On this episode of CoinGeek Conversations, two entrepreneurs from London’s incubator program Block Dojo speak to Charles Miller about their start-ups and how they can solve real world problems.  First up is Ditto, an AI-powered platform that aims to help people combat loneliness. “We are in a global epidemic of loneliness,” says James Kirk, Ditto Founder and CEO. Research suggests that over half the adults living in the United Kingdom experienced loneliness in 2022. The platform which focusses on companionship and mental well-being will utilize advances in AI technology, allowing users to have human-like conversations with Ditto.  The platform, which is connected to the internet, will have access to real time information, but unlike Amazon’s cloud-based voice service Alexa, it will proactively learn about its users’ lives. The platform will ask questions about the users’ likes and dislikes, store and remember this information and eventually match up users with other human beings with shared interests and experiences.   James is currently working with a team of experts which includes an engineer with expertise in AI technology and a professor working in the intersection of AI and healthcare.  According to James, there’s a role for technology in companionship. Some studies even show that people feel more comfortable speaking to a machine than a human being. As he points out, technology “is always there, it’s always going to say the right thing and it’s non-judgmental.”  On the second part of the show, Tristan O’Dwyer, Founder and CEO of Vymt, talks about his platform for social media influencers who operate in the gaming sector.  As he explains, today influencers receive all the revenue, leaving their followers unincentivized. Vymt takes a different approach by rewarding viewers with a blockchain-based token for discovering and following new talents.  A QR code will randomly pop up on the screen while viewers are engaged in a video. The viewer will then scan the QR code and be directed to either a multiple choice question, an opinion poll or a feedback survey based on the content. If answered correctly, the user will be rewarded with a token that has real world utility.    According to Tristan, the business model essentially allows users to move around the platform and find influencers. In turn, viewers’ attention is distributed equally and advertising revenue is likewise spread out.  Catch these Dojo entrepreneurs on the first of four CoinGeek Conversations Summer Special Episodes.   

On this episode of CoinGeek Conversations, two entrepreneurs from London’s incubator program Block Dojo speak to Charles Miller about their start-ups and how they can solve real world problems.  First up is Ditto, an AI-powered platform that aims to help people combat loneliness. “We are in a global epidemic of loneliness,” says James Kirk, Ditto Founder and CEO. Research suggests that over half the adults living in the United Kingdom experienced loneliness in 2022. The platform which focusses on companionship and mental well-being will utilize advances in AI technology, allowing users to have human-like conversations with Ditto.  The platform, which is connected to the internet, will have access to real time information, but unlike Amazon’s cloud-based voice service Alexa, it will proactively learn about its users’ lives. The platform will ask questions about the users’ likes and dislikes, store and remember this information and eventually match up users with other human beings with shared interests and experiences.   James is currently working with a team of experts which includes an engineer with expertise in AI technology and a professor working in the intersection of AI and healthcare.  According to James, there’s a role for technology in companionship. Some studies even show that people feel more comfortable speaking to a machine than a human being. As he points out, technology “is always there, it’s always going to say the right thing and it’s non-judgmental.”  On the second part of the show, Tristan O’Dwyer, Founder and CEO of Vymt, talks about his platform for social media influencers who operate in the gaming sector.  As he explains, today influencers receive all the revenue, leaving their followers unincentivized. Vymt takes a different approach by rewarding viewers with a blockchain-based token for discovering and following new talents.  A QR code will randomly pop up on the screen while viewers are engaged in a video. The viewer will then scan the QR code and be directed to either a multiple choice question, an opinion poll or a feedback survey based on the content. If answered correctly, the user will be rewarded with a token that has real world utility.    According to Tristan, the business model essentially allows users to move around the platform and find influencers. In turn, viewers’ attention is distributed equally and advertising revenue is likewise spread out.  Catch these Dojo entrepreneurs on the first of four CoinGeek Conversations Summer Special Episodes.

Vymt incentivizes gaming fans while Ditto offers a cure for loneliness

James Belding

For James Belding, the co-founder and CEO of Tokenized, the launch of his desktop app just days ahead of the London Blockchain conference in June was the fruit of years of work, ever  since he appeared at a CoinGeek conference with his self-funded team in Toronto in 2019. Described as a “self-custodial and enterprise-grade digital wallet …for issuing, managing and holding digital assets including Bitcoin SV”, Tokenized boasts an elegant interface, an easy sign up process and an impressive range of functions.Sure, it’s taken a while, James admits, but that’s because he wanted his product to be more than just “the hundredth wallet that wasn't that good and that didn't distinguish itself at all from anything else.”Tokenized’s distinction lies in the wide range of what James calls “instrument types” that it supports. So in your wallet, you can have an eclectic mix, including bonds, tickets, coupons and loyalty points as well alongside fiat currencies. Despite the name of the business, James plays down the tokens themselves, partly because he thinks people have a distorted idea about them from the hype around dodgy NFTs. The tokens are just “tiny, tiny pieces of the puzzle,” he says. “You just make a token on chain. Maybe it's a five, or twenty percent improvement over current things”. It’s the rest of what blockchain can do that is key to what he wants to achieve with Tokenized: “the real unlocking of value - and where all the hard work is - in the smart contracts and all the implications that arise from those”. On this week’s CoinGeek Conversations, James talks about the journey from initial idea to product launch, and explains why he thinks users will agree that Tokenized was worth the wait: “We really put our blood, sweat and tears into it to make it as compelling as we could, as simple as we could. But right now anyone can download the app and they can use it as what we think is probably the best Bitcoin wallet or even crypto wallet in the whole industry.”Part of that claim rests on the thinking that James and his team have put into security. By reducing Tokenized’s own custody of assets, they have put their users in a more direct relationship with the blockchain: “we saw a non-custodial approach [allowing] users to connect directly with the DLT [digital ledger technology] as intuitively very compelling from a security point of view.”That has an additional benefit when trying to sign up customers, big business especially: he can tell them that they don’t need to put their faith in Tokenized being around forever - although he is confident it will be! But if the company were to disappear, the Tokenized protocol, which is open source, would still exist and continue to operate, and users could access their assets through alternative interfaces. “I think that resonates very well” in discussion with potential customers, James says. “It's a really powerful message and we get a lot of positive feedback for it.”So what are the prospects for signing up big business users? James is cautiously optimistic: “we're in active discussions with a lot of big players that are getting their heads around it. I wouldn't say we're at a stage where one of the biggest players is ready to drop everything, but we're basically at the point where I think a bunch of pilot projects are going to start rolling out quite soon”. 

For James Belding, the co-founder and CEO of Tokenized, the launch of his desktop app just days ahead of the London Blockchain conference in June was the fruit of years of work, ever  since he appeared at a CoinGeek conference with his self-funded team in Toronto in 2019.  Described as a “self-custodial and enterprise-grade digital wallet …for issuing, managing and holding digital assets including Bitcoin SV”, <a href="https://tokenized.com/" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Tokenized</a> boasts an elegant interface, an easy sign up process and an impressive range of functions. Sure, it’s taken a while, James admits, but that’s because he wanted his product to be more than just “the hundredth wallet that wasn't that good and that didn't distinguish itself at all from anything else.” Tokenized’s distinction lies in the wide range of what James calls “instrument types” that it supports. So in your wallet, you can have an eclectic mix, including bonds, tickets, coupons and loyalty points as well alongside fiat currencies.  Despite the name of the business, James plays down the tokens themselves, partly because he thinks people have a distorted idea about them from the hype around dodgy NFTs. The tokens are just “tiny, tiny pieces of the puzzle,” he says. “You just make a token on chain. Maybe it's a five, or twenty percent improvement over current things”.  It’s the rest of what blockchain can do that is key to what he wants to achieve with Tokenized: “the real unlocking of value - and where all the hard work is - in the smart contracts and all the implications that arise from those”.  On this week’s CoinGeek Conversations, James talks about the journey from initial idea to product launch, and explains why he thinks users will agree that Tokenized was worth the wait:  “We really put our blood, sweat and tears into it to make it as compelling as we could, as simple as we could. But right now anyone can download the app and they can use it as what we think is probably the best Bitcoin wallet or even crypto wallet in the whole industry.” Part of that claim rests on the thinking that James and his team have put into security. By reducing Tokenized’s own custody of assets, they have put their users in a more direct relationship with the blockchain: “we saw a non-custodial approach [allowing] users to connect directly with the DLT [digital ledger technology] as intuitively very compelling from a security point of view.” That has an additional benefit when trying to sign up customers, big business especially: he can tell them that they don’t need to put their faith in Tokenized being around forever - although he is confident it will be! But if the company were to disappear, the Tokenized protocol, which is open source, would still exist and continue to operate, and users could access their assets through alternative interfaces.  “I think that resonates very well” in discussion with potential customers, James says. “It's a really powerful message and we get a lot of positive feedback for it.” So what are the prospects for signing up big business users? James is cautiously optimistic: “we're in active discussions with a lot of big players that are getting their heads around it. I wouldn't say we're at a stage where one of the biggest players is ready to drop everything, but we're basically at the point where I think a bunch of pilot projects are going to start rolling out quite soon”.

James Belding: Tokenized was built with blood, sweat and tears

Kirsty Barany-Gibson

From BSV entrepreneur to start-up enabler, Kirsty Barany-Gibson is no stranger to the Bitcoin SV community. Prior to taking on a position at global investment firm Scale Facilitation, she was known to the BSV community as the founder of Clear Sparrow, an online dating app that utilizes Bitcoin SV technology. Today, Kristy heads Access New York, a program by Scale Facilitation, offering start-ups and small-medium enterprises access to New York City resources. On this episode of CoinGeek Conversations, Charles Miller catches up with the BSV entrepreneur who passionately shares her thoughts on Blockchain technology, its most promising use cases and how she enables innovative start-ups and SMEs through Access New York.    “We have a very much diversified portfolio. We're looking into companies in biotechnology, healthcare, obviously blockchain, so essentially anything that is a high disruptor in established industries,” she says. As an entrepreneur in the blockchain space, Kristy firmly attests to the countless benefits blockchain technology brings to a business. “You need it, otherwise you are going to be at a massive disadvantage,” she asserts. She points to blockchain’s ability to enhance process efficiencies through transparency while allowing companies to reduce liability and cost. Thanks to Clear Sparrow, Kirsty speaks from experience. Her platform is unusual among dating apps in that it uses blockchain technology to store users’ information. It verifies a user’s background through checking government records as a precondition to the access of potential partners. Kirsty is also keen to point out the superior power of BSV’s technology saying “the only blockchain that is able to handle the speed and the volume is BSV”. As head of Access New York, Kirsty is enthusiastic about onboarding companies that utilize blockchain technology. As she explains, “I see the BSV blockchain as a way of future proofing the companies that we invest in” she says.   Kirsty believes that the most successful companies of the future will be those that integrate blockchain technology at an early stage. As for companies planning to integrate blockchain later on, she says it is viable, but more expensive. “If you're able to capture real live data, immutable, you are sitting on a goldmine, that is where the value is, so if you would talk to me and say, well, we can do it today, make a small investment and build it versus well, we'll see in five years, then you're losing five years of these amazing value that you could have been tracking since the beginning,” she explains. Furthermore, Kirsty alludes to the fact that there is an abundance of talents in the BSV community that can help companies integrate blockchain: “there's a group of amazing developers within the BSV community that have been devoting years to building the building blocks, so they are there - you only have to literally bring them into your business and open a whole new dimension to it.”      Kristy’s background in technology goes back to her childhood years. Her father was in one of the largest information technology distributor companies in South America. Kirsty also worked at a cybersecurity firm in the United States that serviced some of the largest brands in various industries. “I protected the oil industry, central banks. I was never the builder, but I always understood exactly how it worked so I could implement it in a very successful way,” she says.     With a deep appreciation for blockchain technology, Kristy continues her journey, hoping to find more use cases that can truly unlock the value of this technology. As she says, “there's a lot of very profitable business models out there that have never been touched just because there's never been that transparency in 

