Jerry Chan: Bitcoin’s value is as a universal source of truth

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The CoinGeek Toronto 2019 scaling conference covered a wide range of topics that the Bitcoin industry is now focused on. While SBI’s Jerry Chan spoke at the conference about the Metanet, he was very impressed with some of the other subjects that were discussed, he told CoinGeek’s Becky Liggero.

Of course, if anyone is going to inspire a new line of thought, who better than Dr. Craig Wright, the creator of Bitcoin himself? “I guess one of the most interesting ones for me was what Craig spoke about in the morning, business attestation, which is when you know somebody signed something and then there’s a witness that signs, the order of signatures kind of matter,” Chan told Liggero. “And as he said, it I kind of thought to myself, how would I do that on, you know, BTC? Or like, you know, using multi-sig? And I realized, you can’t. You can’t actually prove the order. And so when he mentioned that, how you would do it in BSV (Bitcoin SV), that that really clicked, it’s like, wow, okay that that’s really important, because if I really ever at some point in the future wanted to take a Bitcoin transaction and basically say, like your honor, this is the proof that this will and last testament was sign and here was a witness, if we ever moved to an age where these things are all digital and it’s going to be, you know, Bitcoin transactions, then you know, you really do need to prove that these signatures happen in that order.”

As the BSV network quickly approaches its Quasar upgrade, which will allow it to have 2GB block sizes, and then unlimited scaling with the Genesis upgrade in 2020, the roadmap is very much about massive blockchain scaling. That makes BSV special in so many ways, Chan said.

“The more transaction you pump, the more data you store, the more people use the network, the network becomes a utility,” he explained. “And when you have a utility, then you have value, right? Because it becomes the whole commodity money thing. It has to have intrinsic value. Bitcoin itself has no intrinsic value; Bitcoin’s value is in this usage as a universal source of truth that everybody uses. And if everybody uses this, and you know we protect privacy, and everything is encrypted and such, and you know we control access to data, that becomes its intrinsic use, and so we really need to scale that.”

Scaling also makes new business models possible that couldn’t be done on any other blockchain, thanks to cheap transaction fees. “And it’s really cool that seeing like projects like Uptime was kind of interesting to me,” Chan shared, “because they’re really incentivizing people to just, you know, blast data and then, you know, solve a problem that was really not solvable in the normal world because you can’t charge people fractions of a cent to pay them fractions of a cent, and I think that’s very interesting.”

When asked about the drama surrounding cryptocurrency on the internet, Chan returned to his focus on the Metanet as the solution to many of our online problems. “Well like I said on my talk, I think the biggest thing is that there’s a lot of misinformation in the internet, and once we start paying for information that’s valuable, that becomes a signal that this information is valuable,” he explained. “Look how much people have paid to view it. And the Metanet is really all about this, right? It’s basically attaching intrinsically a value to data, and once that happens then there’ll be less misinformation in the internet. I think it’s going to get better, but right now, until we get to the Metanet age, until it really grows up in the next year or two, Just don’t believe what you hear, right? Do your own research, always verify, don’t trust.”