John ‘Jack’ Pitts on The Friendly Bear Podcast: Short selling can be toxic and can affect Bitcoin psyche

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John “Jack” Pitts is the founder of BSV application SLictionary, and not long ago, he joined David aka Reverse Long on the Friendly Bear podcast to discuss digital currencies, blockchain technology, and more.

Jack has a unique insight into BSV, being one of the earliest adopters of the tech, and he’s been around the block, too. Having seen the rise and fall of the Dot Coms back when he was a hedge fund manager, he always has an interesting perspective to share on where we are with regards to digital currencies.

How can it be that very few people acknowledge that Dr. Craig Wright invented Bitcoin?

Jumping straight into the deep end, David asks Jack how it’s possible that relatively few people have acknowledged the truth that Dr. Craig Wright invented Bitcoin.

Jack points to one of his articles, “Three Wrights Don’t Make a Wrong.” In it, he outlines how this actually has a historical precedent; many doubted the Wright brothers when they invented the first working airplane. Many accused them of fraud and mocked their claims while they worked quietly and diligently to perfect and patent their technology.

Jack believes that Dr. Wright refused to publicly prove he was Satoshi because he wanted to build a strong patent portfolio and gain an edge on his potential competition first. To this day, he doesn’t provide absolute and irrefutable public proof, but it’s easy to figure out for anyone who wants to research properly, Jack says.

The toxic psyche of short selling & naked shorting BSV

David veers into talking about trading, and Jack tells him that short selling can be toxic and can affect the psyche. He agrees and notes that many traders don’t want to short for this reason.

Jack explains the true purpose of Bitcoin (BSV); to be a peer-to-peer electronic cash system. He gives David a brief history of Bitcoin: its volatile price history, Satoshi’s disappearance, developers hijacking Bitcoin, the BCH and BSV splits, etc. He then explains that he thinks BTC is a bubble-like the South Sea Bubble of 1720.

“It’s just something you hold and hope that some jackass pays more for it,” Jack says.

He then explains how all the money made in the digital currency bubble allows for naked short selling of BSV. Since it’s the one that many others in the industry view as a threat, that’s exactly what is happening. As a former short seller, Jack says he thought he had seen it all but that he’s seen some seriously clever and devious attacks on BSV and Dr. Wright.

How will it all end? Jack believes that there will be such good things built on BSV that owning some will be unavoidable. Eventually, the naked shorters will be caught.

On BSV today and in the future

Jack points out that BSV has more transactions than Ethereum every day this year except for one. He points out that people think BSV isn’t successful because the price is suppressed, but when you look at real usage and utility, BSV is leading the pack.

“We’re pretty much in the first inning of companies using ‘cryptocurrency’ to build applications…,” Jack says. He believes that BSV adoption will hockey stick in the way many other tech trends do. Likening BSV to Amazon, a company he watched grow from the Dot Com days, he believes that we’re in the very early stages of something world changing.

David asks Jack to clarify a few points about BSV. He understands how it’s technically superior to blockchains like Ethereum but wants to know more about the fork and what exactly BSV is. Jack tells him the history of the Bitcoin forks and what that means (a split in direction). He explains how when the split occurred, Bitcoin Cash wanted to keep the original concept of Bitcoin while BTC changed the protocol and turned it into something that is totally different in its purpose and that ultimately won’t work from a tech perspective.

“BTC is going to zero,” Jack says. He feels the same way about Ethereum, too. Looking back at the Dot Coms, he likens Ethereum and other altcoins to AOL. He says that big investors were throwing money at these companies that ultimately amounted to nothing. He likens BSV to Google; a company few people saw coming at the time.

SLictionary

Jack explains his application SLictionary, which stands for Self Learning dictionary. It’s based on micropayments instead of ads. It costs a penny or so to look up a word, but the definitions will be entertaining and potentially written by actual experts.

Explaining SLictionary in more detail, Jack asks David to imagine reading a definition of Bitcoin written by Satoshi himself or a definition of the word skateboard written by Tony Hawk. Once the user chooses the best definition and clicks the lightbulb icon then the author gets 70% of the penny the user pays. He also explains the concept of word bounties within SLictionary. You can finance a contest to write the best definition of a word and can earn a piece of those definitions in the long run.

Wrapping up, Jack says that new users of digital currencies and blockchain today don’t need to understand the deep technical plumbing of each blockchain. He encourages them to simply use the various applications and find out which is best via experience.

Watch: John “Jack” Pitts on More Than Money with Patrick Thompson