Kurt Wuckert Jr on GoldSilver Pros: Real value of Bitcoin lies in its computational ability

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Kurt Wuckert Jr. recently appeared on the GoldSilver Pros podcast, discussing Bitcoin, his route into digital currency, and the future of BSV enterprise blockchain as it grows to become the world’s new money.

The discussion begins with a look at how digital currency starts—as a mechanism for ‘honest money’ that’s outside the scope of the Fed. In recent months, the idea has gained further credence, with significant money printing and a corresponding devaluation of fiat. Wuckert said that in recent years, the space has become ever more credible, with the idea of sound money crucial to his worldview of economics.

For Wuckert, he explains how his introduction to digital currency came from first receiving a payment in digital currency some years ago. After initially sparking an interest, he began to investigate the mechanics of Bitcoin and digital currency, before getting his own mining rig, and the rest—for CoinGeek’s chief Bitcoin historian—is history.

Wuckert said the real value of Bitcoin lies in its computational ability. Bitcoin and its economics allow the creation and distribution of publicly accessible supercomputer computational power. Pay enough, and that access is open to anyone at any scale. In the case of BSV blockchain, however, there is a strong focus on bringing in business clientele that can benefit from this computational power. Unlike other blockchains which are still floating around in theoreticals, BSV enterprise blockchain is already doing serious business, and is looking for more ways to onboard a wider range of end users.

He compared the transaction capacity on BTC—currently at 5-7 transactions per second, with a maximum of 6MB block capacity per hour, a state of play Wuckert described as “absurdly small.” Especially in light of plans to use BTC as legal tender in the country of El Salvador, he noted that the capacity for BTC is simply nowhere near up to levels that would be needed to sustain that level of usage.

Contrast with BSV, where the network can currently handle 3,000 to 4,000 transactions per second—roughly equivalent to the capacity of the VISA network. Blocks have already been sized as highly as 638MB, and testing has shown the network is capable of handling as many as 50,000 transactions per second before showing strain. In the next generation of the technology, this is expected to increase to 1 million transactions per second, with support for multi-terabyte block sizes into the future. According to Wuckert, this is currently in the latter stages of testing, and will be rolling out soon.

Wuckert said with this capacity, the BSV blockchain is capable of running as the platform for the new internet, giving rise to a whole new generation of apps and commercial opportunities in the process.

He noted that the key to BSV’s success lies in its decentralization. Bitcoin miners should be registered companies, providing security and monetary services, with users as their customers. For Wuckert, it is not necessarily desirable to have decentralization split over millions of nodes, where a few pseudo-institutional players with insurance and other institutional clout would perform the function just as well.

On regulators, he said that ultimately governments should become economic competition, rather than an economic overlord. This, he said, would ensure the integrity of the market and position BSV appropriately for the future of data and money.

Wuckert also suggested that Bitcoin SV will find a use case in stablecoins and CBDCs, as the cheapest, fastest way to tokenize a fiat currency with capacity for global scale. With more countries shifting in that direction already, he said it would continue to demonstrate the value add offered by BSV over any and all other blockchains.