What does BSV need?

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Broad question, right? But these are the important things that we really need to be asking ourselves in order to take the next big steps up. There are technical things, cultural things and economic circumstances. Some, we can control. Others, we can influence. Of course, we all need a little bit of luck, prayer, care and mojo on the way to absolute victory, so I will do my best to be a guiding light. And if this article is triggering to you, then it’s probably over the target. Don’t tell me I’m wrong. Show me I’m wrong with transactions, profits and hash power. 

Technical

Fat Clients: Teranode is coming, and it is expected to be revolutionary. Also, Satoshi was never a fan of multiple implementations of Bitcoin, but I just can’t fathom a world where the nodes at the center of the network don’t do at least some “hot rodding” to their internal software. As Bitcoin specializes, it makes sense for some node implementations to do nothing but build blocks while abstracting out (and maybe even outsourcing) all of the other node functions that are currently monolithic. Teranode should allow this, but intrepid businesses will undoubtedly make their own versions. Imagine a world where companies specialize in speeding up nothing but the unconfirmed transaction set or some other node function, or as the confirmed data set grows, archival data service companies may want to create tools for better serving specialized data needs.

There is a lot of exploration to be done on this front, especially in a world where “Data Broker” becomes a career path in the bitcoin economy that we are creating. 

Light Clients: Not everyone should run a full/fat node client, but there are lots of reasons to run specialized light clients. Let’s say your business tokenizes shipping packages using the RUN protocol. Maybe you don’t want the global UTXO set or even the global RUN token set. There’s not a great reason to be holding and filtering CryptoFights data if you’re DHL or UPS, right? 

But a major shipping company would possibly want to keep a filtered set of their own company’s valuable token data for redundancy and persistence. We need light clients for lots of these special purposes. 

SPV: Simplified Payment Verification (SPV) is probably the vaguest thing Satoshi ever wrote. He told us, “It is possible to verify payments without running a full network node.” Did he implement an example or give us a protocol spec? Nah! Small blockers don’t even think SPV could work… Big blockers understand the concept, but we haven’t exactly put together a standard either! What’s the best way to do it? Rest API forever, or is there something else to be done? 

Time will tell, but it would seem like monetizing an SPV API endpoint would be a no-brainer by now, and very few entities have an ideal solution. 

Merchant API: Conceptually, mAPI is awesome. The notion that an app can send transactions to the node of their choice or that someone can become a transaction broker in the Bitcoin space is fantastic. However, the way the current implementation is built is just plainly unstable. Not only was there a sudden change in the language it was written in, but the roadmap and feature set are scattered. Apps want to send transactions quickly and reliably to the node of their choice. If it can’t do that, then there is no need to add features until it can. The BSV economy needs a trimmed down, lightweight implementation of this fantastic idea. 

Middleware, firmware, overlays networks… 

There is so much opportunity for software libraries and tooling. There are lots of grandiose ideas in the space, but the libraries that undergird them, the middleware that connects them or the overlays that help them blossom into client-facing applications are seriously lacking. Part of this would be solved plainly by more developers in the space, which would be a product of some price appreciation of BSV, but some of this actually just requires some coordination and elbow grease. In the meantime, bug bounties, hackathons and business focus on creating some of this stuff is crucial. 

Cultural

“Craig will do it:” This is the biggest cultural problem in Bitcoin. Every Twitter space, every interview, every thread, and far too many of the conversations about BSV focus on whether or not Craig is going to move coins, exploit the SegWit flaw, roll the icebergs, etc… This has led to the existence of a subculture of people that are just waiting for Craig. To his credit, he tells everyone to build, stop speculating and “get off your asses,” but that doesn’t change the fact that there is just plainly a group of people waiting to ride his coattails to the moon. These people need to be more productive, and that’s it.  

Boomers bad: The inverse to the Craig fan club are the people who can’t seem to cooperate or organize with anyone who has any gray hair. This is also a grave mistake and cultural miscalculation. The boomers have capital, relationships and experience, and the developers and entrepreneurs who can’t stop criticizing them have missed out on the opportunities that could have been cultivated from communicating and cooperating more effectively for the last few years. Fortunately, there’s time to mend relationships and start cooperating better for the sake of the big win. Everyone can be an ally on something mutually important. Find it and leverage it! 

People in places: This is something I’m most hopeful about. Seeing the change in tone and practice that has come as a product of new blood in fresh leadership positions is incredibly refreshing. Richard Baker at TAAL Distributed Information Technologies Inc. (CSE:TAAL | FWB:9SQ1 | OTC: TAALF), Patrick Prinz at BSV blockchain’s association, Hakan Yuksel at nChain and Randy Marsh at Twetch (one of these things is not like the others!) all indicate a shift in tone, scope and goals for the major players in BSV. Not that the previous leaders were bad, but bringing up new leadership to focus on new goals as the BSV economy matures indicates an incredible flexibility that brings me a lot of hope. BSV needs to continue to be bold, hold no person or position sacred, and seek to find the best leader for the era every time the culture shifts! 

Hire a sales manager!: If you’re running a BSV startup, especially if it has some venture backing, it’s time to hire sales and business development professionals. It doesn’t matter if your app is done yet. You need clients right now. Give clientele discounts if they prepay for services you will give them in six months. This is crucial and cannot be overstated. 

Fallout: Many of us are weary from a long Bitcoin Civil War that just won’t seem to end. The bubble hasn’t been kind to BSV, and many of the startups that could have been great have had to move on to other things. We need to build more sustainable businesses instead of trying to spin hobbies into dumb money. Hobbies and scams profit on Ethereum because of a lack of business ethics and a culture of greed in the “crypto” economy. But we have committed to being an honest blockchain full of honest people, and sometimes that means some people die on the hill of their own ethics. It’s sad, but we need to shake it off and make forward progress immediately. 

Economic circumstances:

Price: BSV will not get any unearned demand. The mainstream doesn’t care, the traders don’t care, and the big investors have all been blue-pilled about “forks” of bitcoin. That means influencer marketing and hype are off the table! The price action of BSV has made it very difficult to invest into bigger and better resources, but it has also made us survivors strong and cunning. We need to generate real economic demand by selling products and services to the world that cannot be created by any other blockchain. This is the only way to push the price up amid the naked short sellers and a world that thinks Bitcoin can’t scale. 

Global economy: We can’t change everything. We can’t change the fact that BTC thrives on the meme of global collapse while the world has been in the most chaotic period in a generation or two. But what we can do is be a beacon of hope for sound money, secured freedom and entrepreneurial opportunity. The solution to war and chaos isn’t to become separatist aristocrats like the small blockers would have you believe. The solution is to build profitable and sustainable peace and prosperity using disruptive tech and some hard work! 

Now is not the time to be lazy, ask for that raise, take time off, etc… Now is the time to trim the fat, buckle down and make sure every punch lands hard! We have a lot of ground to make up in the fight for global dominance. Luckily, we have a few things that our competition doesn’t: 

1: Good ideas

2: Good people

3: The only blockchain that scales

4: The truth! 

Take the above to heart, and we can win together. We are going to make it, friends.