History of Bitcoin on CoinGeek Weekly Livestream

Getting your Trinity Audio player ready...

On this episode of the CoinGeek Weekly Livestream, Kurt Wuckert Jr. takes us on a walk down memory lane before outlining his vision for the future of Bitcoin. Being CoinGeek’s Chief Bitcoin Historian, Wuckert knows what went down and how we got here, so this episode should be of great interest to anyone who wants to understand Bitcoin from launch to the current day.

Back to the beginning

In 2008, the world experienced one of the largest financial crashes in modern history. Due to mortgage-backed derivatives and fraud on an epic scale, the American housing market collapsed, and many major banks and financial institutions worldwide went with it.

In what Wuckert describes as a “weird era,” the culture and politics shifted in response. The Tea Party, a hyper-conservative American movement, demanded cuts to government spending and a return to sound finances. At the same time, Occupy Wall Street called for systemic change and a bailout for the people. However, another movement, the cypherpunks, also got a resurgence of interest. Their mission was to use cryptography to create private communications for the world, but to do so, they needed a peer-to-peer currency.

Several previous attempts to create electronic cash, from David Cahum’s eCash to Nick Szabo’s Bitgold, failed for various reasons. Then, in October 2008, Satoshi Nakamoto released the Bitcoin white paper on the Cryptography Mailing List, and a new era began.

Early disagreements over ideology and scaling

From the outset, the Bitcoin community was divided and argued bitterly over various issues. Some said it couldn’t scale, but Satoshi insisted it never hit a scaling ceiling. Anarchists and criminals wanted to use Bitcoin to circumvent or break the law, and again, Satoshi resisted. When Wikipedia embraced it, he warned them they had “kicked the hornets’ nest” and disappeared shortly thereafter.

After Satoshi left, the politics became even more heated, and Bitcoiners split into two main camps: big blockers and small blockers. The former believed Satoshi when he said his system scaled, and they wanted unbounded blocks, opcodes that enable lots of functionality, and more. Small blockers, by contrast, wanted to keep the temporary block size (1MB) and focus on a so-called decentralized, uncensorable network built around “crypto-anarchist” concepts.

There were attempts to come to compromises, such as the Hong Kong and New York agreements, but the promises weren’t kept, and it soon became apparent that the Bitcoin network would split. Thus, in 2017, Bitcoin Cash was born, and the way was paved for the proliferation of thousands of blockchains and coins that plague the industry today.

Wuckert rightfully points out that Bitcoin had 90% of all the value in the industry at the time of the split. It has never again had such a dominant position. He believes it would be worth all of that value combined plus more had it been left the way Satoshi designed it.

A split within the big block camp leads to BSV

Despite big and small blockers going their separate ways, there were still fundamental disagreements within the big block camp. Those who wanted truly unbounded blocks, the restoration of the original opcodes, and to test Satoshi’s vision clashed with the anarchists who tried to introduce a few more new changes and gradually increase block sizes as demand required.

Before long, these two groups of big blockers split, and BSV was born. Wuckert finds it disheartening that there aren’t more people who wanted to test whether Satoshi was correct, but the majority seem focused on value extraction rather than creation. However, he and some others are still here, and while many businesses and ideas have come and gone, valuable lessons have been learned from them.

The path forward for BSV and Bitcoin at scale

Today, BSV is disliked by the crypto industry, but it’s on the cusp of one million transactions per second with Teranode. This scaling and its utility makes Wuckert believe BSV can still win the long game, for as we have seen recently, competitor blockchains like Solana can’t even handle the launch of popular meme coins. There’s simply no way to make a global state machine scale, so the blockchain utilizing the superior UTXO model has an opportunity to take the lead.

Wuckert points to three key concepts: Bitcoin Schema, 1Sat Ordinals, and sCrypt. The combination of these three means any type of business can be built on the BSV blockchain without concerns about scaling. Bitcoin Schema allows transactions to be written to and read from the chain, 1Sat Ordinals allow for the exchange of value, and sCrypt enables functionality like smart contracts and programmability.

Treechat.Ai is an example of how to use all three to create a useful application that raises the bar. Global remittances are an example of a problem that an enterprising entrepreneur could tackle in the future. There are many others, and with massive scaling and the functionality outlined above, the sky is the limit.

If we don’t start focusing on value creation and building businesses that change the world, the entire Bitcoin experiment could be lost. Photos with presidents won’t get it done; we must build value rather than shuffle it around. Wuckert says he’s happy to help anyone with an idea in any way he can, and he encourages us to focus on business, productivity, and growth in the years ahead.

Watch: Realizing the vision for Bitcoin beyond crypto