Dr. Craig Wright on “Taking money over the web using Bitcoin”

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Dr. Craig Wright of nChain has penned his latest Medium post on cryptocurrency, explaining how digital currencies can be used to exchange money across the web. He refers to one of the first real-world use cases for crypto, pointing out how Bitcoin Core (BTC) developers ultimately decided to remove the feature as they tried to evolve the crypto ecosystem. This is one of the main reasons that BTC is having difficulty finding its footing as a true digital currency that can be used in lieu of fiat, and why Bitcoin SV (BSV) is ensuring that an alternative to paper money is made available to everyone.

https://youtu.be/gBb9FSxfyVs

The concept of an IP-to-IP exchange of information is obviously not new. It was used to create a crypto wallet in 2009, but was ultimately discarded by BTC developers. To be fair, the concept was just that – a concept – and needed to be tweaked. However, as presented, it could have been the beginning of a valuable digital payment system that may have helped crypto receive better adoption as a currency over the past decade.

Wright asserts in his post, “To fix such issues, we need to start by understanding that nodes and wallets are separate. Nodes are miners, and wallets are what is used by the user to allow for a P2P transaction.” He adds, “[A]n ECDSA-based web certificate, an SSL/TLS-server certificate that allows you to surf the internet securely, can be the basis of a merchant payment system — a system that remains secure and private, and yet is also constructed such that it only sends a payment to a particular address once.”

He further explains, “There are two ways to send money. If the recipient is online, you can enter their IP address and it will connect, get a new public key and send the transaction with comments. If the recipient is not online, it is possible to send to their Bitcoin address, which is a hash of their public key that they give you. They’ll receive the transaction the next time they connect and get the block it’s in. This method has the disadvantage that no comment information is sent, and a bit of privacy may be lost if the address is used multiple times, but it is a useful alternative if both users can’t be online at the same time or the recipient can’t receive incoming connections.”

This certificate would be possible in both S/MIME (Secure/Multipurpose Internet Mail Extensions) and HTTPS.

The post is a detailed example of how feasible – and easy – it would be to implement a merchant strategy for cryptocurrencies. Given that the volatility of the markets has been greatly reduced over the past year and the cost of crypto transactions is often only pennies, there are virtually no reasons why digital currencies should not become the norm for virtually all spending needs. While the ability of a blockchain to handle a large amount of simultaneous transactions still needs to be addressed, BSV is leading the way and has the capacity to handle millions of transactions at once, making it the ideal candidate for a peer-to-peer retail digital payment alternative.