Calvin Ayre: How BSV will let machines create a new kind of commerce

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Recent news about the possibility of nano-payments on Bitcoin SV is inspiring ideas for a whole new field of applications. Calvin Ayre, founder of Ayre Group and CoinGeek, describes it as “commerce between machines”. Just as micro-transactions have, “this is going to create even more new business models”.

The technology will take the ‘Internet of things’ to a whole new level through the application of smart contracts: “corporations most likely will own machines that will be conducting commerce with each other. So the value will eventually go back to the shareholders. But these little bits of business can be agreed in advance and then rolled out across little pieces of equipment scattered all over the globe. And then they can just start doing business with each other.”

Until now, the billions of transactions between sensors, for instance, have either had no monetisation associated with them, or if they are monetized, it’s in big numbers and likely to be inaccurate. Nano-payments would change that: “this will optimize things and allow value to be tied to actual services, not estimates of them”.

Calvin is more sceptical about other new ideas that are attracting attention at the moment. He’s not completely dismissive of all DeFi (decentralized finance) projects, “but of course, as always, the ones that actually do make sense would work better on BSV than these other platforms that don’t scale.”

But most of DeFi is to be avoided, Calvin warns: “for sure the majority of the people that are going to be trying to trot out some kind of a programme around this new marketing buzz around DeFi …are going to have no interest in anything but a scam. So it’s unfortunate that a lot of people are going to lose money.”

As for central bank digital currencies (CBDCs), “every country in the world could actually operate their central bank currency on top of BSV – in addition to all the other stuff we can do.” The danger is that CBDCs will start to be established on different systems “and you’ll get these siloed central bank digital currencies. And if the vision of how the world unfolds follows the course that we’re predicting, then eventually that won’t make sense – because they were using a technology that doesn’t seamlessly integrate to the rest of the world.”

Next week’s CoinGeek Live conference from New York and London, will be a great chance to take the temperature of the growing BSV ecosystem, with three days of presentations from the worlds of technology, finance and enterprise. So, does Calvin expect to see incremental growth across many different fronts, or is he waiting for a big breakthrough that will change everything?

“I think what you find is that the momentum of the slow, incremental change is happening right now and it’s going to continue to happen,” he says. “But every now and then, there’s going to be a solar flare, something that’s, like, coming out – because I know a few things that are being worked on that I think when they come out, people are going to go, ‘holy crap!’”

Hear the whole of Calvin Ayre’s interview in this week’s CoinGeek Conversation podcast:

You can also watch the podcast video on YouTube.

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