Bitcoin’s Second Coming on X: Gavin Mehl

Last week on X, Gavin Mehl hosted a space called Bitcoin’s Second Coming. Various BSV personalities, including Kurt Wuckert Jr., Casey Hamilton, Alex Vidal, SirToshi, and others, joined to discuss everything happening in Bitcoin.

The market for Bitcoin is everything

Mehl points out how many BTC advocates still believe that legal rights and compliance are unnecessary and that their “decentralized” blockchain of choice is above all. This is despite the numerous SEC lawsuits and a wave of new regulations worldwide.

SirToshi says that this small block mindset is fanciful and inherently limits BTC. The global market for Bitcoin is everything, and if every item or product is to be tokenized on the distributed ledger, it will need to comply with regulations related to specific industries. Giving one example of how big things can get, he says that derivatives are worth up to $1 quadrillion, and Tokenovate is building a platform to trade them on the BSV blockchain.

Picking up on the point about derivatives, Wuckert notes how they can create liquidity and wealth but can also cause problems like the 2008 financial crisis. Bitcoin gives us transparency and audibility that can help prevent such crises in the future. However, there’s a long way to go before we get there.

Proof-of-stake is a security

Answering the question of why something like Ethereum can’t serve as the global ledger everyone uses, SirToshi says it’s because the tokens that make proof-of-stake systems work are securities. The system must be economically competitive or end up centrally controlled.

Wuckert agrees, remembering how early Bitcoiners presumed Satoshi had made the same mistakes as previous attempts at creating electronic cash systems. They didn’t fully understand the economics of Bitcoin until they further read into the competitive nature of distribution and reconciliation.

Delving deeper, Wuckert says Bitcoin differs from proof-of-stake systems in that Bitcoins are discovered after doing provable work rather than created. Satoshi created the system, but he did the work of mining early bitcoins. This is why the process is called mining; it implies working to find something already there rather than creating something new. SirToshi adds that the expenditure of resources and effort is required for something to be considered work.

Brett Banfe offers another analogy: the football field. In proof-of-stake systems, the field can be tilted in favor of whoever has the most tokens, and as they accumulate more, the field can be tilted even more. Pretty soon, it’s an uneven playing field, and everything will work in favor of the party with the biggest stash of tokens. It’s then impossible to compete.

Wuckert points out that securities aren’t bad in and of themselves. They’re fine if they are issued legally on a neutral system. There’s so much dishonesty in the blockchain space about how neutral various systems are, primarily done for legal reasons. This is part of why it was important for Satoshi to stay hidden; Bitcoin builds up provenance as a commodity the longer it is in the wild, and there’s also a statute of limitations for creating something some may try to claim isn’t a commodity in every sense.

Trump’s ‘state of crypto’ address

The conversation then turns to U.S. Presidential candidate Donald Trump‘s anticipated ‘State of Crypto’ address. What will he say, and what’s it all about?

Wuckert says Trump isn’t likely to get accurate information on Bitcoin and blockchain technology. He’s so busy and has to consider so many things that he relies on advisors to tell him. Those people will almost certainly be mainstream opinions rather than people with a deep understanding of blockchain and its capabilities.

Alexander Fauvel says Trump is effectively buying votes. Furthermore, one of the people on his transition team is a lawyer who attested for Tether’s reserves. That’s not a good sign.

Crypto Spartacus believes that Trump is merely informing people about what will happen. Banks are building a blockchain-based system in the background with very little public input, and Trump is likely aware of this.

NAR/DAR on the BSV blockchain

Hooligan highlights how many see NAR/DAR as a protocol change, and he wants to know people’s views on this.

Wuckert responds that the Network Access Rules are conceptually possible on every Bitcoin-style blockchain. All that’s required is for nodes to agree to move coins back to their rightful owner. The only practical limitation is coordination. It’s possible on BTC today, but they’ll never admit that. Back in the day, the BTC blockchain was rolled back after just a few phone calls, and they didn’t even pick the longest chain as the legit one despite Gavin Andresens‘ view that they should do so.

How does it work? Essentially, NAR sends a message to all honest nodes saying that a court has decided that a given party is the rightful owner of some coins, even if they don’t have access to them right now. It’s an overlay messaging system and can be implemented on any similar blockchain.

While he isn’t a fan of NAR conceptually, primarily for marketing reasons, Wuckert says it’s nothing more than a coordination effort to change a distributed ledger. He doesn’t want discourse to devolve into bickering over it, but he acknowledges that it probably will.

To hear more about BSV, the state of blockchain, and whether Elon Musk is really into DOGE, check out the conversation via this link.

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