Joshua Henslee talks bitgear, Tales of SHUA

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What has Joshua Henslee been up to lately? One of BSV and blockchain’s more prolific personalities (both as a developer and online media figure) had been lying low since early 2024, but recently re-emerged with a new project called the bitgear protocol and updates to his Tale of SHUA Ordinals trading platform. The best way to answer the question above was to ping Henslee for more details on his thoughts, which you can read below.

BSV is still far superior to other UTXO-based blockchains, and building with BTC/Fractal “feels like going back to riding a horse after I’ve already been on a spaceship to Jupiter,” Henslee told CoinGeek.

Despite this, and much to the chagrin of BSV users, it’s still blockchains like BTC that captivate the public most (along with their money and economic activity). Developers like Henslee and others better known as BSV proponents, such as sCrypt, therefore will build tools aimed at BTC users or those on other UTXO-based blockchains. Anyone can use them, and BSV fans can still enjoy the speed, scalability, price, and extended data feature set their network gives them.

Down to start YouTube videos again, what should I discuss?

— shua (@cryptoAcorns) October 15, 2024

The bitgear protocol is one of those. It derives a randomly generated piece of fantasy equipment from the mined hash of a Bitcoin block. It’s different from Henslee’s original “Gear” token collection (which was BSV-only) from about a year ago and had a lock-to-mint feature where users locked their BSV for a few months to get eight randomly generated “pieces of gear.”

“The idea was to create a free mint-style collection like Bitmap, yet tied to a Bitcoin block. Anyone can claim a bitgear, simply by paying the mining fee and writing a text inscription on-chain,” he said.

Though it’s designed to work on BTC, bitgear can be deployed on any blockchain that supports Ordinal inscriptions, as well as having a block hash with hexadecimal representation.

Definitely game-inspired

Henslee’s approach to “crypto” and blockchain is that adoption and growth will come first from within its community, and that attempts to pitch the technology to “non-existent target customers” external to it (e.g., enterprise, government) is a waste of time.

“Governments and enterprises will eventually adopt blockchain; they will just be last,” he wrote after the London Blockchain Conference in 2023.

Instead, new users are drawn in by the prospect of creating trading value from something “that was not tradeable before”—particularly NFT collections and meme coins. Henslee has put his money where his mouth is, in this respect, creating his own personalized meme asset (SHUA coin, BSV’s first fungible token) and platforms to make them more useful, such as SHUAllet, Tale of SHUA, and now the bitgear protocol. These projects and their designs show Henslee knows the younger market he’s appealing to and how to design to its tastes.

“SHUA was the first fungible token on BSV back in 2021, this is where the name comes from,” Henslee said.

“I created the site Tale of SHUA originally to be a dungeon-crawling type game, but realized that was unlikely to get any adoption for the time and investment required to help that. Instead, I made it to issue free mint NFTs that could be used in a dungeon crawler, in hopes of adoption that would spark enough interest, demand, and justification to build such a game. That did not happen, so it has become a marketplace instead. To actually tie together the name to the site, maybe eventually I’ll airdrop the SHUA BSV-21 token to all the RUN holders from RelayX and provide an interface to trade there.”

Today’s Tale of SHUA is a BSV Ordinals trading platform for both NFT collections like Pixel Foxes and fungible tokens like 1SAT, as well as Bamboo, Gear, sMon Robots, sMon Sinners, and Masks of Salvation. Henslee originally built it in 2023 to be mobile-friendly, and it’s also available as a downloadable desktop web app.

“Tale of SHUA only shows markets for fungible tokens and NFTs that I have launched or I think are particularly valuable. I built it to make a simpler, faster, mobile-friendly version of a market as I felt the others that existed at the time were too clunky to use, or only worked with a browser extension. Additionally, I hold many of the assets listed there, so I wanted to provide more liquidity for those. Currently, it is the only BSV market that supports SHUAllet, a browser plugin wallet I also developed last year that is extremely simple and fast.”

Henslee understands digital tokens also have value to their owners that goes beyond market price. Like others, he’s been finding ways to restore collections from older protocols (namely RUN) with the help of tools like GorillaPool’s JungleBus.

