UPDATE
In case you haven’t noticed, the Squire Mining website has gotten a fresh new look! On this space, expect weekly blog posts that will keep you updated on what the team is up to, as well as think pieces from our advisory board inaugural members—Bitcoin Association Founding President Jimmy Nguyen and nChain Chief Scientist Dr. Craig Wright—on the future of mining and education about the space.
CoinGeek Conference: Bitcoin, no limits
Bitcoin professionals from all over the globe gathered at the recently held CoinGeek Toronto Conference 2019 for two days of meaningful discussions about the developments happening with Bitcoin SV (BSV), and also to talk about why massive on-chain scaling is essential for the BSV ecosystem to move forward. Massive scaling, after all, was the overall theme of the conference. No limits, only with Bitcoin SV.
Day 2, aka the main conference, showcased high-caliber speeches, panel discussions, and special features including finalist presentations for the Bitcoin Association’s first BSV Hackathon, as well as a special intimate conversation with nChain Chief Scientist Dr. Craig S. Wright about the beginnings of Bitcoin.
Money Button CEO Ryan X. Charles, who discussed “Digital Storage and Digital Rights Management on the BSV Blockchain with Money Button,” tells us what it actually means to use massive on-chain scaling in a real business.
“Individual companies can often need terabyte size blocks just by themselves depending on what they do, so we need to scale massively because we’re going to put more than just one company—we’re going to put an entire industry, we’re also going to put the entire world’s economy on this,” Charles said. “The reason why that matter is it’s not even just payments. You actually can put real data on the blockchain too, and so the sizes start getting very, very large. If you need properties like, I really want this contract to be encrypted but also stored permanently and immutably so that no one can alter it after the fact, you put the actual contract on the blockchain. That takes data.”
But why is it important to scale now, and scale fast in terms of block size? The answer is simple: There’s a direct economic need for miners.
Bitcoin miners earn a fixed block reward amount for each block they mine, in addition to the fees for each individual transaction mined on the block. Currently, the reward is 12.5 coins, but come 2020, it will be split in half to 6.25 coins. To remain profitable after the reward halving takes place, miners will need to generate more revenue from higher volumes of transactions via new applications that are processing large amounts of data on the blockchain.
Even indie game developer Kronoverse agrees that BSV, which has made unlimited scaling a unique reality, the only choice for application developers like them. David Case, chief architect of Kronoverse, explains:
“Well really, BSV is kind of like our only choice… it solves all the problems that we’ve been [having], and we’ve spent a year and half in R&D, [actually] over a year trying to just explore everything that’s out there in the blockchain space… Every step of the way, we had to solve all sorts of other problems, build all sorts of other toolings, and the scale and just being able to rely on the commodity blockchain that we don’t have to worry about how to solve the consensus aspect but yet having the scaling and the cheap transactions, just… it’s our only choice.”
For his presentation, Bitstocks CEO Michael Hudson talked about “Banking on BSV,” giving the audience an overview of what they can expect from Bitstocks’ groundbreaking Bitcoin banking ecosystem, Gravity.
“What we are launching first is the ability of the investment service, so the ability to hold Bitcoin [Core], Bitcoin Cash as well as obviously Bitcoin SV. The logic behind that is to enable people who might have a different view as what Bitcoin really is and while they’re going on their inevitable journey of discovery they have access to then convert their assets into SV if they wish to make that decision to then interact with the wider Gravity ecosystem, so that will be the current accounts, the debit cards, the loan systems, Gravity Pro which eventually is going to be some other cool things, I’m not going to announce right now, but they’re all going to be exclusively on Bitcoin SV. I don’t want to ostracize the Bitcoin Core community or the Bitcoin Cash community because they’ve been essentially miss-sold what Bitcoin is. We want to help support them and provide the infrastructure if they so wish to then have a much better experience that’s more in line with what we believe Bitcoin to be, which is Bitcoin SV,” Hudson tells us.
One of the highlights of CoinGeek Toronto scaling conference is a fireside chat with Founding President of the Bitcoin Association Jimmy Nguyen and Dr. Craig Wright, the person behind the pseudonym Satoshi Nakamoto and creator of Bitcoin. The two’s wide ranging discussion included topics like the beginning of Bitcoin—Nguyen opened the fireside by asking Wright, “Did you create Bitcoin?”—as well as the destiny that Bitcoin was created to achieve, and how Bitcoin SV (BSV) is fulfilling the destiny of Satoshi Vision.
Wright has this to say about Bitcoin and its future:
“Bitcoin is an immutable evidence trail. It is a single global ledger. Once we roll it out, we’re going to make fraud expensive, fraud difficult. They’re going to make it so that people can actually trust money, trust negotiating with people, and because there’s no way to get away with something bad, there’s a record kept of everything, that’s what we’re seeking.”
