CoinGeek Weekly Livestream: A special edition from the CES Day 1 in Las Vegas

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After a very successful 2021, Kurt Wuckert Jr. kicked off the new year with a special edition of the CoinGeek Weekly Livestream from Las Vegas, Nevada. Kurt is leading a contingent of BSV blockchain companies that have attended and are exhibiting at the biggest consumer electronics event in the world. He talked about the event, how the BSV booth is faring and who would win in a Brazilian jiu-jitsu showdown between him and Roger Ver.

The Consumer Electronics Show (CES), held annually at the Las Vegas Convention Center, kicked off on January 5 and will run for three days. The event attracts the crème de la crème from augmented and virtual realities, the Internet of Things, smart homes, smartphones, computing, self-driving cars, and other consumer electronics. This year, it drew about 2,200 exhibitors, and the BSV ecosystem was well represented.

Big block action comes to #Vegas – #BSV blockchain at #CES2022 #CES pic.twitter.com/f6HEJgwpwO

— Jimmy Nguyen (@iamJimmyWIN) January 5, 2022

As Kurt revealed on the livestream, the BSV contingent congregated in its own booth on the first day of CES, showcasing their products and discussing why BSV is above Ethereum, BTC, and others such projects. 

As a co-host of the booth, Kurt spent the first day interacting with several dozen people, answering questions about the Bitcoin Civil War, explaining why not everyone needs to run a node, and much more. 

“And then we go through the white paper, and I quiz them at the end. It’s really good,” he quipped.

Kurt revealed that the BSV booth, which featured entities including Bitcoin Association, VXPASS, CoinGeek, Ayre Ventures, Omniscape, Haste Arcade, and Built By Gamers, had attracted a lot of traction at the event. “It’s been super busy,” he stated, with many tech enthusiasts being massively interested in how they can build a metaverse that sources and records all data on-chain in real-time and at very low fees. The likes of Ethereum don’t have the capacity to offer this, despite being the network that most people are exposed to initially.

Apart from explaining the massive power of BSV, the startups also got to show off the capabilities of their apps and platforms. Among the most popular was Omniscape, the XR platform built on BSV blockchain by Transmira. At a time when the metaverse is the biggest buzzword in tech, Omniscape is showing the world that BSV is the only logical choice to host the metaverse. 

Transmira founder and CEO Robert Rice showed a crowd of awestruck people how Omniscape allows users to digitally drop NFTs in real space and using digital avatars.

Aside from the events at CES, Kurt answered questions related to everything else happening in the space, as he always does. They included the efforts by the Ira Kleiman lawyers to force a retrial in the case they lost horribly to Dr. Craig Wright. Kurt believes that a retrial is next to impossible.

However, the efforts by the lawyers will go a long way in vindicating Dr. Wright and his victory over Ira, especially since anti-BSV people had tried to spin the trial to look like it ended in an Ira victory. “Winners don’t appeal,” said Kurt.

Kurt also addressed the SuperAsset token protocol developed by Attila Aros and what it does better than other protocols. A big fan of Attila, Kurt admitted not being quite well-versed with the protocol. Still, he believes that the rise of varying protocols is a testament to the rapid growth of tokenization on the BSV blockchain.

And as he had had to do with many people who visited the BSV booth at CES, Kurt delved into the decentralization myth with BTC. While the number of people who run nodes is big, the core decisions are still made by a few insiders. Most node operators just upgrade their software as instructed, in what is a “de facto tyranny of ambiguity.” Despite being a global project, BTC has five GitHub maintainers. They wield a lot of power over the community, including what improvement proposals will move forward to get voted on.

“That’s not how Bitcoin is governed. Bitcoin is supposed to be governed by proof of work. It’s not in BTC and in my opinion, what makes Bitcoin decentralized is that nodes can join and leave the network as they please, they can sync right up with the chain, they can attempt to mine blocks, they can govern the chain with proof of work—but none of that happens in BTC,” he explained.

Kurt concluded the livestream with a unique audience question – who would win in a Brazilian jiu-jitsu battle between him and Roger Ver. Roger has been in the Bitcoin community for several years and was among those who previously championed increasing the Bitcoin block size. However, he got derailed with BCH and didn’t want to fully implement Satoshi’s vision of unbounded block sizes.

Roger is a big guy, has a brown belt in jiu-jitsu, and has been involved in the martial arts and combat discipline for decades. Despite this, Kurt is confident that he would get the better of Roger. 

“I’d bet on me. I’m pretty big and I’m good at jiu-jitsu,” Kurt noted.

Stay tuned for more footage and insight from CES on special editions of CoinGeek Weekly Livestream on the second and third days of the event. On day 2, Kurt will hold the livestream from the venue, including showing Robert Rice’s presentation, “where he will be debuting really first of its kind cool stuff.”