“I leveraged JungleRun to fetch and index the old RUN tokens issued on RelayX. JungleBus allows developers to filter on particular transactions instead of managing the entire block, and BSV has many large ones that would make it difficult otherwise. I can use JungleRun only to get the relevant RUN transactions (e.g., excluding all the CryptoFights transactions) and only to index and support certain collections or tokens such as Rexxies, SHUA, etc. This is available on tique.run now.”

Everyone loves Pixel Foxes

Like all good NFT collections, Pixel Foxes range from common to rare, epic, and legendary, depending on their attributes or combinations of them. Lately, there’s been increasing demand from Pixel Fox token holders to know exactly how rare (or valuable) their foxes are without having to figure it out for themselves. Bubblemint’s Foxwars will give you a ranked score, and the most recent Tale of SHUA update has a similar mechanism to discover exactly where your Pixel Foxes rank in both traits and price, with filters for specific attributes.

“Pixel Foxes is a collection of potentially 10,000,000 NFTs on BSV (2.6 million issued thus far), which highlights its scalability. Despite there potentially being 10 million of these foxes issued on-chain, some combinations of Foxes are still particularly rare, for example to get a Fox with Body Armor and Frog Vision Glasses is only a 1 in 600,000 chance, so only roughly 16 of these can exist if the entire collection is minted out. The other reason I love this collection is the attributes are on-chain. Unlike BTC and other chains, which only support simple data inscription, BSV allows embedding additional metadata with the NFT, allowing others to build around other’s creations more easily.”

“To hammer the point about the metadata above,” he says, “because the fox traits were published on-chain, this work only took me a couple of hours.”

2024 issues and the BSV user community

This chat wouldn’t be complete without bringing up the recent unpleasantness of early 2024, particularly the COPA-led “Satoshi Trial” in the U.K. High Court and how its fallout impacted and divided the BSV user base. Henslee’s reaction, in particular, left many wondering if his followers in BSV would ever hear from him again.

He recently posted on X that “Pixel Foxes are the best thing to happen to BSV since losing the court case.” In case you’re wondering if Henslee has mellowed since his post-COPA trial criticisms of the BSV user community…he hasn’t. So, what did he mean by that comment?

“The loss of the court case provides an opportunity for the BSV community to move on,” Henslee said.

“Sadly, too many people still believe otherwise, which still continues to hamper (BSV’s) adoption. That stated, it is still the closest to the original Bitcoin, which is why I cannot stop tinkering with it, as it is far superior to other UTXO-based chains despite their recent innovations. Frankly, building with BTC and Fractal, for example, feels like going back to riding a horse after I’ve already been on a spaceship to Jupiter.”

BSV: Still Satoshi’s Vision, but ‘is stuck adoption-wise, until something fundamental changes’

So, where have Joshua Henslee and his work been since then? He also has some brutally honest thoughts on the future and doesn’t disappoint those looking for more controversy.

“I took a hiatus from the crypto space for around six months to figure out what I wanted to do next, but have reflected quite a lot on what went wrong with BSV and why BTC is still #1 in market cap and perceived as Bitcoin. Much has to do with my answer about the court case, but moreover, it is due to the failure of the people in the space to deliver what the market wants. At this stage, there is no point in debating what holders of digital currency actually want. They want to gamble, pump, and collect tokens.”

“Anything else has near zero adoption. BSV’s reluctance to acknowledge this, despite its ability to execute on those (concepts) far better than other chains, is the primary reason it has become a ghost chain today. The technology does not matter. Inscribing Ordinals on BTC costs exponentially more and technically is a nightmare (requires two transactions), yet they have far more adoption than BSV ever did at any point.”

“Furthermore, pariahs in the BSV space, such as Jack Liu, the Twetch team, and TokenSwap teams, have gone on to have massive success simply by doing the same thing they did on BSV, on BTC and/or other blockchains—which demonstrates that BSV had talented entrepreneurs, but many of those had and still have very lacking mindsets, and have no clue on how to gain adoption. Again, until this changes, I believe it is stuck adoption-wise until something fundamental changes. Despite those negative comments, as it does indeed scale and provides opportunity, I am still hopeful someone can finally crack the Hyperbitcoinization nut on Bitcoin as Satoshi originally designed.”

Watch: 1Sat Ordinals on Bitcoin with Joshua Henslee