From BSV entrepreneur to start-up enabler, Kirsty Barany-Gibson is no stranger to the Bitcoin SV community. Prior to taking on a position at global investment firm Scale Facilitation, she was known to the BSV community as the founder of Clear Sparrow, an online dating app that utilizes Bitcoin SV technology. Today, Kristy heads Access New York, a program by Scale Facilitation, offering start-ups and small-medium enterprises access to New York City resources. On this episode of CoinGeek Conversations, Charles Miller catches up with the BSV entrepreneur who passionately shares her thoughts on Blockchain technology, its most promising use cases and how she enables innovative start-ups and SMEs through Access New York.    “We have a very much diversified portfolio. We're looking into companies in biotechnology, healthcare, obviously blockchain, so essentially anything that is a high disruptor in established industries,” she says.  As an entrepreneur in the blockchain space, Kristy firmly attests to the countless benefits blockchain technology brings to a business. “You need it, otherwise you are going to be at a massive disadvantage,” she asserts. She points to blockchain’s ability to enhance process efficiencies through transparency while allowing companies to reduce liability and cost.  Thanks to Clear Sparrow, Kirsty speaks from experience. Her platform is unusual among dating apps in that it uses blockchain technology to store users’ information. It verifies a user’s background through checking government records as a precondition to the access of potential partners.  Kirsty is also keen to point out the superior power of BSV’s technology saying “the only blockchain that is able to handle the speed and the volume is BSV”. As head of Access New York, Kirsty is enthusiastic about onboarding companies that utilize blockchain technology. As she explains, “I see the BSV blockchain as a way of future proofing the companies that we invest in” she says.    Kirsty believes that the most successful companies of the future will be those that integrate blockchain technology at an early stage. As for companies planning to integrate blockchain later on, she says it is viable, but more expensive. “If you're able to capture real live data, immutable, you are sitting on a goldmine, that is where the value is, so if you would talk to me and say, well, we can do it today, make a small investment and build it versus well, we'll see in five years, then you're losing five years of these amazing value that you could have been tracking since the beginning,” she explains. Furthermore, Kirsty alludes to the fact that there is an abundance of talents in the BSV community that can help companies integrate blockchain: “there's a group of amazing developers within the BSV community that have been devoting years to building the building blocks, so they are there - you only have to literally bring them into your business and open a whole new dimension to it.”      Kristy’s background in technology goes back to her childhood years. Her father was in one of the largest information technology distributor companies in South America. Kirsty also worked at a cybersecurity firm in the United States that serviced some of the largest brands in various industries. “I protected the oil industry, central banks. I was never the builder, but I always understood exactly how it worked so I could implement it in a very successful way,” she says.     With a deep appreciation for blockchain technology, Kristy continues her journey, hoping to find more use cases that can truly unlock the value of this technology. As she says, “there's a lot of very profitable business models out there that have never been touched just because there's never been that transparency in

Kirsty Barany-Gibson: the only blockchain able to handle speed and volume is BSV

The United Nations’ World Food Programme (WFP) has been using blockchain technology to deliver assistance safely and securely since 2017 through an initiative called Building Blocks. It’s a privately managed blockchain network which allows various humanitarian organizations to coordinate efficiently, while allowing people to simply access their essential needs.     As Houman Haddad, Head of Emerging Technologies at WFP explains, Building Blocks is “a humanitarian blockchain network which aims to, in a neutral manner, bring various actors together as hundred percent co-owners, co-operators and co-governors.” On this episode of CoinGeek Conversations, Charles Miller finds out how multiple agencies use the private blockchain to enable a cohesive working environment while at the same time, allowing people to receive different types of assistance with less complexity.  As Houman points out, “by putting the people we serve at the very center, gaining a common visibility on who's assisting whom, we can coordinate that assistance to ensure more equitable outcomes and make the redemption process simpler for the people who are dependent on that assistance.” Oftentimes, humanitarian agencies serve people who lack digital literacy or don’t have access to phones or connectivity. So how does the system work? As Houman explains, “the way we've designed our system is so that the people we serve don't need any of those things - or don't necessarily need any of those things - but we do need connectivity and a device at the point of distribution.”   In the current system, the UNHCR, which has a mandate for protection of refugees, collects documents (if any), biographic and demographic data, as well as biometrics from every refugee family who in turn receive an identification card that only contains a pseudonymous code. WFP then creates a blockchain account using the pseudonymous code for each refugee family. WFP’s onchain work begins as they deposit food tokens into a blockchain wallet associated with the family’s blockchain account. In effect, WFP will not have the refugees’ names or birthdates, therefore protecting every individual’s identity.   As for redeeming entitlements, an individual can go to a supermarket, simply select items and checkout using the UNHCR ID card. WFP then needs to authenticate the transaction through various methods, depending on a country’s limitations. “In Jordan, it's by iris biometrics. In Bangladesh, it was finger biometrics before COVID. But it can be anything. It can be a QR code. It could be a simple pin,” he says.          Houman envisions a future where individuals take complete ownership of their accounts by owning and controlling their own private keys. “At that stage, we won't simply hand them their private key, they will generate their own private key and we will transfer ownership to them,” he says. Houman is also keen to point out that the use of a private blockchain ties in well with the United Nations “do no harm principle, at heart.” As he points out, “we store non-sensitive data on chain, although it's private and we protect it heavily.” While the UN’s humanitarian initiatives make use of private blockchain technology, Houman admits that he favors the concept of a public blockchain for its self-sustaining ability, not dependent to any organization.  Despite recognizing the advantages of a public blockchain, Houman remains steadfast with the use of private blockchain for WFP. While working on a proof-of-concept initiative in Pakistan, backed by Ethereum technology, Houman and his team quickly discovered issues with speed and cost. He also wasn’t keen on the fact that the transactions, although pseudonymous, are publicly visible.

The United Nations’ World Food Programme (WFP) has been using blockchain technology to deliver assistance safely and securely since 2017 through an initiative called Building Blocks. It’s a privately managed blockchain network which allows various humanitarian organizations to coordinate efficiently, while allowing people to simply access their essential needs.     As Houman Haddad, Head of Emerging Technologies at WFP explains, Building Blocks is “a humanitarian blockchain network which aims to, in a neutral manner, bring various actors together as hundred percent co-owners, co-operators and co-governors.” On this episode of CoinGeek Conversations, Charles Miller finds out how multiple agencies use the private blockchain to enable a cohesive working environment while at the same time, allowing people to receive different types of assistance with less complexity.  As Houman points out, “by putting the people we serve at the very center, gaining a common visibility on who's assisting whom, we can coordinate that assistance to ensure more equitable outcomes and make the redemption process simpler for the people who are dependent on that assistance.” Oftentimes, humanitarian agencies serve people who lack digital literacy or don’t have access to phones or connectivity. So how does the system work? As Houman explains, “the way we've designed our system is so that the people we serve don't need any of those things - or don't necessarily need any of those things - but we do need connectivity and a device at the point of distribution.”   In the current system, the UNHCR, which has a mandate for protection of refugees, collects documents (if any), biographic and demographic data, as well as biometrics from every refugee family who in turn receive an identification card that only contains a pseudonymous code. WFP then creates a blockchain account using the pseudonymous code for each refugee family. WFP’s onchain work begins as they deposit food tokens into a blockchain wallet associated with the family’s blockchain account. In effect, WFP will not have the refugees’ names or birthdates, therefore protecting every individual’s identity.   As for redeeming entitlements, an individual can go to a supermarket, simply select items and checkout using the UNHCR ID card. WFP then needs to authenticate the transaction through various methods, depending on a country’s limitations. “In Jordan, it's by iris biometrics. In Bangladesh, it was finger biometrics before COVID. But it can be anything. It can be a QR code. It could be a simple pin,” he says.          Houman envisions a future where individuals take complete ownership of their accounts by owning and controlling their own private keys. “At that stage, we won't simply hand them their private key, they will generate their own private key and we will transfer ownership to them,” he says. Houman is also keen to point out that the use of a private blockchain ties in well with the United Nations “do no harm principle, at heart.” As he points out, “we store non-sensitive data on chain, although it's private and we protect it heavily.” While the UN’s humanitarian initiatives make use of private blockchain technology, Houman admits that he favors the concept of a public blockchain for its self-sustaining ability, not dependent to any organization.  Despite recognizing the advantages of a public blockchain, Houman remains steadfast with the use of private blockchain for WFP. While working on a proof-of-concept initiative in Pakistan, backed by Ethereum technology, Houman and his team quickly discovered issues with speed and cost. He also wasn’t keen on the fact that the transactions, although pseudonymous, are publicly visible.

Blockchain helps UN humanitarian agencies to work together

Times are changing, literally. The Nowatch wearable looks like a watch but doesn’t function like one. Instead of telling the time, the device’s main use is to register its owners’ biometrics. As MintBlue CEO, Niels van den Bergh points out, the watch allows its users to be ‘in the now’: “It doesn’t tell you the time, it only gives you time,” he says.   The BSV blockchain helps Nowatch to track a person’s vitals, breathing, heartbeat, steps, sleep cycle among many other measures. Similar to other smart wearable brands, the information collected from its user used to be stored in the cloud. But as Niels points out, “Nowatch really wants to pioneer and push boundaries in this field.”  And so the brand aims to take smart watches to the next level by offering its customers the opportunity to own and monetize their own data with the use of blockchain technology.  As Niels tells Charles Miller on this episode of CoinGeek Conversations, every Nowatch user will own their own data. “You can do things with it that you can do when you are an owner: you can share it, you can sell it, you can rent it, you own it, you decide,” Niels says.  There are benefits to sharing your Nowatch data to your service providers. For instance, your doctor can access and monitor your sleep cycle after prescribing you new sleep medication or your gym trainer will be able to access your vitals and see how your body reacts to an exercise routine. With the data-sharing capability of Nowatch, people can receive better service.  As for monetizing from your data on the Nowatch, Niels says it’s possible, for instance, for a research organization to track hundreds or thousands of people’s heart rates during a football match. “That's cool information that research labs can use well, and imagine the machine learning algorithms that also can be fed with this information, it's truly authentic information that you buy from an owner,” he says.   Nowatch is one of the many clients of MintBlue, a company that offers blockchain services to businesses. MintBlue’s vision is to create a public protocol spec, not only for Nowatch but for competitor smart wearables that want to integrate the technology as well. As Niels says, “we are like the Yoda to the heroes, we help organizations reap the benefits of Web3, we make it very easy for organizations to just plug and play our SDK and APIs into their backend systems.”   MintBlue also wants to have all its use cases collaborate using BSV technology saying “the BSV blockchain is one global ledger for everything, for all use cases, so all of the clients that we sign up can interoperate.”    From a business perspective, Niels says it’s all about finding the right use cases, as well as focusing on marketing and sales. He believes personal connection is everything. As he points out, “business is still people talking to each other and trusting each other.” For Niels, at the end of the day, business boils down to people having a relationship.

