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Bitcoin: past, present, future - Berlin Blockchain Week '22

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Bitcoin: past, present, future – Berlin Blockchain Week ’22

Bitcoin SV can create applications that are exclusively possible on BSV.

From September 12 to 14, the Bitcoin Association for BSV partnered with B2029 to present BSV blockchain at the 2022 Berlin Blockchain Week.

On Tuesday evening, B2029 founder, Ekhard Seeßelberg and Bitcoin Association’s Liz Louw presented the past, present and future of Bitcoin to a room full of attendants.

Bitcoin’s past

As the Berlin Blockchain Week draws participants from developers, to entrepreneurs as well as the Bitcoin curious, Seeßelberg started his presentation by focusing on how Bitcoin split into three different node implementations – from BTC to BCH (Bitcoin Cash) and BSV blockchain. 

He pointed to differences in each project’s focus and how it relates to their technical choices:

  • Bitcoin (BTC) wants to be ‘Digital Gold’ and therefore reserves its base layer for the occasional transfer of large sum transactions. Due to this low transaction throughput, mining cannot be funded by transaction fees, but have to rely on the block reward subsidy that halves approximately every four years. As the token-based reward sum is reduced, miners rely on the price of the token to increase compensation.
  • Bitcoin Cash (BCH) has chosen to focus exclusively on being ‘Digital Cash’, for which it increased its block size from BTC’s original 1MB but refrained from reactivating Bitcoin’s original opcodes that are superfluous to this purpose.
  • BSV blockchain, on the other hand, envisions Bitcoin as becoming far more than digital cash or a store of value – foreseeing it becoming the global infrastructure and protocol for storing and processing data and attributing value and ownership to individual data points. To realise this vision, BSV blockchain harks back to the original Bitcoin protocol, complete with opcodes and sans developer-implemented limitations.

Seeßelberg also highlighted the economic differences between the projects. Bitcoin (BTC) and Bitcoin Cash (BCH) have implemented a Marxist model where developers steer these projects in a technocratic fashion. The BSV blockchain project has adopted an approach after Adam Smith’s Market Economy theory. The protocol is locked, preventing developers from putting in place limitations, instead leaving miners to adjust their offerings based on market forces.

As a result of these different economic models and focuses, developers building on BSV blockchain can create applications that are exclusively possible on BSV.

Bitcoin’s present

To illustrate the functionality already possible on BSV blockchain, Seeßelberg offered demonstrations of Twetch, HandCash wallet, Peergame and Haste Arcade.

Peergame – play and earn per play casino games

Like Twetch and DuroDogs, players can connect to Peergame via their HandCash wallets. Peergame is a provably-fair online casino built on BSV blockchain – only one of many applications available in the HandCash App Gallery.

What sets it apart from other online casinos is the fact that players are not required to deposit money into the house’s account to onboard, to eventually offboard by withdrawing their balance. Instead, players pay per game (for as little as 0.001 BSV) and receive winnings back in their wallets with immediate effect. Underlying this unique functionality are BSV blockchain microtransactions.

Haste Arcade – play to earn arcade games

Haste Arcade is a gaming platform built on BSV blockchain and featured in the HandCash app gallery. While the platform offers players a gaming experience reminiscent of old-school arcade games, its unique value proposition is a first-of-its-kind Instant Leaderboard Payout (ILP) system that lets you earn money based on your in-game performance.

For each game, players choose a league to participate in, allowing them to play for as little as a cent. A part of your funds goes to the platform while another part is distributed to players who place above you on the leaderboard. Once you’ve achieved a score, you become eligible to earn in the same way.

Bitcoin’s future – the Gutenberg project of the digital economy

To gain an understanding of where Bitcoin can lead us in the future, Bitcoin Association’s Liz Louw parallelised it with the historical narrative of Gutenberg disrupting the Roman Catholic Church’s monopoly on ‘truth’, literacy and representation with his movable printing press.

 Luther furthered the cause by employing the technology to publish short, easily readable essays challenging the Pope’s position of power – not in Latin, like Gutenberg’s texts, but in the German of commoners. 

The Renaissance, or ‘Enlightenment’ was fuelled by the disbanding of the Church’s centralised power that had suppressed science and creativity for centuries – in part thanks to Gutenberg’s technology which made it possible for the masses to participate in the shaping of ‘truth’, literacy and representation. 

In parallel, Liz portrayed the Bitcoin blockchain as the technological breakthrough that will allow humanity to free our digital economy from the tight reins of Big Tech monopolies. 

Although we can already participate in reading and writing content online, the model’s inherent ‘Surveillance Capitalism’ (Shoshana Zuboff) means that our data is being harvested to predict our behaviour, and sold as derivatives that could power AI to replace the very humans used to create them.

In contrast to such a dystopian reality, migrating the digital economy onto a public blockchain infrastructure like BSV blockchain will allow everyone to become providers of digital services – creating their terms and conditions. 

Small businesses and individual developers can use the infrastructure on a pay-per-use basis with the surety that they’ll be able to scale globally when needed. 

As data published to the blockchain is assigned to the creator (using a pseudonymous public key system), they can truly own their creations, assign value to them and monetise it as an income. 

Most significantly, BSV blockchain’s killer app is the Internet of Things (IoT) – a vision that can only be realised via a peer-to-peer network that can scale to handle extreme-scale data communications at a very low cost.

Future BSV blockchain events in Berlin

B2029, the organisation hosting the BSV Hub Berlin hosts regular events for those interested in learning more about BSV blockchain. Every second Thursday of the month the Hub hosts a MetaNet TechTalk on topics like debunking popular BTC myths, deep dives into tech topics, Bitcoin and law. 

To keep abreast of future events, sign up for their newsletter or follow them on LinkedIn and Twitter.

Liz Louw

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