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The history of blockchain and where we are now

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The history of blockchain and where we are now

Wuckert Jr discussed the history of blockchain.

The Bitcoin Association for BSV recently sponsored the first annual Unbounded Perspectives Live Summit in Austin, Texas. The event was by invitation only and had an exclusive list of roughly 100 investors.

Confirmed attendees included Unbounded Capital’s limited partners, prominent venture and hedge fund managers, fintech and blockchain entrepreneurs, and institutional and family office investors.

Kurt Wuckert Jr, CoinGeek’s Chief Bitcoin Historian, gave one of the keynote addresses at the summit. Wuckert Jr discussed the history of blockchain and revealed how Bitcoin has changed for the worse since its inception. He also explains how this has been restored to its original implementation as BSV blockchain.

In the beginning of Bitcoin

Wuckert Jr began his presentation by discussing the Bitcoin white paper, pointing out that it can be read in around 20 minutes despite introducing a revolutionary technology. He added that Bitcoin is simply a protocol which defines a set of rules.

Citing the white paper, Wuckert Jr noted that Bitcoin was designed to address the need for commerce on the internet aside from credit cards and Paypal. Problematically, both of these payment protocols have minimum payment thresholds in place, meaning it is next to impossible to send small funds over the Internet.

He added that these payment methods offer next to no anonymity and that users often have to hand over a significant amount of private information to complete a simple purchase. ‘Bitcoin is designed to reduce that minimum threshold for payment such that you don’t have to do any of that. He wanted to disrupt the very low end of the payment space of commerce on the Internet.’

BTC – A system corrupted

Wuckert Jr explained that while this ideal should have been achieved, Nakamoto inadvertently lost control of Bitcoin, which inevitably led to its corruption. Shortly after publishing his white paper in 2009, Nakamoto faced criticisms regarding the functionality of the Bitcoin system.

In addition, unsavoury characters attempted to exploit the technology for illicit business dealings. Eventually, Nakamoto lost control of the project, although the exact timing of this event is unknown. He expressed concerns about the infiltration of anonymous developers and criminal misuse of Bitcoin, as well as its association with controversial projects such as WikiLeaks. Nakamoto found this distortion of his creation unacceptable, leading him to distance himself from the project.

The situation worsened when it was discovered that Nakamoto’s account had been compromised, resulting in changes to the source code. Meanwhile, venture capital companies, including Visa and Mastercard, arrived during this uncertain time, and they created a new economy specifically centred around Bitcoin as a slow financial asset that required third parties, according to Wuckert Jr.

A fractured system

This ultimately led to a big split and multiple forks away from the original Bitcoin protocol – including the new BTC. Segregated Witness or ‘SegWit’, was designed to remove the tracing capabilities of Bitcoin allowing the introduction of off-chain, opaque exchange solutions such as the Lightning Network.

The introduction of this broke Bitcoin’s original protocol and rendered BTC as non-Bitcoin compliant and intentionally ineffective.

The return of the true Bitcoin

When BCH deviated from Bitcoin’s white paper and implemented non-compliant features, such as anonymity that posed challenges for government and financial regulation, the original Bitcoin Protocol adopted BSV blockchain as its new ticker symbol. This move is commonly referred to as Bitcoin’s Independence Day.

In February 2020, the Genesis upgrade was introduced to restore the Bitcoin Protocol as closely as possible to Satoshi’s original design. This upgrade aimed to enhance stability for developers and enterprises seeking to build upon the original protocol. With this upgrade, unbounded scaling returned, and the original Bitcoin script language was reintroduced, enabling developers to create on-chain applications with greater ease.

You can find a copy of the presentation slides here.

Ryan Brothwell

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