CoinGeek Weekly Livestream: The best of 2021

Getting your Trinity Audio player ready...

The CoinGeek Weekly Livestream has become such a staple of the Bitcoin media ecosystem that you’d be forgiven for thinking it’s been around for years. In fact, the show started only 11 months ago, and since then, CoinGeek’s Chief Bitcoin Historian Kurt Wuckert Jr. has hosted some of the brightest and most influential thought leaders in the Bitcoin space. In a special lookback clip show, Kurt shared some of the best moments from what has been an eventful year for the space.

Kurt has interviewed innovators, developers, Bitcoin experts, cryptographers, startup founders, venture capitalists, and more. He has also taken a lot of time to answer questions from the audience, with topics ranging from Elon Musk to Ethereum to Dogecoin to regulations to space travel and much more.

The first clip stretches back to February, when Kurt addressed the transition of digital currencies into digital assets. As he explained, this tragedy emanates from people’s lack of understanding of what Bitcoin is, despite the white paper being crystal clear that it’s a currency and not digital gold. 

In Bitcoin’s early days, Satoshi explained how Bitcoin would scale to meet payment needs, including why everyone won’t need to run a node. Unfortunately, most of Satoshi’s diligent work was discarded by the Mastercard cartel that wanted to limit Bitcoin to what BTC is today, a speculative asset that serves the needs of the rich and mighty.

Kurt hosted Ryan X. Charles in March in a lively show. The MoneyButton founder spoke about several topics, but in his lookback clip show, Kurt focused on Ryan’s explanation of why Ethereum has attracted so many developers and users, even more than the massively scaling Bitcoin SV.

Ryan revealed that it all boils down to three things—it’s easier to program on Ethereum, their tooling is better, and the misinformation surrounding Bitcoin. “I’m 10 years into it and I’m still learning some basics,” he stated in reference to how complicated Bitcoin is. 

Despite Bitcoin being more difficult to build on, it still beats Ethereum and other blockchains on its utility. Ryan explained that we could work on the tooling and get it to where Ethereum is, but they can never change the fundamentals and get to where Bitcoin is.

Following this interview, Ryan would take a long hiatus from the Bitcoin ecosystem. About a month ago, he resurfaced with the “Here’s How I know Craig is Satoshi” video on YouTube.

Moving on, Kurt replayed David Case’s interview from March. Case is the chief architect at FYX Gaming, the makers of CryptoFights, the biggest generator of transactions on the Bitcoin blockchain this year.

At the time, Case had just migrated from Ethereum to Bitcoin SV, and CryptoFights was another app trying to make its mark. Fast forward nine months, and now the game is nearly ubiquitous with BSV and the success of blockchain gaming.

On the show, David went into the technicalities of the game, including how it generates transactions, how it ensures there’s provably fair gaming, its use of NFTs to represent the gaming icons, and more.

In a year when the metaverse became the biggest buzzword, the BSV space was early to the party, and Robert Rice has been leading this march. Rice is the founder of Transmira, the makers of Omniscape, a startup pioneering experiential reality (a term he coined himself back in 2014), which encompasses augmented and virtual realities.

Rice joined the Livestream in April to talk about the world of XR and why he chose to build Omniscape on Bitcoin SV. 

“The first thing off the bat was just scale. What we’re trying to do requires a massive scale beyond the likes of what you’d think. Second was the transaction cost,” Rice stated, explaining that he was building an application that will appeal beyond the blockchain enthusiasts, and for that, these two factors are massively important.

Kurt would later take part in an activation process for Omniscape in Wynwood, Florida. The team at Omniscape placed virtual food items (pizza and tacos) in strategic locations around the neighborhood, and those who collected them could redeem them for real food items. 

Just weeks later, CoinGeek Zurich kicked off. At the event, Kurt met Ian Grigg, the legendary Australian financial cryptographer who invented the Ricardian contract. He managed to convince him to come on as a guest on the Livestream, and he did, with the one-and-a-half-hour-long show going into Ricardian contracts and how they differ from smart contracts, the ‘90s cypherpunks community, and how Grigg met Dr. Craig Wright back in 2015. 

After going into detail about how he knows Craig is Satoshi, Grigg bemoaned how the digital currency community has treated him over the years. “…we really shouldn’t have been doing all those nasty things and trying to figure out who Craig was and then who Satoshi was, and then proceeded to tear him limb from limb, that was bad character.”

Still on people who knew Dr. Wright way before the world knew he was Satoshi, Kurt brought on outgoing TAAL (CSE:TAAL | FWB:9SQ1 | OTC: TAALF) CEO Stefan Matthews in June. 

Matthews revealed his long relationship with Dr. Wright on the show, stretching back to before anyone knew he was Satoshi. Matthews was close friends with Satoshi at the time when Wired doxed him, and he personally handled the media frenzy in Australia. He was also a key player in the founding of nChain and Satoshi’s move to London from his homeland of Australia.

Kurt concluded, “I hope you’ve had a lovely and restful Christmas with your family, and I bid you, I implore you, I hope for you and wish for you a very happy New Year.”

Watch the previous episodes of CoinGeek Weekly Livestream on YouTube.