Times are changing, literally. The Nowatch wearable looks like a watch but doesn’t function like one. Instead of telling the time, the device’s main use is to register its owners’ biometrics. As MintBlue CEO, Niels van den Bergh points out, the watch allows its users to be ‘in the now’: “It doesn’t tell you the time, it only gives you time,” he says.   The BSV blockchain helps Nowatch to track a person’s vitals, breathing, heartbeat, steps, sleep cycle among many other measures. Similar to other smart wearable brands, the information collected from its user used to be stored in the cloud. But as Niels points out, “Nowatch really wants to pioneer and push boundaries in this field.”  And so the brand aims to take smart watches to the next level by offering its customers the opportunity to own and monetize their own data with the use of blockchain technology.  As Niels tells Charles Miller on this episode of CoinGeek Conversations, every Nowatch user will own their own data. “You can do things with it that you can do when you are an owner: you can share it, you can sell it, you can rent it, you own it, you decide,” Niels says.  There are benefits to sharing your Nowatch data to your service providers. For instance, your doctor can access and monitor your sleep cycle after prescribing you new sleep medication or your gym trainer will be able to access your vitals and see how your body reacts to an exercise routine. With the data-sharing capability of Nowatch, people can receive better service.  As for monetizing from your data on the Nowatch, Niels says it’s possible, for instance, for a research organization to track hundreds or thousands of people’s heart rates during a football match. “That's cool information that research labs can use well, and imagine the machine learning algorithms that also can be fed with this information, it's truly authentic information that you buy from an owner,” he says.   Nowatch is one of the many clients of MintBlue, a company that offers blockchain services to businesses. MintBlue’s vision is to create a public protocol spec, not only for Nowatch but for competitor smart wearables that want to integrate the technology as well. As Niels says, “we are like the Yoda to the heroes, we help organizations reap the benefits of Web3, we make it very easy for organizations to just plug and play our SDK and APIs into their backend systems.”   MintBlue also wants to have all its use cases collaborate using BSV technology saying “the BSV blockchain is one global ledger for everything, for all use cases, so all of the clients that we sign up can interoperate.”    From a business perspective, Niels says it’s all about finding the right use cases, as well as focusing on marketing and sales. He believes personal connection is everything. As he points out, “business is still people talking to each other and trusting each other.” For Niels, at the end of the day, business boils down to people having a relationship.

Living in the now with MintBlue’s Nowatch

For more than two decades, Giovanni Franzese has been working for the telecoms giant Ericsson where he served most recently as Head of Blockchain Business Development. As an engineer, Giovanni liked to experiment with different types of technologies, but it wasn’t until six years ago that he decided to use blockchain technology to develop a product solution.The product, Ericsson Customer Acceptance is a big win for Ericsson. As he explains, “it's a big product, it's very successful, and we have we have a very vast adoption.” As he tells Charles Miller on this episode of CoinGeek Conversations, innovation from within a corporation is extremely complex. “Innovation comes through acquisition, it's much easier: you buy a company which has a brilliant idea,” he says. In Giovanni’s case, his idea to use blockchain didn’t happen overnight. He admits that transforming his idea into a viable product was a struggle at first, but he worked  ‘under the radar’ and step by step: “it’s like Lego bricks buildings, the first one and then the second, and then it was a good building at the end,” he says. It also helped that he found an internal stakeholder to sponsor his idea.Ericsson Customer Acceptance is backed by Hyperledger Fabric, a private blockchain technology. While building the product, Giovanni wasn’t aware of any public blockchain with secured scalability and high transaction rates per second. On top of that, he was wary of proposing the use of public blockchain which he colleagues might fear would potentially expose corporate data.    As Giovanni explains, the challenge continued as there was resistance to a product that had the word blockchain associated to it. As he points out, “at the very beginning nobody wanted it because it's not a secret that blockchain is still a little bit controversial, especially when we have such scandals like FDX.” Despite the roadblocks, Giovanni’s blockchain-based solution was deployed to several Ericsson customers. At the end, he says “the benefits were so evident.”Giovanni left his position at Ericsson to join nChain where he plans to expand the BSV-supporting global tech company into a consultant service company. Only a few weeks after taking on the role of nChain executive partner, Giovanni had the opportunity to speak at the recent London Blockchain Conference. He highlighted his experience in developing, implementing, and eventually providing blockchain solutions to big corporates. In his talk, he shared a significant career-lesson to his audience: “I don't regret what I did and the decisions I took six years ago when I decided to embrace blockchain and use private, but my message to the audience today was, if you have to start now, then don't do it in the way I did with the  use of public, use Bitcoin SV, because that is the right choice today.”Giovanni is impressed with BSV’s capability to do 50,000 transactions per second and compares it to Ethereum which can only do an average of seven transactions per second, he says. He then compares the two blockchains to modes of transport saying BSV is like a Ferrari while Ethereum is like a little bike. As for discussions on using private vs public blockchain, Giovanni says, “now is the time to go public.” He supports public blockchain by saying that private blockchains are for the most part centralized, costly and it don’t exploit the full capabilities of blockchain technology.

For more than two decades, Giovanni Franzese has been working for the telecoms giant Ericsson where he served most recently as Head of Blockchain Business Development. As an engineer, Giovanni liked to experiment with different types of technologies, but it wasn’t until six years ago that he decided to use blockchain technology to develop a product solution. The product, Ericsson Customer Acceptance is a big win for Ericsson. As he explains, “it's a big product, it's very successful, and we have we have a very vast adoption.”  As he tells Charles Miller on this episode of CoinGeek Conversations, innovation from within a corporation is extremely complex. “Innovation comes through acquisition, it's much easier: you buy a company which has a brilliant idea,” he says.  In Giovanni’s case, his idea to use blockchain didn’t happen overnight. He admits that transforming his idea into a viable product was a struggle at first, but he worked  ‘under the radar’ and step by step: “it’s like Lego bricks buildings, the first one and then the second, and then it was a good building at the end,” he says. It also helped that he found an internal stakeholder to sponsor his idea. <a href="https://www.communicationstoday.co.in/batelco-ericsson-deploy-customer-acceptance-solution/" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Ericsson Customer Acceptance</a> is backed by Hyperledger Fabric, a private blockchain technology. While building the product, Giovanni wasn’t aware of any public blockchain with secured scalability and high transaction rates per second. On top of that, he was wary of proposing the use of public blockchain which he colleagues might fear would potentially expose corporate data.     As Giovanni explains, the challenge continued as there was resistance to a product that had the word blockchain associated to it. As he points out, “at the very beginning nobody wanted it because it's not a secret that blockchain is still a little bit controversial, especially when we have such scandals like FDX.”  Despite the roadblocks, Giovanni’s blockchain-based solution was deployed to several Ericsson customers. At the end, he says “the benefits were so evident.” Giovanni left his position at Ericsson to join nChain where he plans to expand the BSV-supporting global tech company into a consultant service company. Only a few weeks after taking on the role of nChain executive partner, Giovanni had the opportunity to speak at the recent London Blockchain Conference. He highlighted his experience in developing, implementing, and eventually providing blockchain solutions to big corporates.  In his talk, he shared a significant career-lesson to his audience: “I don't regret what I did and the decisions I took six years ago when I decided to embrace blockchain and use private, but my message to the audience today was, if you have to start now, then don't do it in the way I did with the  use of public, use Bitcoin SV, because that is the right choice today.” Giovanni is impressed with BSV’s capability to do 50,000 transactions per second and compares it to Ethereum which can only do an average of seven transactions per second, he says. He then compares the two blockchains to modes of transport saying BSV is like a Ferrari while Ethereum is like a little bike.  As for discussions on using private vs public blockchain, Giovanni says, “now is the time to go public.” He supports public blockchain by saying that private blockchains are for the most part centralized, costly and it don’t exploit the full capabilities of blockchain technology.

Giovanni Franzese: It’s time for corporates to turn to public blockchain solutions

Kevin Healy

Former iOS developer Kevin Healy first found fame when he released a video on YouTube called “What is Ethereum?” Published in 2016, in the video, Kevin shows developers how to build on the Ethereum blockchain. Despite thousands of views and some revenue he received from the video, Kevin removed it from his YouTube channel as he was worried about some of the dodgy ads that appeared alongside it. It is now back on the channel, clearly labelled as out of date and “posted for historical purposes”.   Kevin is now part of the education team at the Bitcoin Association, a non-profit organization that aims to advocate and support the adoption of BSV blockchain technology worldwide. As he tells Charles Miller on this week’s episode of CoinGeek Conversations, his more general concerns about Ethereum grew after the spat between Ethereum’s Vitalik Buterin and Dr. Craig Wright broke out in 2018 at the Deconomy Conference. In the midst of the controversy, Kevin felt the need  to “pick a side”. Then he release another successful video. Again, it received thousands of views. But this time, Kevin explains why he believes Dr Craig Wright is Satoshi Nakamoto. Despite anticipating some negative responses, Kevin went on to defend the man he believes to be the inventor of Bitcoin.    At the start of his developer career, Kevin created apps for Apple’s App Store. His exposure to investments and technology while growing up led him to a career in technology: “My dad is a wealth advisor - a portfolio manager - and so I've always been comfortable trading stocks. Part of the reason I was obsessed with Apple is because we bought a lot of Apple stock when I was young,” he says. Kevin remembers owning his very first iPhone in high school and thinking “how do I learn to program this thing?” This thought process eventually led him to focus his studies on computer science. Kevin says that his early obsession to Silicon Valley success stories drove him to use the same business model as Facebook and Snapchat while building apps. Looking back, he says “it was a silly thing to do.”As the app industry evolved, Kevin realized the chances of making millions as a single developer became slim to none. As he explains, “in those early days there were people that were making millions as a single developer but as the app platform matured, then it was more companies and you needed venture capital, and the labor for building apps became really expensive.”At present, Kevin speaks of the advantages of Bitcoin technology based on what is written in the Bitcoin White Paper. At the recent London Blockchain Conference, Kevin focused on how to solve problems using Bitcoin. As he points out, the ability of Bitcoin to do micropayments solves many issues we encounter on the Internet today: “If you want to do small casual payments, then you can't do that with a trusted third party because they have to be able to reverse the transactions and they have fees. It's just too expensive to do it that way. If we want to do micropayments, then we need to get rid of it [third-party involvement] or we need a model without them.”  Kevin refers to a valuable takeaway he got from one of Dr Wright’s interviews where the nChain Chief Scientist spoke about mercantilism. After watching the interview several times, Kevin says he realized that “money comes second, it's the goods and services that really is the wealth of society.” He relates this form of economic policy to the Bitcoin economy saying “money gets people's attention and the fact that the other tokens have gotten so much money, they've gotten so much attention and there's something sad about that, but at the same time too, it's also been a great filtering mechanism because now everybody inte

