nChain’s Alex Mackay: Low bandwidth SPV helps bring Bitcoin back to its natural state

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When Bitcoin was first developed, it was meant, among other things, to offer a true peer-to-peer payments platform that would put the power of the transactions directly in the hands of consumers and merchants. Currently, any payment system, other than cash, relies on a third party to handle the transactions; this can be seen in credit and debit card payments, wire payments and even cryptocurrency. However, Simple Payment Verification on Bitcoin SV (BSV) is helping to take digital currency to a new level, while returning it to its rightful state as Satoshi Nakamoto described. Alex Mackay, a researcher with nChain, talked with CoinGeek’s Stephanie Tower during the recent CoinGeek Conference Seoul event and laid out SPV and how it is achieving Bitcoin’s goal. 

SPV makes it possible for merchants and consumers to communicate their transactions directly. It offers a mechanism through which payments are handled the same as if someone were to be handing cash over to a clerk in a store, but with digital cash and not physical fiat. Ultimately, this helps speed up the activity on the blockchain, making payments virtually instantaneous.

A Low bandwidth SPV system will help Bitcoin return to its natural state by drastically cutting the amount of traffic seen on the blockchain, allowing it to scale to new heights that no other blockchain can reproduce. It also has the added benefit of being able to sign and propagate transactions, even offline.

By allowing merchants to connect to BSV nodes, this produces less congestion on the network and results in a transaction solution that benefits everyone, from miners to merchants to end users. Merchants are particularly rewarded, because they receive money instantaneously in their wallets, without having to pay a percentage to a third-party processor, such as Visa or Mastercard, giving them a greater profit margin without having to wait for their funds to be released from the processor.

Low bandwidth SPV is more than just a potential solution. It is already developed and is ready to be rolled out with BSV upgrades. It is compatible with BIP 270, often defined as “the simplified payment protocol,” and is ready to be rolled out. This is just the latest in a long list of examples of how BSV is restoring Bitcoin to its natural state and creating the only truly optimized blockchain payments and transaction solution.