Bitcoin SV DevCon 2021 Day 1 recap

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The hotly anticipated Bitcoin SV DevCon 2021 got underway on May 15-16, bringing together some of the brightest minds in crypto to provide fresh insights into building for Bitcoin SV.

The online event, hosted by Bitcoin Association in partnership with nChain and WeAreDevelopers, was set up to provide an in-depth look at the Bitcoin SV platform for developers, the only blockchain to offer unbounded scale closely aligned with the original Satoshi Nakamoto whitepaper vision for Bitcoin.

The event kicked off with opening remarks from nChain CTO Steve Shadders, supported with an introduction by Bitcoin Association Founding President Jimmy Nguyen.

The pair set out what to expect from the event, as well as the work being done by nChain and Bitcoin Association in developing the Bitcoin SV ecosystem.

Shadders set out the topics for discussion over the first day of the conference, before exploring the evolving toolsets currently in development for those building on Bitcoin SV.

“We are going to showcase a whole lot of tools. The tooling ecosystem in Bitcoin SV is always growing.”

Shadders highlighted the recent launch of the beta release of Bitcoin SV Node Software v1.0.8, which has raised the ancestor limit to 10,000, as well as other technical developments coming on-stream.

“The ancestor limit has been at the top of the agenda for the last two years—there have been challenges in getting that rolled out—but we have now increased the limit to up to 10,000. We think we could push it a lot higher, but out of an abundance of caution we are doing testing first.”

Next up, Brendan Lee, Conor Murray, Evan Freeman and Kapil Jain, all speaking on behalf of Bitcoin Association, took to the floor to discuss Bitcoin SV Academy, the free online learning platform developed by Bitcoin Association.

The academy currently has three different courses on offer aimed at Bitcoin SV developers—Bitcoin Theory, Bitcoin Development and Bitcoin Infrastructure—with more courses set to launch this year.

Freeman said the academy was of crucial importance at a time of rapid growth in the Bitcoin SV ecosystem: “We set forth one year ago to build the greatest Bitcoin SV educational resource in the galaxy. We did so because we knew just how dangerous ignorance can be to a growing ecosystem.”

Mempool co-founder and CEO Lin Zheming meanwhile presented on DotWallet, Windtalker and DotID. The accompanying suite of tools and DotWallet APIs are aimed at developers building a range of data and payment functions.

In particular, he explained how his solutions solve problems for services like PayMail in China, where the pronunciation and sharing of English words and characters can pose problems.

“We present two new techniques to help solve this problem. The first one is Windtalker, which is a trustless message forwarding service. The second is DotID, which is a decentralized identity protocol.”

Aaron Russell of Chronos Labs Suite and Univrse also took his turn to speak about the suite of developer tools his company has built for working on the Bitcoin SV blockchain—namely Operate BSV, TxForge and PayPresto.

During the presentation, Russell revealed his new protocol, Univrse, created to reduce the scope for errors in implementing or interacting with blockchain data.

“What I’ve created is called Univrse. It is a universal schema for serializing data with signatures and encryption built-in as a first-class citizen of the protocol. It allows us to serialize any arbitrary piece of data in a concise, binary-friendly format.”

Alessio Pagani and Jack Davies of nChain took to the stage next, to look at Bitcoin data transactions and how they can be used to embed data on the Bitcoin SV blockchain.

Covering basic standards of developing for Bitcoin SV through to important technical considerations for reading/writing to the blockchain, the duo went on to deliver a walkthrough demonstration of creating Bitcoin SV transactions on the blockchain.

nChain software engineer Jad Wahab spoke on Bitcoin SV as a platform for scale, both for peer-to-peer payment and data protocols, with reference to standards such as Simple Payment Verification.

His demonstration set out how Bitcoin SV can function as a P2P payment protocol, and how SPV and a collection of other lightweight tools can be used to enable true P2P transactions on Bitcoin SV.

“Users don’t need to run a node and they shouldn’t have to validate every single transaction on the planet instead of just caring about their own.”

“The sooner we can sort out scaling Bitcoin’s user aspect, the better for everyone and the faster we can move on to other things.”

The day concluded with a fireside chat with Bitcoin founder Dr. Craig S. Wright, in conversation with Steve Shadders. The session covered a candid discussion of the backstory to Bitcoin and Dr. Wright’s role in its creation, through to a discussion of the ins and outs of blockchain governance.

The conversation covered a broad range of topics and insights from Dr. Wright, before returning to the importance of the role played by Bitcoin Association and nChain in taking the ecosystem forward.

The first day of the event was hailed as a significant success, providing huge value to those who attended. The full livestream from Day 1 of the event is available to watch again on Bitcoin Association’s YouTube channel.