Former iOS developer Kevin Healy first found fame when he released a video on YouTube called “<a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vam0ZjAy3Rw" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">What is Ethereum</a>?” Published in 2016, in the video, Kevin shows developers how to build on the Ethereum blockchain. Despite thousands of views and some revenue he received from the video, Kevin removed it from his YouTube channel as he was worried about some of the dodgy ads that appeared alongside it. It is now back on the channel, clearly labelled as out of date and “posted for historical purposes”.   Kevin is now part of the education team at the <a href="https://association.bitcoinsv.com/" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Bitcoin Association</a>, a non-profit organization that aims to advocate and support the adoption of BSV blockchain technology worldwide. As he tells Charles Miller on this week’s episode of CoinGeek Conversations, his more general concerns about Ethereum grew after the spat between Ethereum’s Vitalik Buterin and Dr. Craig Wright broke out in 2018 at the Deconomy Conference. In the midst of the controversy, Kevin felt the need  to “pick a side”. Then he release another successful video. Again, it received thousands of views. But this time, Kevin explains why he believes Dr Craig Wright is Satoshi Nakamoto. Despite anticipating some negative responses, Kevin went on to defend the man he believes to be the inventor of Bitcoin.    At the start of his developer career, Kevin created apps for Apple’s App Store. His exposure to investments and technology while growing up led him to a career in technology: “My dad is a wealth advisor - a portfolio manager - and so I've always been comfortable trading stocks. Part of the reason I was obsessed with Apple is because we bought a lot of Apple stock when I was young,” he says. Kevin remembers owning his very first iPhone in high school and thinking “how do I learn to program this thing?” This thought process eventually led him to focus his studies on computer science. Kevin says that his early obsession to Silicon Valley success stories drove him to use the same business model as Facebook and Snapchat while building apps. Looking back, he says “it was a silly thing to do.”As the app industry evolved, Kevin realized the chances of making millions as a single developer became slim to none. As he explains, “in those early days there were people that were making millions as a single developer but as the app platform matured, then it was more companies and you needed venture capital, and the labor for building apps became really expensive.”At present, Kevin speaks of the advantages of Bitcoin technology based on what is written in the Bitcoin White Paper. At the recent London Blockchain Conference, Kevin focused on how to solve problems using Bitcoin. As he points out, the ability of Bitcoin to do micropayments solves many issues we encounter on the Internet today: “If you want to do small casual payments, then you can't do that with a trusted third party because they have to be able to reverse the transactions and they have fees. It's just too expensive to do it that way. If we want to do micropayments, then we need to get rid of it [third-party involvement] or we need a model without them.”  Kevin refers to a valuable takeaway he got from one of Dr Wright’s interviews where the nChain Chief Scientist spoke about mercantilism. After watching the interview several times, Kevin says he realized that “money comes second, it's the goods and services that really is the wealth of society.” He relates this form of economic policy to the Bitcoin economy saying “money gets people's attention and the fact that the other tokens have gotten so much money, they've gotten so much attention and there's something sad about that, but at the same time too, it's also been a great filtering mechanism because now everybody inte

Kevin Healy: My long journey to BSV

How do venture capitalists make investment choices? There are many answers to this all-important question for entrepreneurs looking to raise capital for their start-ups.  Tokentus, a German publicly listed VC company is an early stage investor that focuses on the blockchain market. Its Investment Manager, Mona Tiesler says one of the top criteria they look at in a start-up is its founder’s strengths - including his or her background, mindset, commitment, knowledge of the technology - as well as the business use case and the product market fit. Another important aspect is the team behind the founder and whether are complimentary to his or her skill set. As Mona tells Charles Miller on this episode of CoinGeek Conversations, Tokentus is focused on finding start-ups in the Web3 space. While the term Web3 varies in definition, for Mona it can be explained as a decentralized web with Web3 companies being those that utilize blockchain technology to create efficiencies.   Tokentus however is not aiming to add all types of blockchain-based companies to their portfolio. They focus on financial services in Web3 related businesses, as well as some consumer facing businesses such as those in retail payments. According to Mona, Tokentus favours infrastructure and applications that will essentially power the future internet.   Mona points out that Tokentus is blockchain agnostic. She believes that every blockchain is different and that each serves a unique purpose. In her opinion, BTC is the safest when it comes to store of value while ETC offers the biggest community with more potential in adoption opportunities. Mona believes that blockchain will continue to evolve:  “I don't think necessarily the landscape we see now is going to be the landscape we see in the future, but I do believe that there will be a myriad of different blockchains existing in the future, utilized for different use cases.” For some, the emergence of blockchain technology is likened to the onset of the consumer internet. Many companies formed during the internet’s early days failed to see it through, in effect, missing the opportunity to benefit from the technology’s success. But with blockchain technology now in the palm of our hands, the opportunity presents itself once again. And so, the question is: which blockchains will survive the test of time and which won’t?   Mona predicts “there will be some sort of consolidation process. I wouldn't say every blockchain I haven't heard of is going to be weeded out. I don't have a crystal ball.  But there's incredible building going on, so maybe a big winner could be one we haven't even heard of yet.”

How do venture capitalists make investment choices? There are many answers to this all-important question for entrepreneurs looking to raise capital for their start-ups.  Tokentus, a German publicly listed VC company is an early stage investor that focuses on the blockchain market. Its Investment Manager, Mona Tiesler says one of the top criteria they look at in a start-up is its founder’s strengths - including his or her background, mindset, commitment, knowledge of the technology - as well as the business use case and the product market fit. Another important aspect is the team behind the founder and whether are complimentary to his or her skill set. As Mona tells Charles Miller on this episode of CoinGeek Conversations, Tokentus is focused on finding start-ups in the Web3 space. While the term Web3 varies in definition, for Mona it can be explained as a decentralized web with Web3 companies being those that utilize blockchain technology to create efficiencies.   Tokentus however is not aiming to add all types of blockchain-based companies to their portfolio. They focus on financial services in Web3 related businesses, as well as some consumer facing businesses such as those in retail payments. According to Mona, Tokentus favours infrastructure and applications that will essentially power the future internet.   Mona points out that Tokentus is blockchain agnostic. She believes that every blockchain is different and that each serves a unique purpose. In her opinion, BTC is the safest when it comes to store of value while ETC offers the biggest community with more potential in adoption opportunities. Mona believes that blockchain will continue to evolve:  “I don't think necessarily the landscape we see now is going to be the landscape we see in the future, but I do believe that there will be a myriad of different blockchains existing in the future, utilized for different use cases.” For some, the emergence of blockchain technology is likened to the onset of the consumer internet. Many companies formed during the internet’s early days failed to see it through, in effect, missing the opportunity to benefit from the technology’s success. But with blockchain technology now in the palm of our hands, the opportunity presents itself once again. And so, the question is: which blockchains will survive the test of time and which won’t?   Mona predicts “there will be some sort of consolidation process. I wouldn't say every blockchain I haven't heard of is going to be weeded out. I don't have a crystal ball.  But there's incredible building going on, so maybe a big winner could be one we haven't even heard of yet.”

Mona Tiesler: A venture capitalist on Web3 prospects

Jerry Chan

You can’t escape debates about AI at the moment. BSV entrepreneurs are as fascinated as anyone else - perhaps more so if they have experienced previous tech revolutions. Jerry Chan has gone public with his cautious scepticism about the much-publicised dangers of AI, but in this week’s CoinGeek Conversations, the former blockchain infrastructure developer and Wall Street technologist says he also sees the potential of AI, and that it could have a role in his forthcoming Frobots game. “I am impressed,” he says of his experience with ChatGPT, “it is effectively like Google search on steroids …But it doesn't know if what it's saying is true or false.”It’s been suggested that what’s unique about generative AI (that is, AI which creates its own content in its responses) is the existence of emergent properties - higher order functions which weren’t written into the software but somehow appear, if not of their own accord then at least to the surprise of its programmers.Jerry believes that these kinds of property don’t mean we need to attribute sentience to AI or to worry that it’s acquiring human abilities. You can think of AI as the “equivalent of saying somebody's brain has massive breadth but very shallow depth - they can know much more about many more topics than any one human brain and sort of overlay layers of meaning and see which layer of meaning makes the most sense. But at the end of the day, the thing that makes humans humans is we have our own internal volition - we don't have a program we're going by.”To try to define what is unique about human beings, Chan points to Richard Dawkins’ book, The Extended Phenotype, which talks about how our genes are responsible not only for the physical manifestation of our bodies - the phenotype - but also for the ways in which we affect our environment too. That starts with the genes producing cells which act together, each cell ‘knowing’ whether it should be, say, a skin cell or muscle cell. When the cells lose this ability to act together and can only behave independently, they become cancer cells, no longer a useful part of the being in which they live. So, says Chan, “we as humans have innately - down to our cellular structure - a notion of self, even cellular self, which aggregates …and AIs are nothing like that”.Despite his mild scepticism about the dangers of AI, Chan isn’t saying that its developers should be left to do entirely as they please, because there are also potential dangers: “Regulation would be good because if something comes out of regulation that says ‘let's put some checks and balances for whatever AI you create …Let's not plug it up into the nuclear launch code system, let's agree not to do that’. That would be a good regulation.”More immediately, Chan is interested in AI as a part of the STEM education game, Frobots, which he is developing. The idea is to teach players computer programming, but AI gives another dimension to the idea: “humans could write programs to fight and AIs could write programs, and I'm not exactly clear whether it's certain that AI would win, because compared to chess or Go, which we know AI wins …the game is not well-defined. It's an open ended game”. 

You can’t escape debates about AI at the moment. BSV entrepreneurs are as fascinated as anyone else - perhaps more so if they have experienced previous tech revolutions. Jerry Chan has gone <a href="https://coingeek.com/artificial-intelligence-still-a-long-way-away/" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">public</a> with his cautious scepticism about the much-publicised dangers of AI, but in this week’s CoinGeek Conversations, the former blockchain infrastructure developer and Wall Street technologist says he also sees the potential of AI, and that it could have a role in his forthcoming <a href="https://www.frobots.io/#top" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Frobots</a> game. “I am impressed,” he says of his experience with ChatGPT, “it is effectively like Google search on steroids …But it doesn't know if what it's saying is true or false.”It’s been suggested that what’s unique about generative AI (that is, AI which creates its own content in its responses) is the existence of <a href="https://medium.com/technicity/should-we-be-wary-of-the-emergent-properties-of-ai-882910bac91c#:~:text=Emergent%20properties%20are%20characteristics%20or,collective%20behavior%20of%20the%20system." rel="nofollow" target="_blank">emergent properties</a> - higher order functions which weren’t written into the software but somehow appear, if not of their own accord then at least to the surprise of its programmers.Jerry believes that these kinds of property don’t mean we need to attribute sentience to AI or to worry that it’s acquiring human abilities. You can think of AI as the “equivalent of saying somebody's brain has massive breadth but very shallow depth - they can know much more about many more topics than any one human brain and sort of overlay layers of meaning and see which layer of meaning makes the most sense. But at the end of the day, the thing that makes humans humans is we have our own internal volition - we don't have a program we're going by.”To try to define what is unique about human beings, Chan points to Richard Dawkins’ book, <a href="https://www.amazon.co.uk/Extended-Phenotype-Oxford-Landmark-Science/dp/0198788916/ref=sr_1_1?crid=LYNM6ITOASKN&amp;keywords=Richard+Dawkins+extended+phenotype&amp;qid=1686557075&amp;sprefix=richard+dawkins+extended+phenotype%2Caps%2C72&amp;sr=8-1" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">The Extended Phenotype</a>, which talks about how our genes are responsible not only for the physical manifestation of our bodies - the phenotype - but also for the ways in which we affect our environment too. That starts with the genes producing cells which act together, each cell ‘knowing’ whether it should be, say, a skin cell or muscle cell. When the cells lose this ability to act together and can only behave independently, they become cancer cells, no longer a useful part of the being in which they live. So, says Chan, “we as humans have innately - down to our cellular structure - a notion of self, even cellular self, which aggregates …and AIs are nothing like that”.Despite his mild scepticism about the dangers of AI, Chan isn’t saying that its developers should be left to do entirely as they please, because there are also potential dangers: “Regulation would be good because if something comes out of regulation that says ‘let's put some checks and balances for whatever AI you create …Let's not plug it up into the nuclear launch code system, let's agree not to do that’. That would be a good regulation.”More immediately, Chan is interested in AI as a part of the STEM education game, Frobots, which he is developing. The idea is to teach players computer programming, but AI gives another dimension to the idea: “humans could write programs to fight and AIs could write programs, and I'm not exactly clear whether it's certain that AI would win, because compared to chess or Go, which we know AI wins …the game is not well-defined. It's an open ended game”.

