BSV Technical Standards Committee Formation Meeting highlights

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The Bitcoin SV Technical Standards Committee (TSC) formation meeting, organized by Bitcoin Association, took place in London in January 2020. The group’s goal was to create a roadmap facilitates better interoperability across the BSV ecosystem. 

What is the TSC?

“The TSC’s mission is to promote interoperability between applications and the Bitcoin SV space,” explained Steve Shadders, the CTO of nChain. “Industry-wide standards are important because they generally enable a better user experience.”

Interoperability creates a better user experience because it can increase the efficiency of an app or service while minimizing the number of touch points for the end-user. The formation meeting was a gathering of several prominent technical leaders from the Bitcoin SV ecosystem, including those with expertise in wallets, transaction processing, node development, application development, data services, and more. Over the course of several days, the group worked to create a framework for technical workgroups including roles, responsibilities, and operating procedures.

CoinGeek producer Charles Miller, who interviewed some of the meeting’s participants, commented on the experience: “There was a really positive atmosphere between entrepreneurs and developers from many different Bitcoin SV-based businesses, and a feeling that there was an opportunity to lay the groundwork to make the whole sector work more efficiently in future. The inspiration was from technical standards groups in other industries which have successfully agreed on everything from the design of plugs to the exact width of household pipes. Where that doesn’t happen, and you find you need several kinds of charger for consumer devices for instance, everyone loses out.”

It is important to note, the framework that the TSC is actively creating is not mandatory for software engineers to abide by when creating their applications and services. However, if engineers follow the technical standards that the TSC creates, it will fuel growth via compatibility in the blockchain and digital asset ecosystem.

“Everyone benefits from interoperability so that’s really important,” said James Belding, the CEO of Tokenized. “It can be very difficult when everyone’s in their little silo building their project head down to kind of poke their head up again and spend the effort to kind of coordinate with others, often, that just won’t go well and people may question the motives or think that it’s benefiting [others] at their own expense.

The TSC is invaluable because it is difficult to get companies and individuals to create a common framework when they are busy creating their own businesses and projects.

Interested in contributing?

Are you interested in working with the Bitcoin Association’s Technical Standards Committee? 

For each of the standards that the TSC plans to develop, a public call for interest will be made for parties wishing to contribute to issue-specific workgroups. The first of these has already been issued for a workgroup that aims to produce a standard data format for Merkle inclusion proofs.

You can find out more information about the Merkle inclusion proof workgroup here.