Developers and businesses should use Bitcoin SV, the BSV blockchain, instead of all other blockchains. But why?
On the first day of the CoinGeek conference in New York, an expert panel moderated by Kurt Wuckert Jr. has answered that question in a discussion titled, “BSV vs. Other Blockchains: Differences that Matter for Developers & Businesses.” The panelists include Peter Bainbridge-Clayton, founder & CTO of kompany; Kevin Healy, independent app developer and investor; and Rohan Sharan, product manager of BlockReview.
Wuckert started the panel by pointing out that many developers in the blockchain space tried to build their projects on Ethereum. However, since Ethereum does not scale the way developers need a blockchain to scale, some developers have left Ethereum to work on the BSV blockchain instead.
“A lot of people—especially in business—talk about the need for the blockchain solution, but not necessarily with a currency tied to it, the token economics (…). They want the blockchain technology, but not the coin,” Wuckert Jr. said.
Sharan stated that without the coin there is no value in a blockchain. If one removes the coin aspect from the blockchain, what is left are linked hashes, which are only data structures according to Sharan. So for him, the economic model of Bitcoin definitely needs to stay in order for the blockchain to thrive.
One example of the “blockchain without economy” approach is Hyperledger, which Bainbridge-Clayton has worked with in the past. But as of today, Bainbridge-Clayton started to move away from Hyperledger to work on the BSV blockchain instead.
“With a public chain you have to incentivize the public, otherwise it is not a public chain,” Bainbridge-Clayton said in accordance with Sharan. Furthermore, Bainbridge-Clayton points out that the business mind is different from the developer mind. While businesses have to fulfill certain business requirements, the developer is tasked with actually doing the fulfillment.
Healy has been active in the Ethereum community for a long time and recently published a surprising video in which he identified Dr. Craig Wright as Satoshi Nakamoto. CoinGeek also did an interview with Healy on the three phases of Dr. Wright went through being the inventor of Bitcoin.
Coming from Ethereum, Healy is nowadays working with the BSV blockchain instead and explained his shift from ETH to BSV on the panel:
“The stable protocol. If I am going to build something that I want to be durable and long-lasting, I don’t want the protocol to be changed all the time (…) and the low transaction fees. So we can do micropayments and that sort of thing.”
There are still reservations about the BSV blockchain coming from developers who build on other blockchains at the moment. Wuckert has had his own experiences with that and reports about it on the panel.
“I had a dinner about two weeks ago where I was talking to people who developed on other blockchains. They didn’t know who I was, so when they came to me and asked what do you do, I started talking about BSV and hundred thousands transactions per second (…). All of a sudden the group—everyone independently—wanted to argue with me that it is impossible, it is not how these things work,” Wuckert said.
The panelists discussed how to inform other developers better about Bitcoin SV’s unique capabilities. Sharan believes that it would be helpful to use the word time chain more often, as blockchain itself is about time and Bitcoin actually can be described as a timestamp server. Interestingly, Dr. Craig Wright’s keynote speech at the CoinGeek Conference in New York on the same day had the topic time as a personal experience.
Sharan also talked about the crucial difference between proof-of-stake and proof-of-work blockchains. For him, it is clear that proof-of-work is a free market-driven force that incentivizes users, developers and businesses, while proof-of-stake ends up in oligarchies.
Bainbridge-Clayton said the BSV blockchain has to attract developers through other sources that build the Bitcoin SV ecosystem. Healy stated that some developers within BSV are quite happy to be early on the Bitcoin SV blockchain and therefore not too eager to invite the competition. However, Healy thinks BSV is on the right track already and does not need to persuade the wrong kind of people that are short-minded to join the ecosystem at the moment.
What the panel discussed is in accordance with the statements from famous economist and writer George Gilder, who gave a keynote speech at the CoinGeek Conference in New York the day after the panel.
“Bitcoin SV now has more transactions and more activity than BTC (…) What makes Satoshi’s blockchain so superior to all the others is: it has blasted away the limits!” Gilder said and called BSV the epitome of the information economy.
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