John Pitts: The BSV network could have an “astronomical” value

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A former technology analyst on Wall Street, John Pitts brings his experience of assessing Internet companies to making educated guesses about the prospects for Bitcoin SV and BTC. And he’s confident that it’s possible to make valuations: “it’s my belief not only that you can, but if it cannot be valued, then it probably isn’t anything.”

In an article on CoinGeek, John worked through a series of calculations to assess the value of the BTC network and compared it with BSV. He started by taking transaction fees across the network as the ‘income’ of the network – equivalent to sales in assessing the value of a tech startup. With small blocks, and therefore limited potential for transaction fees, BTC comes off badly, with the whole network being worth as little as $45,000.

John is unapologetic: “that’s about where I think BTC is going, which is effectively zero. And the reason for that is because BTC isn’t using the most important thing about Bitcoin, which is the data, the information.”

When it comes to BSV, it’s a different story because the blocks will be much bigger: “if you adjust those numbers and you start using one gigabyte instead of one megabyte or you use one terabyte …you get very big numbers.”

But John is cautious about predicting too much too soon for BSV: “these things take time. They always do. You know, it took Apple 40 years to get to a trillion dollar valuation. Maybe it doesn’t take BSV that long because it’s more important than what Apple has done. But the point is, it’s going to take a lot longer than people think. However, the valuations can be astronomical for BSV. So there’s good news and there’s bad news.”

John compares the value of data stored on BSV to the relative value of land and the buildings on them in a city. When the city prospers, land increases in value and that makes it worthwhile for real estate developers to replace smaller, cheaper buildings with new ones. In the same way, as the BSV network grows in value, with a limited supply of coins (21 million), data that’s not valued by its owner can be replaced by more valuable data, making better use of the ‘real estate’ on the coins.

 

But John’s interest in BSV is not just theoretical, nor even just financial. He is also an app developer, with SLictionary (above) now available to users. It’s a BSV-powered dictionary, whose marketing describes it as the “biggest advancement in dictionaries since books”.

The idea is to invite users to create competing definitions and upload photos and videos to help explain words too. Popular definitions are rewarded with BSV. Although the user has to pay a small search fee, John says, the money “takes away all the bad entries and accentuates the good ones.” Unlike with Wikipedia, “people can’t spam it. People cannot manipulate it. I think that’s the beauty of the whole thing.”

At the moment, there are still thousands of words waiting to be defined on SLictionary. But for John, that’s not a problem. He’s in BSV for the long run, based on his research into the potential of the network. It worked when he made that kind of judgement on the young Amazon.com. Now he’s getting the same feeling about BSV, as he said in his article: “this is one of those times I’m betting my life, my good name, and even my children’s destiny on a set of research.”

“Destiny” is still waiting to be defined on SLictionary.

Hear the whole of John Pitts’ interview in this week’s CoinGeek Conversation podcast:

You can also watch the podcast video on YouTube.

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