This week’s CoinGeek Weekly Livestream comes just days after the BSV Global Blockchain Convention in Dubai. At the event, one of the biggest highlights was sCrypt founder and CEO Xiaohui Liu’s announcement that the BSV enterprise blockchain was now opening its doors to Ethereum developers. He joined host Kurt Wuckert Jr. to discuss the big announcement and what it means for Bitcoin, Ethereum and the future of the blockchain industry.
Liu’s presentation was a big hit in Dubai, with Kurt noting that even Dr. Craig Wright was raving about it and welcoming the Ethereum faithful to Bitcoin at the afterparty.
In a recap of his presentation, Liu said that he had announced the launch of a smart contract transpiler which is “sort of like an automatic conversion tool where you can take an Ethereum [smart] contract written in Solidity and it generates the equivalent sCrypt code.”
Liu acknowledged that no transpiler will ever be 100% accurate, and it’s not what he was going for. The compiler will do a great job with about 95% of the code and the developer has to go through it manually to fine tune it.
The transpiler will be a great tool to kickstart the absorption of Ethereum into Bitcoin, Liu believes. One of the prime targets will be projects deployed on Ethereum that have been building for years but have run into the scaling bottleneck or are being put off by the high fees. Such projects have three- or four-years’ worth of code deployed on Ethereum and can’t just abandon it.
Despite Bitcoin being technically superior to Ethereum, “they started much earlier so they have a much bigger network effect.”
The compiler will also target the Solidity developers, even those who are yet to deploy apps on Ethereum. Rather than learn a new programming language, they can still explore their ideas through Solidity but build on Bitcoin, Liu added.
Liu’s compiler is open source and he invites any developer out there to join him in making it better and even port some of the Ethereum tools and libraries to Bitcoin.
Liu, who has a Ph.D. in Computer Science from Wayne State University and previously worked at Facebook, is not an absolutist when it comes to technology. While he knows that only Bitcoin SV can scale unbounded to support enterprise-level applications, he acknowledges that other networks have something they can offer too. He constantly checks out what’s happening in rival projects including BTC, BCH and Ethereum and as he told Kurt, he’s always trying to see what can be ported to BSV to move the network forward.
Today, the blockchain world has thousands of networks, most of which have little to no activity, and all of whom promise to change the world in one way or another. Almost all of them sprung up under the premise that Bitcoin isn’t Turing complete and can’t support smart contracts, led by Ethereum. It might have been different if Liu had been building sCrypt a decade ago and we wouldn’t have so many ‘useless’ projects. But as he told Kurt, he believes that Bitcoin will still win in the long run and most of these projects will be phased away.
Liu’s tools can be used on every other Bitcoin implementation, from BTC and BCH to even the meme-based Dogecoin. However, he insists that he will continue to build on BSV as it’s the only one that can scale. For him, it’s all about going with the best, and BSV is undoubtedly the best.
“Basically, I asked myself, what’s the one thing they can do that we can’t do? For me, it’s not about being religious and following the original Bitcoin. I just always choose the best option. We have the biggest blocks, the most mature opcodes and an ecosystem capable of using this. Why would I go to Dogecoin, nobody is using it.”
Liu and Kurt also discussed a low-hanging fruit of resurrecting projects that were being built on Ethereum that died off after their developers run into scaling challenges. Granted, in the 2017 ICO boom, there were many scammers who defrauded investors, but there were also genuine ideas that just couldn’t work out on Ethereum.
“Maybe the project itself, the business idea made sense but it just couldn’t work on Ethereum because of the high fees and unscalability. Why not port them over here?”
Watch the BSV Global Blockchain Convention Dubai 2022 Day 1 here:
Watch the BSV Global Blockchain Convention Dubai 2022 Day 2 here:
Watch the BSV Global Blockchain Convention Dubai 2022 Day 3 here:
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