practical demonstration on Electrum, showing how it can be used to prove ownership over a specific set of private keys. This is particularly interesting given the fact that this was how Dr. Craig Wright demonstrate his control of the Satoshi keys to Gavin Andresen in 2016.

Is Bitcoin just another kind of money? An undergraduate module dedicated to Bitcoin at the University of Exeter sheds light on the question by delving into the history of money. The module, called Bitcoin, Money and Trust was launched in 2018 after a high demand from students to learn about Bitcoin. 

Dr. Jack Rogers, a senior lecturer in economics at the University of Exeter launched the Bitcoin module as a precursor to an MSc Fintech course which he leads. He says participation increased ten fold in recent years - from less than 50 students when it launched to 700 this year.   

Despite the impressive turnout, Jack believes that “probably the big number is partly driven for the wrong reasons - all the various hype and sense that you could get rich from this.” 

On this week’s episode of CoinGeek Conversations, Charles Miller talks to Jack about the University of Exeter’s Bitcoin teaching, the evolution of money and the role Bitcoin plays.  

Jack points to the emergence of central banking as a step change in history. He quoted Felix Martin, the author of Money: The Unauthorized Biography, whom he recalls speaking of a “compromise power structure” between the central bank and the government. For the first time in centuries, a decoupling between money and the state is happening before our eyes, Charles suggests. Jack agrees, saying “a new technology that allows people to potentially pay each other without using existing fiat-based systems” has indeed raised fundamental questions. He pertains to the author’s view on cryptocurrency and how it’s lead to a disruption in the payment system which central banks have been in control of for a long time. 

Jack believes the disruption in central banking was inevitable eventually: “I think this stuff, central bank, digital currencies and things that you see now, maybe it was coming anyway… I think the emergence of Bitcoin and all the hype and everything has kind of brought that forward.” 

Based on Jack’s comments, it’s safe to say that the future of money will depend on the outcome of the competition between blockchain-based payment systems. For now, he admits no-one is certain as to where Bitcoin is heading. 

“One of my students did a great dissertation on this, speculating that in 20 years time, will there be loads of different types of money? What does it look like? I mean, no-one can really say.”

Dr. Jack Rogers is co-authoring a textbook alongside Brendan Lee and Neil Smith. The book will be out by the end of 2023.

Mark Zuckerberg and his Harvard room-mates launched The Facebook (as it was called in 2004) with a new idea. It wasn’t to let people post messages to each other online - because messageboards had been doing that for years, long before the World Wide Web was invented. 

What was new was the way Facebook wanted to tie the user’s online identity to that of the real person who was posting on the site. At first they did that by only allowing people with Harvard emails to join - since Harvard required your email address to contain a version of your real name. Today anyone can register for Facebook but the intention, at least, remains to tie your Facebook presence to your real persona. And that, as it turned out, was exactly what advertisers wanted, making Facebook one of the most profitable businesses in the world. 

But arguably something was lost in Facebook’s ideas about identity online and off. Almost 30 years later, a new social media business, My2cents, is rediscovering the virtues of those old messageboards which Facebook helped consign to history. And it brings something completely new to the model thanks to the powers of Bitcoin SV.

On this week’s CoinGeek Conversations, I spoke to Dr Maximilian Sinan Korkmaz, the founder of my2cents, about his project, which was launched earlier this year. 

To register with my2cents, all you do is invent a user name and a password. That’s it. Then you can start posting. It changes the emphasis from most social media sites, BSV or otherwise, from the person posting (because on my2cents, they could be anyone) to what they have to say. That creates a whole new dynamic, in which celebrities have no more clout than nobodies and a first post gets as much traction as one from someone who’s been posting on the site for years. There are no “followers” or “following” of people - only of topics. 

The service is powered by Bitcoin SV, and in the world of BSV social media it is revolutionary in a different way. Far from using BSV to escape from business models that rely on advertising, my2cents will take ads and it invites you to view them, although you can choose not to, in return for sharing the ad revenue that my2cents generates. 

Each user’s ad share is calculated by a subtle measure of that person’s contribution to the site in which various metrics are combined to create their “user score” made up from things like how much they have posted or commented. 

Finally, when you sign up, you are given a BSV wallet. But you don’t need to transfer money into it in order to start using the site. You can simply start posting and when someone likes (which my2cents calls “pluses”) your contribution, a small BSV transfer will be made to your wallet. 

So what about the perennial problem of BSV social media sites - that everyone is happy to be paid for their contributions but, except for purely altruistic reasons, why would anyone want to pay other people? Well here, as mentioned above, your “pluses” count towards an improved “user score”. So if my2cents prospers, and its ad revenue grows, even though you’re paying out in the short term, you’re investing in your share of future profits. 

My own brief experience on my2cents was positive. I found people talking about much more than Bitcoin SV (an inescapable subject on many BSV-powered social media apps) and I earned an impressive $0.25 or so from two or three posts. I even proved to myself that it was real money by sending it to my Centbee wallet. I was impressed. 

So that’s my two cents about my2cents. 

On the fourth and final installment of CoinGeek Conversations Special, we’ll hear from individuals whose companies’ ESG or environmental, social, and corporate governance initiatives are achieved through blockchain technology. 

 While it seems like blockchain is not usually associated with ESG, these companies are making strides in proving how the technology can play a vital role in the industry. Joe Holles de Peyer of Gate2Chain and Daniel Keane of Predict Ecology talk about the integrity that blockchain provides while recording data on the environment; Dave Perill of Compute North talks about how blockchain provides efficiency in data centers; and Bryan Daugherty discussed his project, Proof of ESG and explained why blockchain will make the world a greener place. 

On the third installment of CoinGeek Conversations Special, we take a look at some of the most interesting contributions about venture capital from previous episodes of the series. 

We hear from Craig Massey and Osmin Callis from the London BSV incubator Satoshi Block Dojo. Craig talked about how investors and start-ups profit and benefit from the incubator process; Osmin focussed on what went on during the program and made interesting observations about the participants; Pacer Ventures co-founder Gbemi Akande talked about the adoption of blockchain technology in Africa; and  Paul Rajchgod, managing director of private equity at Air Ventures stressed that there's a lot more to venture capital investment in a promising new start-up than simply handing over a cheque. 

Join me, Claire Celdran next week as we revisit episodes that focus on companies whose Environment Social and Corporate Governance or ESG initiatives are achieved through blockchain technology.  

In the second of four CoinGeek Conversations special episodes, we take a look back at some of the best moments from the last season, featuring the biggest and boldest personalities in the Bitcoin SV ecosystem. 

 We hear from Mandeep Singh, musician and qualified doctor, on how Bitcoin can revolutionise the relationship artists have with their fans; Nick Numas, Founder and CEO of Genuine Retweets explains the impact his social media company is having on those in the developing world; the Women of BSV discuss why they decided to carve out a space for themselves; and Adam Hawley and Yuriy Porytko explain what the NFT they launched is doing to help people in Ukraine. 

 Join CoinGeek producer Claire Celdran next week as she highlights some of the most insightful conversations from past shows on the theme of venture capital.