Jerry Chan: Does AI know what it’s doing?

Calvin Ayre

Calvin Ayre: Blockchain can make governments look good to their citizens The London Blockchain Conference next week will be held at a prestigious venue in Parliament Square - no coincidence because its tagline is “Bringing government and enterprise onto the blockchain”. As conference creator Calvin Ayre explained in this week’s CoinGeek Conversations, the use of blockchain could benefit both governments and citizens:   “Governments can use this technology to manage data in a way that makes them look really good to their citizens. They're saving costs. They're being able to provide unique services that weren’t possible before.”  But the “honesty and truthfulness” of a government will also become more transparent to its citizens, which may not always be welcome, Ayre believes: “it's going to be interesting to see how this unfolds because we do know that a lot of governments don't like things that force them to be honest”.  The conference is “about solving big data challenges in a unique way with blockchains”. And although Ayre is a big supporter of the Bitcoin SV (BSV) blockchain - partly through his Ayre Ventures, which invests exclusively in BSV businesses -, he insists that the conference is not a BSV event: “BSV is just a tool. If someone else has another tool that wants to compete in that space, then the conference is open to them.”  Indeed, the conference advertised for participation by supporters of any other blockchain that had what Ayre considers essential to serve this market - unbounded scaling, the ability to make nano payments and a readiness to follow all existing laws - but nobody applied: “nothing came back. Not one person. And I found that shocking actually”.  Ayre draws a complete distinction between the work he supports and the rest of the ‘crypto’ market. He sees no future for crypto and backs the suggestion of a Select Committee of British MPs who recently recommended that crypto should be regulated under gambling laws rather than financial - as it currently is under the FCA (Financial Conduct Authority) in the UK.   “Innovation on blockchains will happen after the crypto nonsense is cleared of the way,” he says. And as a former entrepreneur in the world of online gaming he believes that crypto is “like gambling - only it's like illegal, unregulated gambling”.  On the current media focus on AI, Ayre believes that more important technological developments will be centred on the implementation of BSV and IPV6 - an internet protocol that allows greater scaling of IP addresses than the currently more common IPV4.   “You're not going to solve the challenges that the Internet has with artificial intelligence. You need what BSV does to make the Internet work better, for artificial intelligence to work better. They are things that will actually work together”. The BSV blockchain could provide a record of the provenance of data used in AI - an essential additional component to make its results more trustworthy.   On the question of Dr Craig Wright’s many ongoing court cases, closely followed in BSV circles, Ayre is a huge supporter of Dr Wright on social media, but admits “I'm not a fan of all his court cases. I actually wish that there was a lot less of that and a lot more focus on business.” Nevertheless, Ayre has no doubts about Dr Wright’s claims - “of course I support him because he's right. I just don't think that all that stuff needs to be proven right now”. He jokes that “everything looks like a nail to Craig and he's got a couple of hammers in his hands”.  The London conference will be the first of a regular annual event, Ayre says. From next year, he wants to expand it from this year’s two stages - focussing on business and technology - to three, and to extend th

Calvin Ayre: Blockchain can make governments look good to their citizens The London Blockchain Conference next week will be held at a prestigious venue in Parliament Square - no coincidence because its tagline is “Bringing government and enterprise onto the blockchain”. As conference creator Calvin Ayre explained in this week’s CoinGeek Conversations, the use of blockchain could benefit both governments and citizens:   “Governments can use this technology to manage data in a way that makes them look really good to their citizens. They're saving costs. They're being able to provide unique services that weren’t possible before.”  But the “honesty and truthfulness” of a government will also become more transparent to its citizens, which may not always be welcome, Ayre believes: “it's going to be interesting to see how this unfolds because we do know that a lot of governments don't like things that force them to be honest”.  The conference is “about solving big data challenges in a unique way with blockchains”. And although Ayre is a big supporter of the Bitcoin SV (BSV) blockchain - partly through his Ayre Ventures, which invests exclusively in BSV businesses -, he insists that the conference is not a BSV event: “BSV is just a tool. If someone else has another tool that wants to compete in that space, then the conference is open to them.”  Indeed, the conference advertised for participation by supporters of any other blockchain that had what Ayre considers essential to serve this market - unbounded scaling, the ability to make nano payments and a readiness to follow all existing laws - but nobody applied: “nothing came back. Not one person. And I found that shocking actually”.  Ayre draws a complete distinction between the work he supports and the rest of the ‘crypto’ market. He sees no future for crypto and backs the suggestion of a Select Committee of British MPs who recently recommended that crypto should be regulated under gambling laws rather than financial - as it currently is under the FCA (Financial Conduct Authority) in the UK.   “Innovation on blockchains will happen after the crypto nonsense is cleared of the way,” he says. And as a former entrepreneur in the world of online gaming he believes that crypto is “like gambling - only it's like illegal, unregulated gambling”.  On the current media focus on AI, Ayre believes that more important technological developments will be centred on the implementation of BSV and IPV6 - an internet protocol that allows greater scaling of IP addresses than the currently more common IPV4.   “You're not going to solve the challenges that the Internet has with artificial intelligence. You need what BSV does to make the Internet work better, for artificial intelligence to work better. They are things that will actually work together”. The BSV blockchain could provide a record of the provenance of data used in AI - an essential additional component to make its results more trustworthy.   On the question of Dr Craig Wright’s many ongoing court cases, closely followed in BSV circles, Ayre is a huge supporter of Dr Wright on social media, but admits “I'm not a fan of all his court cases. I actually wish that there was a lot less of that and a lot more focus on business.” Nevertheless, Ayre has no doubts about Dr Wright’s claims - “of course I support him because he's right. I just don't think that all that stuff needs to be proven right now”. He jokes that “everything looks like a nail to Craig and he's got a couple of hammers in his hands”.  The London conference will be the first of a regular annual event, Ayre says. From next year, he wants to expand it from this year’s two stages - focussing on business and technology - to three, and to extend th

Calvin Ayre: Blockchain can make governments look good to their citizens

CoinGeek Conversations is a weekly podcast update on the thriving BitcoinSV ecosystem - for beginners as well as those already deeply immersed in it. CoinGeek's Charles Miller meets entrepreneurs, technologists and businesspeople to ask about their work and their visions for the future. You don't need to be an expert in computer science or business studies. But you do need an appetite to learn about the most exciting new technology of our time.

Very interesting to catch glimpses of the Cambrian explosion of creativity and innovation happening on Bitcoin SV. It’s under the radar right now, but will be world changing in coming years.

BSV is Bitcoin

CoinGeek Conversations

In a wide-ranging interview with CoinGeek, the businessman Calvin Ayre, a major supporter of Bitcoin SV and the work of Dr Craig Wright, says that a forthcoming legal case being brought to prove that Dr Wright is Satoshi Nakamoto, the creator of Bitcoin, could also lead to a ruling that would stop other cryptocurrencies using the name Bitcoin. To do so would constitute "consumer fraud", Ayre warned. 

In a wide-ranging interview with CoinGeek, the businessman Calvin Ayre, a major supporter of Bitcoin SV and the work of Dr Craig Wright, says that a forthcoming legal case being brought to prove that Dr Wright is Satoshi Nakamoto, the creator of Bitcoin, could also lead to a ruling that would stop other cryptocurrencies using the name Bitcoin. To do so would constitute "consumer fraud", Ayre warned.

Calvin Ayre: courts could rule on "consumer fraud" of cryptos claiming to be Bitcoin

Stephan Nilsson

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.” 

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.”

Stephan Nilsson: BSV can fix the world’s supply chains

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.”

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.”

Jerry Chan: Bitcoin will improve the Internet by bringing value to data

Kristy-Leigh Minehan

Kristy-Leigh Minehan was into Bitcoin before most people had heard of it. She was getting paid in Bitcoin for developer work, and was pleased to be able to convert her first payment into enough dollars to buy one of Apple’s fancy new iPads. She loved her iPad. But perhaps not so much that she would have chosen it over the more than $200 million that those Bitcoins would be worth now.Today, as Chief Technical Officer of Core Scientific in Seattle, Washington, Kristy-Leigh is still working in cryptocurrency and blockchain and is confident they’re going to be widely adopted. That will create opportunities for experts to build new kinds of servicing businesses that will integrate blockchain solutions, themselves getting paid with micropayments for each transaction.“You’d go to a business, and you’d say ‘listen, I’ll build all of this out for you on a smart contract. And then every time that smart contract is processed, every time those rules are executed, I will take a very small per cent’ ...Multiply that by millions and millions of transactions per day - bingo! You’ve got a sustainable business.”That’s just one example of a wider push that Kristy-Leigh would like to see towards “building infrastructure”. That means creating the kind of basic products that are taken for granted in other software areas. In blockchain and cryptocurrency, they would allow people to get involved more easily:“We need to start building things like tools - debuggers, all of the basic stacks of software that traditional software development has. Build it from the ground up so that anyone - any teenager, any high schooler can jump in and start creating on the Bitcoin blockchain.”Alongside the infrastructure, Kristy-Leigh wants the sector to work closely with regulators to build confidence with established public and private sector players: “If the governments are saying ‘hey, we need KYC [‘know your customer’ - processes to guard against money laundering and other regulatory issues], we need to come over to them and say ‘OK, great, what KYC standards do you need, that still protects customers’ privacy, but allows you to get enough information to know what the sources of these funds are, and are people paying their taxes?’”That kind of protection would lead to greater adoption of cryptocurrency by banks and governments and lead to people “letting it into their lives”.Long term, Kristy-Leigh has a vision for national currencies to be conducted on a blockchain. Just as each currency note now has its own serial number, each transaction would be traceable on the blockchain. The physical aspect of money is “clunky and it’s prone to errors and it’s prone to laundering”. Instead, there’ll be a “digital-backed system with asset IDs that are tracked”. It’s a big ambition because it would entail more discipline from governments: they wouldn’t be able to print more money to fix their problems. But Kristy-Leigh is bullish about the prospects: “all it takes is one country to adopt it and the rest will have to play catchup.”

