Chronicle, Teranode, Bitcoin stewardship with Connor Murray

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On episode four of the CoinGeek Weekly Livestream, Director of Stewardship at the BSV Association, Connor Murray, joined Kurt Wuckert Jr. to talk about the upcoming Chronicle update, where people can learn more about it and much more. Check it out via the live stream below.

Why does Bitcoin need a steward?

Wuckert introduces Murray, who should already be familiar to many BSV supporters. Inquiring about his official title at the BSV Association (BSVA), he asks Murray why Bitcoin needs a steward.

Murray replies that the core philosophy of BSV is that it’s set in stone. That means no single entity should have the power to change it. The BSVA acts as a steward to protect and document the protocol. There’s one last update to go—Chronicle—then the original protocol will be fully restored, and no further updates will be required.

If the protocol is set in stone, what exactly is it?

Murray says he came up with a “guiding North Star” to determine this: he thought about what documentation someone would need if they came along and wanted to create a node implementation from scratch. What would they need so they’d be able to communicate with other nodes? He considered that, identified the various elements, and began documenting them. He acknowledges getting everyone to agree on this is still a challenge. After all, he’s a human, and so is everybody else involved.

What if someone tries to change the protocol? Murray says his role is to do nothing. Bitcoin is a distributed network of nodes, and the BSVA simply defines it. If someone came along with a lot of hash power and tried to change it, he’d expect to see honest nodes ignore that and continue on the remaining chain.

The Bitcoin white paper says nodes have a duty to reject malicious activity. He’d expect them to do so since changing the protocol is an example of malicious activity. Wuckert agrees, giving the example of gold: you can call something else gold, but its atomic properties define it. He believes BTC developers have fundamentally changed Bitcoin so that it can no longer be described as Bitcoin while they may use the ticker and the name.

Is there an active release date for the Chronicle update?

Murray says he thought it would have been released already. However, after releasing it for private testing, some parties had concerns about transaction malleability.

Developers have many opinions on this issue, and some of the proposed changes would reintroduce it. Hence, the BSVA took a different approach, allowing people to choose what they want to do.

Answering a related question about whether the update might break wallets like ElectrumSV that developers are no longer maintaining, Murray says it won’t if they use BSVA open-source libraries. However, there may be some lag between the release and when they update.

Is this update a hard fork, and will there be a new coin if so?

Murray does define the update as a hard fork, but there’ll be no new coin. He likens it to the Back to Genesis update. Once this one is implemented, no further changes must be made, and the original protocol will be restored.

Did the original Bitcoin have a block size limit?

There was no block size limit when Satoshi Nakamoto released Bitcoin. Hal Finney and some others convinced him to temporarily implement one due to concerns about DDoS attacks and some other security concerns. It was supposed to be a temporary measure, but a group took over the project and decided it should be permanent.

What is the significance of stablecoins on BSV?

While Murray is a hard money advocate personally, he believes stablecoins are one of the major things we have been missing. Most users don’t care about this or that coin but instead want cheap, fast, reliable transactions in a stable currency like the USD. Add in the possibility of micropayments, and this is a big deal.

Murray signs off, saying the Town Hall is on Thursday, January 30, at 11 AM ET. It will cover the Chronicle update in more detail and will be recorded for those who don’t catch it live.

To hear more about OP_VER, how the different Bitcoin forks are similar to religious denominations, and what Wuckert thinks about Ross Ulbricht’s release from prison, check out the live stream via this link.

Watch: Bringing the Metanet to life with Teranode