CoinGeek London 2020 highlights enterprise solutions with BSV

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The second day of the CoinGeek London conference had a heavy focus on the enterprise use of Bitcoin SV (BSV), and two talks in the morning helped emphasize BSV’s use case for businesses. The crowd in attendance heard about why enterprises should look to BSV for their business needs, and how the Bitcoin industry is going to help them grow.

First up was David Washburn, CEO of nChain, to talk about “Creating Enterprise Solutions with the BSV Blockchain.” His talk emphasized why the talented people of nChain are already proving to enterprises their professionalism and knowledge in the space. Washburn also discussed what nChain is working on to help enterprises move over to a world of Bitcoin.

Washburn spent a lot of time talking up the immense depth of talent inside nChain. “We’ve got a really unique skillset, people that come from traditional software development backgrounds, we’ve got people coming from academic research, a real breadth of experience and a breadth of perspective,” he said. “And I think this is one of the most unique and important things about nChain, because we don’t operate in an echo chamber, we bring a lot of outside views to what we’re doing, and we use this really well in terms of trying to take our vision beyond our walls.”

Later on, he highlighted the leaders of each of nChain’s departments to ensure the community is familiar with all of them. The company has nearly doubled since Washburn started less than a year ago, now with 94 people on staff. This talent and growth proves something to businesses. “We’re not a startup in a basement somewhere, we have, I believe, the most advanced team in the world.”

But what the collective group works on matters most. “Our mission, as a business, is to really provide the framework for enterprise development, and enterprise level use of Bitcoin,” Washburn said. “We’re looking to build enterprise-grade solutions for clients that are thinking as big as us.”

“The only way that we can execute this, thinking this big, is on Bitcoin SV,” he added. And for enterprises, that means building platform services to help them integrate with Bitcoin seamlessly. “These are pieces of software that allow real businesses to talk to the blockchain without having Bitcoin experts in their business.”

A couple of presentations later, Jimmy Nguyen, founding president of the Bitcoin Association, moderated a discussion that included Ron Austring, president of Daedalos Inc., Alexander Shulgin, founder & CEO of Gruppa Kompaniy Familia, and Dr. Daniel Diemers, former partner and head of blockchain EMEA with the PWC Blockchain Taskforce. The group came together to discuss “Enterprise Blockchain Applications: What Big Business Needs.”

Austring began the panel by talking about what applications work best on the blockchain. Anything that has digital data, and a financial component to it, is ripe for the blockchain, he said. Government, insurance and publishing industries could all easily slide into Bitcoin SV and do well.

Shulgin added that entertainment, media and sports industries also have a natural home on the blockchain. The platform is now king, he emphasized, and Bitcoin SV should be that platform. Nguyen took the opportunity of sports being mentioned to comment that the blockchain can be used to help improve the reliability of doping sports tests.

Diemers had a simple test to determine if an enterprise needed a blockchain solution. “Is there a serious issue of trust in the existing system that you want to solve?” he asked. “Like counterfeit medicine in pharmaceuticals, maybe sports cheating, we had Kronoverse as an example yesterday, very interesting, cheating becomes an issue. The second test is more difficult. Is the system extremely complex, distributed, and with a lot of micro transactions?”

He then went on to describe a future London dominated by automated cars, where BSV would work beautifully in handling all the data and micro transactions necessary to make it all work.

The panel then discussed what helps an enterprise decide which blockchain works best for them. For Austring, the transaction throughput was important to their choice, and they desired a public blockchain. They needed 5000-6000 transactions per second, so scale and speed mattered. That kind of volume could only be handled on BSV.

Diemers felt that most businesses are scared off by public blockchains at the moment, incapable of understanding the terminology. “The questions that you’re asking, they’re irrelevant for them, at the moment,” he said. “If they heard unlimited blocksize, it’s not a good thing.”

He then spelt out four issues that matter most to these companies. They care about the governance of a blockchain, and they want to know who’s in charge of it. Many like Hyperledger simply because they trust IBM. But after that, they of course care about the blockchain’s specs, like technical details and price. If those two pieces line up, they also want to know the regulatory situation of the blockchain, and if any governments will have a problem with them using a specific one. Finally, they want to know how big is the ecosystem is. Can companies hire world class developers quickly? Without a talent pool to support the choice, they may not make the change just yet.

Nguyen took that opportunity to note the many initiatives that are being worked on in the ecosystem to address that last concern. The new Bitcoin SV Wiki and a certification program for developers will go a long way to increasing the talent pool available to BSV businesses.

The panel was then asked how companies should decide between a public blockchain, like BSV, or a private blockchain. Shulgin immediately noted that, culturally and technologically, the new generation is already decentralized, and that bodes well for public blockchains. Austring looked to history to see which would prevail, noting most corporations started with an intranet, but moved to the internet because it just made sense. “I would make a prediction that in a few years, we won’t even see private blockchains, right? It’ll be public.”

When asked what the builders of the future should focus on to encourage enterprise growth, Diemers demanded a more aggressive approach. “I think this technology has so much potential that we shouldn’t wait and do now 2 years of building and then go to market,” he said. “I think we should go to market now, today.”

Austring used the same question to break down how businesses big and small already have solutions out there to help them get on the BSV chain:

“I think like, if you’re an enterprise and you’re looking for an enterprise solution, there are companies like nChain that are perfect for you. If you’re kind of a hobbyist, or a hacker, or you’ve got this great idea but you just want to test out the concept, then something like a Planaria is perfect, right? Where you can just test out the concept and see if it’s going to work, and then go get your funding to actually build a solid enterprise behind that.”

Finally, when asked to give their predictions for the future of BSV, Shulgin gave this optimistic view. “I hope that more and more people every month, or every year, will join Bitcoin SV, and that will make for them fantastic opportunity, fantastic future,” he said. “And only when we are all together can make a fantastic future for us and Bitcoin SV.”