For Bitcoin Association Founding President Jimmy Nguyen, talking about the vision, plan and goals of Bitcoin SV (BSV) comes naturally. He joined CoinGeek.com recently to discuss the recent achievements of BSV, where the development of Bitcoin went wrong, and what the future holds for the world’s new money.
There’s been a rush of activity to the BSV blockchain since it embraced unlimited scaling, and Nguyen is excited about all of it. “A number of the top Bitcoin applications and projects have moved over to Bitcoin SV, many of them exclusively,” He explains. “Such as Centbee, HandCash, two of the best mobile wallets out there. Money Button, Yours.org, one of the great applications from Bitcoin Cash has gone full on to Bitcoin SV. A number of exchanges have added support and listed BSV, I think there’s over 70 now around the world.”
Development has ramped up as well, sometimes from unexpected places. “Unwriter, the mysterious, very prolific Bitcoin developer wrote this very powerful post that explained how, in Unwriter’s view, Bitcoin SV is the real Bitcoin, and Unwriter’s only going to develop projects just on Bitcoin SV going forward,” Nguyen notes.
The BSV team isn’t resting either. “Our Bitcoin Node SV development team is really focused on scaling initiatives,” he said. “So we know it’s critical to demonstrate the capacity of the Bitcoin SV blockchain to massively scale with big blocks. They’ve been running tests on a new scaling test network, demonstrating their success on the test network of showing not just a random large block, but sustained for 24 hours, 64MB blocks, and even getting up to 128MB range.”
This is all a huge step forward for the Bitcoin protocol, which saw so many regrettable setbacks for years. “There have been developer groups that have wanted to make fundamental changes to the Bitcoin core design and protocol,” Nguyen points out. He adds:
“And that’s why Bitcoin, if we’re honest, has not really grown, and become what it was birthed to be. That started with Bitcoin Core’s development team putting in limitations and restrictions on Bitcoin that should not have remained forever. It capped the block size to 1MB, pursued off-chain attempts at processing transactions faster, such as the Lightning Network and other layer two solutions.
“And then most egregiously, introduced Segregated Witness into the code in 2017, changing forever the definition of what Bitcoin was supposed to be, a chain of digital signatures. It no longer is on Bitcoin Core, because of Segregated Witness’ introduction.”
Those choices, made by the Bitcoin Core (BTC) team, prevented any solid growth for Bitcoin’s cause. “When you have these constant changes by developer groups to the base protocol, it makes it very hard to convince a big business, big enterprises, to spend their time, resources, and a lot of money to build applications on top of that blockchain.” Nguyen points out. “Think about it this way, what if the internet protocol was changing every six months because some developers wanted to try and experiment something with the internet, would we have the robust internet that we have today with so many websites, applications, services operating on it. I would say no because businesses would not want to invest on a platform that is not rock solid, but moving sand. That’s why Bitcoin SV is committed just to restore the original Satoshi Protocol.”
The future of BSV looks solid because its development is being handled in a mature manner. “For Bitcoin SV’s future, our Node development team knew that it was critical to professionalize the entire Bitcoin development process, so that big enterprises would feel comfortable operating on this blockchain, and that involves how we deal with security,” he told us. “One of the key things is a full security audit of the Bitcoin SV software. We believe this is the first time in the history of Bitcoin that any Bitcoin node implementation has been fully security audited. It’s because its time consuming and expensive. But thanks to our partners at CoinGeek, we’ve got the funding to engage Trail of Bits, which is a top tier security audit firm in the United States.”
Setting BSV apart from the pack is the bounty program it offers. “Basically what that means is providing monetary rewards, incentives, for the world’s best security researchers to find, but then responsibly disclose, any bugs or problems in the code,” he notes. “The team is offering, again thanks to the funding from CoinGeek, bounties that match what Google, Microsoft, the biggest tech companies in the world offer, and its designed to incentivize responsible disclosure of any security issues in the software.”
One of the common points of disagreement about Bitcoin has been its regulation. On this matter, Nguyen is pretty clear where BSV stands. “It’s going to be subject at some point to government laws,” he believes. “So rather than ignore laws that apply to those areas, we believe it’s critical to convince the biggest businesses of the world to operate on Bitcoin SV. That we build an environment and ecosystem that is regulation friendly. That doesn’t mean we want governments to over regulate applications and services that operate on Bitcoin SV. We just want them to sensibly apply existing laws to this new world.”
The future of BSV is clear, and it’s all about scaling. “Our team is working on a lot of technical solutions to improve block and transaction propagation,” Nguyen told us. “We know that’s critical. We know you don’t just lift the block cap to a bigger number and all of a sudden, voila, the network operates easily with bigger blocks. So the team is working on solutions for that, we are planning some more testing, we’ve done some testing on a new scaling test network the team has constructed for Bitcoin SV.”
BSV has proven time and time again now that it can sustain big blocks, and more of that is coming. Nguyen shared upcoming plans with us:
“We’re planning more public stress tests to demonstrate what we believe is the massive throughput capacity of Bitcoin SV. For later releases, the plan is to continue to increase the default block cap. Right now it’s 128MB, the future plan is to go to 512MB as the default block, on the way to higher, 1-2GB in size. The ultimate goal is to have no cap at all, no limit, and let miners configure whatever block size they want to accept.”
To end the discussion, Nguyen extended a welcoming hand to anyone who believes in the true vision of Bitcoin. “No matter what stance you took during the battle between Bitcoin ABC and the Bitcoin SV camps last year, the Bitcoin SV ecosystem is open for everyone to join,” he said. “If you believe in Bitcoin, because you read that Whitepaper and thought, ‘This is an amazing invention for the world,’ then you believe in Bitcoin SV. We have the plan, the commitment, and the resolve, to see through the original Satoshi vision. So join us and say, we choose SV.”
If you’re ready to choose BSV, or you already have, why not go to the CoinGeek Toronto conference, happening May 29 and 30. Registering is fast and easy, and you can save money by using Bitcoin SV with Coingate.
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