Kristy-Leigh Minehan was into Bitcoin before most people had heard of it. She was getting paid in Bitcoin for developer work, and was pleased to be able to convert her first payment into enough dollars to buy one of Apple’s fancy new iPads. She loved her iPad. But perhaps not so much that she would have chosen it over the more than $200 million that those Bitcoins would be worth now. Today, as Chief Technical Officer of Core Scientific in Seattle, Washington, Kristy-Leigh is still working in cryptocurrency and blockchain and is confident they’re going to be widely adopted. That will create opportunities for experts to build new kinds of servicing businesses that will integrate blockchain solutions, themselves getting paid with micropayments for each transaction. “You’d go to a business, and you’d say ‘listen, I’ll build all of this out for you on a smart contract. And then every time that smart contract is processed, every time those rules are executed, I will take a very small per cent’ ...Multiply that by millions and millions of transactions per day - bingo! You’ve got a sustainable business.” That’s just one example of a wider push that Kristy-Leigh would like to see towards “building infrastructure”. That means creating the kind of basic products that are taken for granted in other software areas. In blockchain and cryptocurrency, they would allow people to get involved more easily: “We need to start building things like tools - debuggers, all of the basic stacks of software that traditional software development has. Build it from the ground up so that anyone - any teenager, any high schooler can jump in and start creating on the Bitcoin blockchain.” Alongside the infrastructure, Kristy-Leigh wants the sector to work closely with regulators to build confidence with established public and private sector players:  “If the governments are saying ‘hey, we need KYC [‘know your customer’ - processes to guard against money laundering and other regulatory issues], we need to come over to them and say ‘OK, great, what KYC standards do you need, that still protects customers’ privacy, but allows you to get enough information to know what the sources of these funds are, and are people paying their taxes?’” That kind of protection would lead to greater adoption of cryptocurrency by banks and governments and lead to people “letting it into their lives”. Long term, Kristy-Leigh has a vision for national currencies to be conducted on a blockchain. Just as each currency note now has its own serial number, each transaction would be traceable on the blockchain. The physical aspect of money is “clunky and it’s prone to errors and it’s prone to laundering”. Instead, there’ll be a “digital-backed system with asset IDs that are tracked”.  It’s a big ambition because it would entail more discipline from governments: they wouldn’t be able to print more money to fix their problems. But Kristy-Leigh is bullish about the prospects: “all it takes is one country to adopt it and the rest will have to play catchup.”

Kristy-Leigh Minehan: Bringing blockchain to big business

Craig Wright

Dr Craig Wright is the Chief Scientist of nChain and the main creator of Bitcoin, he says, as the pseudonymous Satoshi Nakamoto. In a wide-ranging interview, Wright takes the chance to correct a few myths about Bitcoin’s origins and purpose. First, he says that Bitcoin is not a cryptocurrency: “cryptography is secret writing. Bitcoin is the exact opposite of that. Bitcoin is basically a public ledger”. Wright makes a distinction between Bitcoin and ecash systems which use technology to “cryptographically hide something”. Instead, Bitcoin is a “chain of evidence” that is “pretty much everything that those other systems that aim for anonymous transfer are not”.What’s more, Wright doesn’t even accept that Bitcoin is a currency since that implies a level of official acceptance - “something that’s used by the state”. In time, Bitcoin will be currency, he says. But first, he predicts the release of “tokenized fiat” by states, which will “use the capabilities of Bitcoin to print their own money on top of it”. Thirdly, Bitcoin is not about “democratizing finance”. You can’t do that with Bitcoin, he says. The only kind of decentralizing that works will be achieved by sticking to a stable protocol: “you pull the developers from ever making a change”. In that sense, it’s about taking away the power of developers. Developers “are the cancer in Bitcoin”. Two more corrections to conventional wisdom: Wright is sceptical about the potential future threat to crypto systems from quantum computing. “to create something that could attack Bitcoin in the mythical quantum computer world” would require an unrealistic area of quantum computer space: “it’s fud, it’s snake oil ...none of it will ever affect Bitcoin.” Finally, on the widespread criticism of mining as a profligate user of electricity, Wright says Google uses “thousands of times more”, as do Visa and Mastercard. “People who want to attack the system make things up”.  Alongside Bitcoin as money is the use of the blockchain to store non-financial data. Wright is developing the blockchain-based Metanet, which he says that has the potential to threaten the ubiquity of the Internet and the dominance of the tech giants: “it changes everything in giving people control of their own lives. Rather than having people like Twitter or Facebook owning everything you’re doing, it now allows you to start creating your own space”. The bargain that users currently make with the tech giants, to sell their data in return for the services offered, is one in which users don’t really have a choice, Wright says: with the Internet so important in our lives, to decide not to use the big tech services would be “like saying ‘don’t use electricity’...You have to use it for work etc.”But there is an opportunity for the Metanet because “the [online] model for advertisements is incredibly inefficient”. It leads to clickfraud, which the tech companies have to spend money fighting. He believes users would be prepared to make micropayments for search results rather than being stuck with the ad model in which they are selling they data. In time, he says you might only have to pay a thousandth of a cent for a set of search results.He is currently writing openly about being Satoshi because, he says, “unfortunately I’ve got a whole lot of greedy con men who all want money”. As for the choice of Satoshi as a name, he says that it’s “a bit silly” but it’s the Japanese for ash. The idea, which he originally saw in The Economist magazine, is that new money will rise from the ashes. As for Nakamoto, that’s the name of a Japanese 18th Century philosopher. He doesn’t see any value in the figure of Nakamoto remaining enigmatically anonymous: “the myth 

Dr Craig Wright is the Chief Scientist of nChain and the main creator of Bitcoin, he says, as the pseudonymous Satoshi Nakamoto. In a wide-ranging interview, Wright takes the chance to correct a few myths about Bitcoin’s origins and purpose.  First, he says that Bitcoin is not a cryptocurrency: “cryptography is secret writing. Bitcoin is the exact opposite of that. Bitcoin is basically a public ledger”. Wright makes a distinction between Bitcoin and ecash systems which use technology to “cryptographically hide something”. Instead, Bitcoin is a “chain of evidence” that is “pretty much everything that those other systems that aim for anonymous transfer are not”.What’s more, Wright doesn’t even accept that Bitcoin is a currency since that implies a level of official acceptance - “something that’s used by the state”. In time, Bitcoin will be currency, he says. But first, he predicts the release of “tokenized fiat” by states, which will “use the capabilities of Bitcoin to print their own money on top of it”. Thirdly, Bitcoin is not about “democratizing finance”. You can’t do that with Bitcoin, he says. The only kind of decentralizing that works will be achieved by sticking to a stable protocol: “you pull the developers from ever making a change”. In that sense, it’s about taking away the power of developers. Developers “are the cancer in Bitcoin”. Two more corrections to conventional wisdom: Wright is sceptical about the potential future threat to crypto systems from quantum computing. “to create something that could attack Bitcoin in the mythical quantum computer world” would require an unrealistic area of quantum computer space: “it’s fud, it’s snake oil ...none of it will ever affect Bitcoin.” Finally, on the widespread criticism of mining as a profligate user of electricity, Wright says Google uses “thousands of times more”, as do Visa and Mastercard. “People who want to attack the system make things up”.  Alongside Bitcoin as money is the use of the blockchain to store non-financial data. Wright is developing the blockchain-based <a href="https://coingeek.com/surveillance-economy-metanet-economy/" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Metanet</a>, which he says that has the potential to threaten the ubiquity of the Internet and the dominance of the tech giants: “it changes everything in giving people control of their own lives. Rather than having people like Twitter or Facebook owning everything you’re doing, it now allows you to start creating your own space”. The bargain that users currently make with the tech giants, to sell their data in return for the services offered, is one in which users don’t really have a choice, Wright says: with the Internet so important in our lives, to decide not to use the big tech services would be “like saying ‘don’t use electricity’...You have to use it for work etc.”But there is an opportunity for the Metanet because “the [online] model for advertisements is incredibly inefficient”. It leads to clickfraud, which the tech companies have to spend money fighting. He believes users would be prepared to make micropayments for search results rather than being stuck with the ad model in which they are selling they data. In time, he says you might only have to pay a thousandth of a cent for a set of search results.He is currently writing openly about <a href="https://coingeek.com/dr-craig-wright-satoshi/" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">being Satoshi</a> because, he says, “unfortunately I’ve got a whole lot of greedy con men who all want money”. As for the choice of Satoshi as a name, he says that it’s “a bit silly” but it’s the Japanese for ash. The idea, which he originally saw in The Economist magazine, is that new money will rise from the ashes. As for <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tominaga_Nakamoto" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Nakamoto</a>, that’s the name of a Japanese 18th Century philosopher. He doesn’t see any value in the figure of Nakamoto remaining enigmatically anonymous: “the myth

Craig Wright: Bitcoin is not a cryptocurrency

Lise Li

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”. 

Lise Li has all the right credentials for her new job as <a href="https://coingeek.com/bitcoin-association-hires-lise-li-as-china-manager-to-grow-bitcoin-sv-in-the-region/" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">China Manager</a> 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 <a href="https://blockchain.news/Post?id=chinas-shenzhen-special-economic-zone-supports-digital-currency-research" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Special Economic Zone</a> 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 <a href="http://weiblock.app" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">WeiBlock</a> 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”.

Lise Li: Why Bitcoin SV will succeed in China

Jimmy Nguyen

In a wide-ranging conversation, Jimmy Nguyen, President of the Bitcoin Association and and Chair of the Strategic Advisory Board for nChain, discusses Bitcoin SV, nChain's business model - including the role of the many hundreds of patent applications it has filed - and the how things work between the "unlikely trio" of senior figures behind Bitcoin SV - himself, Calvin Ayre and Craig Wright. Finally, Jimmy gives his view on the endlessly fascinating question of Craig Wright being Satoshi Nakamoto.  

In a wide-ranging conversation, Jimmy Nguyen, President of the Bitcoin Association and and Chair of the Strategic Advisory Board for nChain, discusses Bitcoin SV, nChain's business model - including the role of the many hundreds of patent applications it has filed - and the how things work between the "unlikely trio" of senior figures behind Bitcoin SV - himself, Calvin Ayre and Craig Wright. Finally, Jimmy gives his view on the endlessly fascinating question of Craig Wright being Satoshi Nakamoto.

Jimmy Nguyen: Why nChain has filed so many patent applications

James Belding was an electrical engineer, working in the oil and gas industries in Australia when cryptocurrency caught his attention back in 2013. He was hooked - but it was only last year that he decided to devote himself full time to understanding how crypto works and to try to “add something to it, to make it better”.He wanted to start a business to help people to set up smart contracts. But he found there wasn’t an easy way to add contracts to the blockchain: “I was getting a bit frustrated, thinking ‘surely someone’s going to come up with this’ … but no-one did. So I started designing it myself”.  James assembled a group of four colleagues with a wide range of skills, from the technical to the legal. The team, spread around Australia and Singapore, have worked together to create Tokenized, which he believes can become “a sort of a commercial Internet on which all commerce is done”. ”Tokenized offers protocols for over 40 separate kinds of contract, with all the necessary legal parameters specified. That’s meant he and his team have had to study commercial law, and have lawyers combing through their work, making sure it’s all watertight. But Tokenized is not just for big financial or legal contracts: it could be something as ordinary as selling movie tickets. It’s a “structured template so that everyone involved in tokenized transactions knows what to expect.” It guides you to fill in the information that’s required in order for a contract to be valid. “I want to make it easy enough that anyone can do it and anyone can benefit from it.”After the recent Bitcoin SV network upgrade which allows more data to be carried in an individual transaction, the Tokenised team have been upgrading their protocol to use the extra space to improve the legal and financial protocols that Tokenized will include. He says they’re “creating what we hope will be the backbone of a new global financial system, one that has no barriers to entry and is ultra-convenient and low-cost.” And, using that extra space for data, a single token transaction can now involve different assets and different parties. This means, for instance, that you’ll be able to buy or sell shares or bonds on the blockchain, even if you’re nervous about converting fiat to crypto – because you’ll be able to trade with stablecoins, which are tied one to one with fiat currencies.Tokenized will be releasing the documentation for the upgraded version of the protocol in the next couple weeks. And meanwhile they’re continuing to work on their commercial platform and will be announcing a release date soon.

