How Teranode fulfills Bitcoin’s true potential: Siggi Óskarsson

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Teranode will be a “monumental” improvement to Bitcoin that proves once and for all that it can scale. It can scale on-chain and without bottlenecks in speed and costs. CoinGeek‘s Becky Liggero spoke to BSV Association’s Teranode Director Siggi Óskarsson at the AWS Summit in Zurich recently to find out what’s so special about it and how large-scale data services like AWS have a role to play in all this.

Due to going live around the end of 2024 and the start of 2025, Teranode has been able to process over a million on-chain transactions per second in testing. That’s already far superior to any other blockchain network, but it’s just the beginning. It’s expected that Teranode will be capable of processing many times that number in the future.

Satoshi’s original vision and rules for Bitcoin

“We are scaling this thing and proving what Satoshi has been talking about for all these years, since I think 2010, 2011 he talked about how Bitcoin will end up in data centers and it will scale, and it will be run by specialists. That’s what we’re working on, and I think we’ve proved that now with our proof of concepts, that it’s possible,” Óskarsson explains.

It’s a ground-up rewrite of Bitcoin’s node software, but it follows the original protocol rules for transactions set by Satoshi Nakamoto in the version first released in January 2009. Óskarsson says his team is taking the original node implementation and splitting it into microservices, scaling out every component separately.

Liggero points out that there are thousands of other blockchains out there today. Why is BSV so special?

“A lot of the blockchain stuff is based on assumptions,” Óskarsson says. “So if you work from those assumptions, you get to some conclusions, and you get stuck. And we had to break some of those assumptions, and they took a long time, a lot of discussions, like how do we actually do that? But we broke those assumptions, and that allowed us to think differently about the problem and scale it up.”

The rest of the industry is still stuck on many of those assumptions, he adds. One big one is the notion of “decentralization.” That word means different things to different people, who all have different expectations for it.

Decentralization means interactions between users

It’s about having no middleman, no trusted third party involved between two parties to a transaction, Óskarsson says. Decentralization, in this sense, is one of blockchain’s “three pillars,” the other two being security and scalability. They are all interrelated.

But if you take “decentralization” to mean everyone has to run a processing node in their own home, then you cannot scale. You can’t process a million transactions per second with a network based on home users and PCs. Users need to interact with each other, peer-to-peer, so the underlying infrastructure—which actually does the time-stamping and securing the network —can be in data centers while the network as a whole remains decentralized.

That’s where AWS enters the frame. Rather than experimenting on a purpose-built network of multiple thousands of CPUs, AWS data centers have allowed the Teranode team to experiment with different server types, bandwidth levels, and hardware configurations.

It would have been almost impossible to build and improve Teranode in a timely manner otherwise, Óskarsson says. “AWS has really helped us get this done so quickly. It’s been absolutely great,” he adds.

You can watch the full interview here, as well as hundreds of other informative videos about Bitcoin and blockchain on the CoinGeek YouTube channel.

Watch: Teranode is the future of the Bitcoin network