Kevin Healy: My long journey to BSV

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Former iOS developer Kevin Healy first found fame when he released a video on YouTube called “What is Ethereum?” Published in 2016, in the video, Kevin shows developers how to build on the Ethereum blockchain. Despite thousands of views and some revenue he received from the video, Kevin removed it from his YouTube channel as he was worried about some of the dodgy ads that appeared alongside it. It is now back on the channel, clearly labelled as out of date and “posted for historical purposes.”

Kevin is now part of the education team at the BSV Association, a non-profit organization that aims to advocate and support the adoption of BSV blockchain technology worldwide. As he tells Charles Miller on this week’s episode of CoinGeek Conversations, his more general concerns about Ethereum grew after the spat between Ethereum’s Vitalik Buterin and Dr. Craig Wright broke out in 2018 at the Deconomy Conference.

Amid the controversy, Kevin felt the need to “pick a side.” Then he released another successful video. Again, it received thousands of views. But this time, Kevin explains why he believes Dr. Craig Wright is Satoshi Nakamoto. Despite anticipating some negative responses, Kevin went on to defend the man he believes to be the inventor of Bitcoin.

At the start of his developer career, Kevin created apps for Apple’s App Store. His exposure to investments and technology while growing up led him to a career in technology:

“My dad is a wealth advisor—a portfolio manager—and so I’ve always been comfortable trading stocks. Part of the reason I was obsessed with Apple is because we bought a lot of Apple stock when I was young,” he says.

Kevin remembers owning his very first iPhone in high school and thinking, “how do I learn to program this thing?” This thought process eventually led him to focus his studies on computer science.

Kevin says that his early obsession with Silicon Valley success stories drove him to use the same business model as Facebook and Snapchat while building apps. Looking back, he says “it was a silly thing to do.”

As the app industry evolved, Kevin realized the chances of making millions as a single developer was slim to none. As he explains, “In those early days there were people that were making millions as a single developer but as the app platform matured, then it was more companies and you needed venture capital, and the labor for building apps became really expensive.”

At present, Kevin speaks of the advantages of Bitcoin technology based on what is written in the Bitcoin white paper. At the recent London Blockchain Conference, Kevin focused on how to solve problems using Bitcoin. As he points out, the ability of Bitcoin to do micropayments solves many issues we encounter on the Internet today:

“If you want to do small casual payments, then you can’t do that with a trusted third party because they have to be able to reverse the transactions and they have fees. It’s just too expensive to do it that way. If we want to do micropayments, then we need to get rid of it [third-party involvement] or we need a model without them.”

Kevin refers to a valuable takeaway he got from one of Dr. Wright’s interviews where the nChain Chief Scientist spoke about mercantilism. After watching the interview several times, Kevin says he realized that “money comes second, it’s the goods and services that really is the wealth of society.” He relates this form of economic policy to the Bitcoin economy saying “money gets people’s attention and the fact that the other tokens have gotten so much money, they’ve gotten so much attention and there’s something sad about that, but at the same time too, it’s also been a great filtering mechanism because now everybody interested in technology is filtered to BSV and everybody who’s interested in making money has been filtered to others.”

Hear the whole of Kevin Healy’s interview in this week’s CoinGeek Conversations podcast or catch up with other recent episodes:

You can also watch the podcast video on YouTube.

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