James Belding was an electrical engineer, working in the oil and gas industries in Australia when cryptocurrency caught his attention back in 2013. He was hooked - but it was only last year that he decided to devote himself full time to understanding how crypto works and to try to “add something to it, to make it better”. He wanted to start a business to help people to set up smart contracts. But he found there wasn’t an easy way to add contracts to the blockchain: “I was getting a bit frustrated, thinking ‘surely someone’s going to come up with this’ … but no-one did. So I started designing it myself”.  James assembled a group of four colleagues with a wide range of skills, from the technical to the legal. The team, spread around Australia and Singapore, have worked together to create Tokenized, which he believes can become “a sort of a commercial Internet on which all commerce is done”. ”Tokenized offers protocols for over 40 separate kinds of contract, with all the necessary legal parameters specified. That’s meant he and his team have had to study commercial law, and have lawyers combing through their work, making sure it’s all watertight. But Tokenized is not just for big financial or legal contracts: it could be something as ordinary as selling movie tickets. It’s a “structured template so that everyone involved in tokenized transactions knows what to expect.” It guides you to fill in the information that’s required in order for a contract to be valid. “I want to make it easy enough that anyone can do it and anyone can benefit from it.”After the recent Bitcoin SV network upgrade which allows more data to be carried in an individual transaction, the Tokenised team have been upgrading their protocol to use the extra space to improve the legal and financial protocols that Tokenized will include. He says they’re “creating what we hope will be the backbone of a new global financial system, one that has no barriers to entry and is ultra-convenient and low-cost.” And, using that extra space for data, a single token transaction can now involve different assets and different parties. This means, for instance, that you’ll be able to buy or sell shares or bonds on the blockchain, even if you’re nervous about converting fiat to crypto – because you’ll be able to trade with stablecoins, which are tied one to one with fiat currencies. Tokenized will be releasing the documentation for the upgraded version of the protocol in the next couple weeks. And meanwhile they’re continuing to work on their commercial platform and will be announcing a release date soon.

James Belding: Building the backbone of a new global financial system

Converting the fiat world to crypto isn't easy. This week's podcast shares the experience of four people from different businesses about what worked and what didn't in their dealings with a wide range of sectors. Elizabeth White of the luxury retailer The White Company in New York established her business with sales of Lamborghinis and other high priced items to customers who already had crypto. For her, the challenge was to persuade retailers to accept it. Heidi Patmore from the South African wallet company Centbee says you need to be aware of the priorities and concerns of large and small retailers, which are often very different.Ina Samovich of Coppay, the Belarus-based payment gateway, says they'd found it takes an average of an hour for their sales rep to convince a store owner to accept Bitcoin. And Martin Dempster of the Scottish drinks business, Brewdog has had direct experience on the front line from his company's opening of a new bar in London's Canary Wharf, where bar staff were trained to accept crypto from a Centbee wallet. All four were speaking at the last CoinGeek Week conference in London, on a panel hosted by Jimmy Nguyen, President of the Bitcoin Association. 

Converting the fiat world to crypto isn't easy. This week's podcast shares the experience of four people from different businesses about what worked and what didn't in their dealings with a wide range of sectors.  Elizabeth White of the luxury retailer The White Company in New York established her business with sales of Lamborghinis and other high priced items to customers who already had crypto. For her, the challenge was to persuade retailers to accept it.  Heidi Patmore from the South African wallet company Centbee says you need to be aware of the priorities and concerns of large and small retailers, which are often very different. Ina Samovich of Coppay, the Belarus-based payment gateway, says they'd found it takes an average of an hour for their sales rep to convince a store owner to accept Bitcoin.  And Martin Dempster of the Scottish drinks business, Brewdog has had direct experience on the front line from his company's opening of a new bar in London's Canary Wharf, where bar staff were trained to accept crypto from a Centbee wallet.  All four were speaking at the last CoinGeek Week conference in London, on a panel hosted by Jimmy Nguyen, President of the Bitcoin Association.

How to encourage businesses to use Bitcoin SV

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.”

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 <a href="https://www.faiabrand.org" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Faiā</a>, 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.”

Brendan Lee: Building the knowledge base for Bitcoin

Stephan Nilsson is working with fish farmers in his native Norway. He’s putting blockchain to use in a practical way - although his business sounds distinctly unworldly. It’s called UNISOT, which stands for Universal Source of Truth. Nilsson admits the name shows he’s “aiming high”. But then he insists he’s trying “to change the world” and believes he can “make a big difference”.Nilsson’s background is in supply chain management. He worked for SAP, the German enterprise resource planning (ERP) business, as an integration consultant. Now he’s using that experience to revolutionise supply chains with blockchain technology.Why blockchain? Well because it provides “immutable storage, where nobody can change things afterwards,” he says. “It’s more or less the only immutable system in the world.” And  a single integrated blockchain avoids the problems that often arise between different company systems. All suppliers who work together on the same system would still being able to set levels of privacy for their own data: “all the information that I put on the blockchain, I am still the owner of”. You can share the information with another company, but you still have the power to revoke access.So how does this apply to the Norwegian fishing industry? Well, UNISOT is working with a company that offers a supply chain monitoring product using SAP. UNISOT is providing the blockchain functionality within that service. Integrating blockchain with SAP software is “actually very easy if you know what you’re doing,” Nilsson says. He laughs at his own confidence but adds that it’s only easy for him because he’s worked with SAP for 20 years.So here’s what becomes possible with the UNISOT system: you can track a particular fish all the way from when it’s swimming around, to when it - or even just a small bit of it - appears on someone’s dinner plate. Using blockchain, all sorts of information, such as the precise history of a fish’s storage temperatures, can be uploaded, creating a kind of virtual fish whose every detail can be tracked. And it all starts when the salmon are directed down a pipe and photographed in a way that makes each one distinguishable from every other - using a kind of ‘facial recognition for fish’. You heard it here first!  

Stephan Nilsson is working with fish farmers in his native Norway. He’s putting blockchain to use in a practical way - although his business sounds distinctly unworldly. It’s called UNISOT, which stands for Universal Source of Truth. Nilsson admits the name shows he’s “aiming high”. But then he insists he’s trying “to change the world” and believes he can “make a big difference”. Nilsson’s background is in supply chain management. He worked for SAP, the German enterprise resource planning (ERP) business, as an integration consultant. Now he’s using that experience to revolutionise supply chains with blockchain technology. Why blockchain? Well because it provides “immutable storage, where nobody can change things afterwards,” he says. “It’s more or less the only immutable system in the world.” And  a single integrated blockchain avoids the problems that often arise between different company systems.  All suppliers who work together on the same system would still being able to set levels of privacy for their own data: “all the information that I put on the blockchain, I am still the owner of”. You can share the information with another company, but you still have the power to revoke access. So how does this apply to the Norwegian fishing industry? Well, UNISOT is working with a company that offers a supply chain monitoring product using SAP. UNISOT is providing the blockchain functionality within that service. Integrating blockchain with SAP software is “actually very easy if you know what you’re doing,” Nilsson says. He laughs at his own confidence but adds that it’s only easy for him because he’s worked with SAP for 20 years. So here’s what becomes possible with the UNISOT system: you can track a particular fish all the way from when it’s swimming around, to when it - or even just a small bit of it - appears on someone’s dinner plate. Using blockchain, all sorts of information, such as the precise history of a fish’s storage temperatures, can be uploaded, creating a kind of virtual fish whose every detail can be tracked.  And it all starts when the salmon are directed down a pipe and photographed in a way that makes each one distinguishable from every other - using a kind of ‘facial recognition for fish’. You heard it here first!

Stephan Nilsson: Changing the world with blockchain - one fish at a time

Paul Chiari

WeatherSV uses the Bitcoin SV blockchain to store data - detailed hourly weather readings for thousands of locations around the world - and to collect payments from its users via MoneyButton. It's a project of Paul Chiari, director of Tableland IT in Queensland, Australia. Paul is interested in how 'internet of things' systems could be used in his rural area to collect and amalgamate data for farmers. WeatherSV is an experimental project through which he's been learning about the potential of BSV, in collaboration with developers like unwriter, who have contributed open source software for BSV blockchain users. Paul says that the work of unwriter and others means that "the heavy lifting is being done, and you've just got to jump on board and have a go". So far, WeatherSV has received 500 subscriptions to activate weather reports in different locations.  

WeatherSV uses the Bitcoin SV blockchain to store data - detailed hourly weather readings for thousands of locations around the world - and to collect payments from its users via MoneyButton. It's a project of Paul Chiari, director of Tableland IT in Queensland, Australia. Paul is interested in how 'internet of things' systems could be used in his rural area to collect and amalgamate data for farmers. WeatherSV is an experimental project through which he's been learning about the potential of BSV, in collaboration with developers like unwriter, who have contributed open source software for BSV blockchain users. Paul says that the work of unwriter and others means that "the heavy lifting is being done, and you've just got to jump on board and have a go". So far, WeatherSV has received 500 subscriptions to activate weather reports in different locations.

Paul Chiari: The heavy lifting is being done, it's time to jump on board BSV and have a go

Take a listen and all will be explained. Normal service will be resumed next week. Thanks, Charles

Take a listen and all will be explained. Normal service will be resumed next week. Thanks, Charles

This is not a podcast

At London's Blockchain Expo, 16,000 people exhibited, networked or just gawped at stands promoting businesses that were too complicated or obscure to get their heads round. In this podcast Charles Miller tries to make sense of it all with the help of Osmin Callis from nChain, Richard Kastelein from Blockchain News and Sergio Rigert from Gingr - a Swiss startup that's putting prostitution on the blockchain.  

At London's Blockchain Expo, 16,000 people exhibited, networked or just gawped at stands promoting businesses that were too complicated or obscure to get their heads round. In this podcast Charles Miller tries to make sense of it all with the help of Osmin Callis from nChain, Richard Kastelein from Blockchain News and Sergio Rigert from Gingr - a Swiss startup that's putting prostitution on the blockchain.

What can't you do on blockchain?

Jack Liu

This is cool industry to be in, says Jack Liu of the crypto finance company Circle: “even fintech that’s not Bitcoin or not blockchain is not cool any more”. People who once dismissed the sector as a scam or a fraud, may say they’re still not ready to use crypto, but they now recognise that “this must be the future”.Jack graduated from his Canadian university in 2010 and started working for Barclays Capital in Hong Kong. He liked wearing a suit every day and “the money was pretty good too”.  But while the rest of his life was full of new technology, he says he found himself in a financial world that hadn’t changed much from the Wall Street described in Michael Lewis’ Liar’s Poker in the 1980s: “structurally, something was off in finance”. He decided to quit his job and move to Silicon Valley and “see what was going on in the fintech world”. And that’s how he discovered Bitcoin, in 2013.At the time, almost everyone in Bitcoin was from a technical, not a financial background. Jack wasn’t even sure he’d be able to get a job. But he started a blog to share his ideas about crypto. One feature of crypto compared to other Silicon Valley sectors, is that it was global from day one. Jack’s international experience led to a job as director of strategy at the crypto exchange Kraken. At the time, it wasn’t clear how you could make money in crypto. There were really only two ideas, Jack said: “there was mining and there was exchange”. Today, that’s all changed and Jack’s vision for the potential of the sector has increased dramatically: “money is just a representation of value”. Once you have money that can move instantly across borders and be transferred using microtransactions, “that can underpin an entirely different economic structure for all of humanity”. And it’s not just the practicalities: Jack believes that the crypto revolution will be so profound that it will “improve the quality of living for every single person on the planet. It will do that even for people who don’t even know what Bitcoin is and will never own a Bitcoin.”But how? Well, it would do that by allowing everyone to fulfill their potential by reducing the risks associated with pursuing the brilliant ideas that we all have, but mostly leave unexploited. Instead of having to give up your job to move onto a more interesting path, you’d “get paid every single minute” for making any kind of contribution - from flipping burgers to writing a brilliant book. And that’s because Bitcoin would provide an easy economic transaction path to every single person on the planet. “Work becomes a hobby,” says Jack, “because for anything you do, you’re going to be able to get the appropriate value for that contribution. There’ll be no frictions in the Bitcoin world.” It’ll be like “the gig economy on steroids”.If that sounds like something you might not want, don’t worry: it’ll release creativity and allow us to escape from crude materialism. It’ll be like “a digital Renaissance”. And Jack goes further: “it’ll have the kind of effect of making earth seem like heaven”, and the way we live today “will be looked at by historians in the future, [and] seem like hell”.And if you do, by some misfortune, find that you aren’t able to work, as long as you have previously worked in a Bitcoin economy, you’ll be OK because the Bitcoin you have already earned will be worth more and more as time goes on.  

