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2024 saw some phenomenal interviews on the CoinGeek Weekly Livestream. Esteemed guests from across the BSV ecosystem joined Kurt Wuckert Jr. to share insights, answer questions, and update us on their projects and companies. In the first episode of 2025, we look back at some of the best bits of the 2024 episodes.
Gavin Mehl on blockchain for voting
At the beginning of this clip, Wuckert talks about the billions per day spent in the sub-dollar economy and how people in Southeast Asia, Africa, and Latin America could benefit from an electronic cash system capable of micropayments. However, Bitcoin is so much more than that; it could also help keep accurate records, prove identity, and more.
Mehl agrees, speaking about how it could also help with election integrity. He previously worked with a U.S. congressman, so he knows something about this. Wuckert says the technology is up to the task, but getting wallets into everyone’s hands is the challenge.
Siggi Óskarsson on Teranode and scaling
Óskarsson mentions how the Teranode team is wrapping up and fixing some bugs and issues. At the time of the interview, they had three nodes listening on the mainnet (since then, TAAL mined the first block).
Óskarsson acknowledges the importance of their work at the base layer, but he says developers need to think about building more applications. We need to think bigger, he says, reminding us of blockchain’s awesome potential to disrupt almost everything. He encourages developers to reach out to the BSV Association and each other, make connections, and build.
Ryan Wold on how Bitcoin encourages self-responsibility
Wold is a software developer based in California. In his livestream appearance, he hammered home how Bitcoin encourages the self-responsibility we have lost to some extent. Not everyone likes this, he acknowledges, but it’s important, and Bitcoin can reignite it.
As for changing the world with Bitcoin, he encourages a grassroots approach. Individuals can influence their families, which can influence communities and societies. The best way to switch people on to Bitcoin’s potential is to get them using it; that’s how it clicked for him.
Stephen Febuary on true peer-to-peer transactions
Like so many other guests, February recalls how he first encountered Bitcoin in the early days but largely ignored it. After receiving some from a friend while traveling, he began exploring how to use it as a developer. He realized much of the programmability had been done away with, so he lost interest. However, in 2017, he started paying attention again and was involved when the split happened.
February is most excited about Bitcoin’s ability to create true peer-to-peer transactions. This is back to the old notion of how the Internet should work—free from middlemen and back to direct value exchange. Of course, to do so, it has to scale, and that’s why he’s involved with BSV.
Brendan Lee on how BTC is a doomed chain
Lee talks about tokenization and potential use cases a lot, but during his livestream interview, he noted how others are waking up to the fact that BTC is virtually useless for anything involving utility. He’s even had people confide in him that they lock BTC up in smart contracts, and all of the related activity happens on other chains.
Ultimately, he thinks it will all come to naught, and when IoT smart devices start using tokens, among other things, scalable big block Bitcoin will have its moment in the sun.
Reggie Middleton on the gatekeepers and the war for Bitcoin
Middleton is an entrepreneur with a finance background and a respectable intellectual property portfolio. He first became interested in Bitcoin because it could help circumvent the gatekeepers, but now, they control it almost completely. BlackRock (NASDAQ: BLK), Microstrategy (NASDAQ: MSTR), and others are the biggest buyers and have the loudest megaphones to set the narrative.
While the price of BTC has grown quickly, the technology is evolving and being adopted much faster, Middleton tells Wuckert. He knows first-hand how the big players are aware of its power; most of them have sued him over his IP portfolio. He warns that they will fight back and tend to do so with power and lobbying rather than by competing.
Pieter Den Dooven on immutable records and compliance
Den Dooven is a developer at mintblue. He says that brands used to engage in storytelling, but it isn’t working anymore. Instead, his firm tries to convince them to use the blockchain for “story proving.”
What does he mean by this? Using the blockchain’s immutable records to prove provenance, chain of custody, and compliance with regulations and ideals such as fair trade or sustainability. He points to the European Union’s digital product passports as an opportunity to help firms prove compliance in a relatively simple, straightforward way that doesn’t involve building their systems from scratch. Everyone in the supply chain can update records, meaning everything is provable.
In a later clip, Tokenovate CEO Richard Baker expresses similar sentiments: he feels blockchain’s best use case is provable records. He doesn’t see it as a payload destination, but immutable on-chain records can be linked to data stored elsewhere on specialized databases.
These are just some clips from the Best of the CoinGeek Weekly Livestream 2024. Hear more from Eli Afram, Rafa Jiménez, Dmitry Fabrikant, and others by watching the livestream episode here
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