On the final day of the London Blockchain Conference, the Head of Network Infrastructure at the BSV Blockchain Association, Jake Jones, went up the technical stage to fill us in on what’s happening with Teranode and how it enables unbounded scaling.
What’s happening with Teranode
Jones begins by acknowledging that BSVers have been waiting for the release of Teranode for some time, and he jokes that it’s coming Soon™. On a more serious note, he says that the Teranode team is iterating on it. While early experiments with Teranode have been somewhat successful, some elements have been redesigned to allow for unbounded horizontal scaling.
Jones points out that the word “unbounded” doesn’t mean the same thing as infinite. The latter is a mathematical concept, while the former means that the Bitcoin network can adjust as the demand for transactions picks up.
While it’s well known that Bitcoin is a peer-to-peer electronic cash system, Jones wants us to start thinking of it as an edge-to-edge electronic value system. For the first time, we can assign value to information, and he describes this as “mind-blowing.”
We need one global blockchain, Jones says. Just as having many internets didn’t make sense, it doesn’t make sense to have many different private, permissioned blockchains. For that to happen, the blockchain will have to scale unboundedly.
That’s great, but that’s a LOT of transactions
Jones acknowledges that acting as the world’s ledger will require the BSV blockchain to be able to handle an almost unthinkable number of transactions. He highlights how credit card networks typically require around 30,000 transactions per second, and the Bank of England recently said that any system capable of running a digital GBP would need to be able to handle as many as 300,000 transactions per second.
How will Bitcoin scale to these massive levels? With specialized nodes, overlay networks, and SPV. He shows an impressive diagram of how the network will look at scale and highlights how enabling edge-to-edge communication is BSV blockchain’s superpower. This structure is what will allow the BSV blockchain to scale to the levels no other blockchain can.
Wrapping up, Jones says that every once in a while, an invention comes along that changes how we do everything. In his view, BSV blockchain is one of those inventions.
Teranode: Taking Bitcoin to unbounded scaling with Jake Jones
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