This is cool industry to be in, says Jack Liu of the crypto finance company Circle: “even fintech that’s not Bitcoin or not blockchain is not cool any more”. People who once dismissed the sector as a scam or a fraud, may say they’re still not ready to use crypto, but they now recognise that “this must be the future”.Jack graduated from his Canadian university in 2010 and started working for Barclays Capital in Hong Kong. He liked wearing a suit every day and “the money was pretty good too”.  But while the rest of his life was full of new technology, he says he found himself in a financial world that hadn’t changed much from the Wall Street described in Michael Lewis’ Liar’s Poker in the 1980s: “structurally, something was off in finance”. He decided to quit his job and move to Silicon Valley and “see what was going on in the fintech world”. And that’s how he discovered Bitcoin, in 2013.At the time, almost everyone in Bitcoin was from a technical, not a financial background. Jack wasn’t even sure he’d be able to get a job. But he started a blog to share his ideas about crypto. One feature of crypto compared to other Silicon Valley sectors, is that it was global from day one. Jack’s international experience led to a job as director of strategy at the crypto exchange <a href="https://www.kraken.com/" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Kraken</a>. At the time, it wasn’t clear how you could make money in crypto. There were really only two ideas, Jack said: “there was mining and there was exchange”. Today, that’s all changed and Jack’s vision for the potential of the sector has increased dramatically: “money is just a representation of value”. Once you have money that can move instantly across borders and be transferred using microtransactions, “that can underpin an entirely different economic structure for all of humanity”. And it’s not just the practicalities: Jack believes that the crypto revolution will be so profound that it will “improve the quality of living for every single person on the planet. It will do that even for people who don’t even know what Bitcoin is and will never own a Bitcoin.”But how? Well, it would do that by allowing everyone to fulfill their potential by reducing the risks associated with pursuing the brilliant ideas that we all have, but mostly leave unexploited. Instead of having to give up your job to move onto a more interesting path, you’d “get paid every single minute” for making any kind of contribution - from flipping burgers to writing a brilliant book. And that’s because Bitcoin would provide an easy economic transaction path to every single person on the planet. “Work becomes a hobby,” says Jack, “because for anything you do, you’re going to be able to get the appropriate value for that contribution. There’ll be no frictions in the Bitcoin world.” It’ll be like “the gig economy on steroids”.If that sounds like something you might not want, don’t worry: it’ll release creativity and allow us to escape from crude materialism. It’ll be like “a digital Renaissance”. And Jack goes further: “it’ll have the kind of effect of making earth seem like heaven”, and the way we live today “will be looked at by historians in the future, [and] seem like hell”. And if you do, by some misfortune, find that you aren’t able to work, as long as you have previously worked in a Bitcoin economy, you’ll be OK because the Bitcoin you have already earned will be worth more and more as time goes on.

Jack Liu: Bitcoin will create a digital Renaissance

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. 

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 <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hakka_Chinese" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Hakka</a>. 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.

Dean Little: BSV works because it can value information on a very small scale

Mark Allison has been a freelance IT consultant for 20 years, specialising in data. He works for investment banks, retailers, insurance companies, hedge funds and payment processors. Many of the people he deals with are sceptical about Bitcoin - and have been more so since the crash in its value last year. But Mark is optimistic about Bitcoin’s prospects and has been following the sector closely. Now he’s spending his evenings and weekends building products for Bitcoin SV (BSV). “I see huge potential”, he says. Bitcoin could allow governments and banks to be more transparent. “If we do move over to Bitcoin as a currency ...I think everyone’s going to be better off.” He understands the scepticism among his City and IT colleagues: “because BTC [Bitcoin Core] has these limits in place, it couldn’t scale, so people who did go out and buy Bitcoin and try to use it, were like, ‘well, it’s not actually very good, is it?’.” With transaction fees rising to around $50, its prospects for being used as a global cash seemed “ridiculous”.  But Mark says the limits on transactions and high fees were artificial and the appearance of Bitcoin SV (BSV) has given him even more hope because it returns to the ideas of the original Bitcoin White Paper, of which Mark is a huge fan: “When you consider Bitcoin as a whole, I see it like a Michelangelo painting: it’s a thing of beauty. If you look at the economics behind it, all the incentives behind it - how the miners are incentivised - if you look at the computer science breakthrough that happened to solve the Byzantine Generals problem, if you look at the game theory behind it, if you look at the law: all of these elements all come together in one package, and it’s just a beautiful thing.”The developers at nChain are removing many of the limits imposed on BTC, and then “Bitcoin can really realise its potential”. It will make business more efficient by reducing their costs. All it will take it one large business to start using it. Dr Craig Wright, Jimmy Nguyen and others have spoken of the need to achieve massive scaling on the BSV network - and Mark agrees: “we need to scale now”. With the mining block subsidy being halved again next year in line with how Bitcoin was set up, eventually “if there’s not significant volume, then the miners are going to leave - so we’ve got this ticking time bomb”. The answer to that problem is BSV, Mark says. It’s not only a stable platform in terms of the protocol, but nChain is committed to scaling. “If we don’t scale, it’s going to fail,” Mark says. “We need to see consistent large blocks though real world usage”, for instance for data that needs to be immutably stored with proof of existence. To help things along, Mark has been making his own applications for BSV. The first is a Chrome extension for the Handcash wallet. To make it, Mark had to teach himself Javascript, among other things, over two or three weekends. After about a month, he says, he “managed to cobble something together that kind of worked”. You can try the Handcash Handle Converter for yourself: it converts a Handcash handle into a Bitcoin address. Or, thanks to fellow developer Derek Moore, who made use of Mark’s open source project, you can get the same functions on a website, handcash.to.Mark’s second project is an analytics database, SVCharts, which produces Bitcoin trends, such as mining fees: “ultimately what I want to have is a self-service analytics platform.” The project includes an interesting monetisation model using MoneyButton. 

Mark Allison has been a freelance IT consultant for 20 years, specialising in data. He works for investment banks, retailers, insurance companies, hedge funds and payment processors. Many of the people he deals with are sceptical about Bitcoin - and have been more so since the crash in its value last year. But Mark is optimistic about Bitcoin’s prospects and has been following the sector closely. Now he’s spending his evenings and weekends building products for Bitcoin SV (BSV). “I see huge potential”, he says. Bitcoin could allow governments and banks to be more transparent. “If we do move over to Bitcoin as a currency ...I think everyone’s going to be better off.” He understands the scepticism among his City and IT colleagues: “because BTC [Bitcoin Core] has these limits in place, it couldn’t scale, so people who did go out and buy Bitcoin and try to use it, were like, ‘well, it’s not actually very good, is it?’.” With transaction fees rising to around $50, its prospects for being used as a global cash seemed “ridiculous”.  But Mark says the limits on transactions and high fees were artificial and the appearance of Bitcoin SV (BSV) has given him even more hope because it returns to the ideas of the original Bitcoin <a href="https://bitcoin.org/bitcoin.pdf" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">White Paper</a>, of which Mark is a huge fan: “When you consider Bitcoin as a whole, I see it like a Michelangelo painting: it’s a thing of beauty. If you look at the economics behind it, all the incentives behind it - how the miners are incentivised - if you look at the computer science breakthrough that happened to solve the <a href="https://captainaltcoin.com/byzantine-generals-problem/" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Byzantine Generals problem</a>, if you look at the game theory behind it, if you look at the law: all of these elements all come together in one package, and it’s just a beautiful thing.” The developers at nChain are removing many of the limits imposed on BTC, and then “Bitcoin can really realise its potential”. It will make business more efficient by reducing their costs. All it will take it one large business to start using it. Dr Craig Wright, Jimmy Nguyen and others have spoken of the need to achieve massive scaling on the BSV network - and Mark agrees: “we need to scale now”. With the mining block subsidy being halved again next year in line with how Bitcoin was set up, eventually “if there’s not significant volume, then the miners are going to leave - so we’ve got this ticking time bomb”. The answer to that problem is BSV, Mark says. It’s not only a stable platform in terms of the protocol, but nChain is committed to scaling. “If we don’t scale, it’s going to fail,” Mark says. “We need to see consistent large blocks though real world usage”, for instance for data that needs to be immutably stored with proof of existence. To help things along, Mark has been making his own applications for BSV. The first is a Chrome extension for the <a href="https://handcash.io/" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Handcash wallet</a>. To make it, Mark had to teach himself Javascript, among other things, over two or three weekends. After about a month, he says, he “managed to cobble something together that kind of worked”. You can try the <a href="https://chrome.google.com/webstore/search/handcash%20handle%20converter" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Handcash Handle Converter</a> for yourself: it converts a Handcash handle into a Bitcoin address. Or, thanks to fellow developer Derek Moore, who made use of Mark’s open source project, you can get the same functions on a website, <a href="http://handcash.to/" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">handcash.to</a>. Mark’s second project is an analytics database, <a href="http://www.svcharts.com" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">SVCharts</a>, which produces Bitcoin trends, such as mining fees: “ultimately what I want to have is a self-service analytics platform.” The project includes an interesting monetisation model using MoneyButton.

Mark Allison: Bitcoin is a thing of beauty, like a Michelangelo

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.”

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.”

Matt Dickson: BSV is the logical choice for gaming

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.”

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, <a href="https://relayx.io/dashboard" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">RelayX</a> 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 <a href="https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLTpDsXEwfAQqp3SK5mYERgcUX-G-9MO5C" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">CambrianSV Bootcamp</a>, 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.”

Jack Liu: BSV will create a revolution in niche applications

Ivy Dang

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.

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?<a href="https://cityonchain.com/" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">CityonChain </a>is a Chinese startup that has something in common with <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Craigslist" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Craigslist</a>, 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.

Ivy Dang: Buy a city with Bitcoin SV

The best podcasts about ourselves as well as the world through the lense of Science. Specific topics include things about our brain, emotions to biology, physics and more!

Best Episodes on Science, Humans & The World

The best podcast episodes on global issues affecting everyone. Covering topics such as the #metoo movement, climate change, the impact of technology and some of the biggest global issues facing us right now. For anyone interested in learning more about the world, and some of the issues we're facing, pick an episode below and start listening! Add episodes you're interested into your queue below!