So much data—what should we do with it? BSV DevCon looks at real world solutions

Getting your Trinity Audio player ready...

Think Teranode‘s one million on-chain transactions per second is great? Well it is, but for the builders at BSV DevCon 2024 in London, it’s not enough.

“That’s only a 1MHz CPU guys. We need to do a lot more,” said Project Babbage‘s Ty Everett in his presentation on the “Bitcoin CPU”—or, how to perform general purpose computation using UTXOs.

Everett’s comment reflected the spirit of the day, where some of the hardest workers in blockchain are pushing the Bitcoin protocol’s capabilities to ever new heights.

BSV DevCon is a raw, no-nonsense, or frills peek at what blockchain could really do for the world. We don’t need a Steve Ballmer leaping around the stage reminding us it’s “developers, developers, developers” who make the difference. Everyone here in London today already knew it.

‘To build real-world solutions for real-world problems’

There were several presentations from the protocol guardians at the BSV Association, who hosted and sponsored the event for at least a hundred attendees. Thomas Giacomo reminded us that a regulatory-compliant blockchain network is essential if you want adoption, as is BSV’s “set in stone” protocol rules and the much-talked-about Digitial Asset Recovery and Network Access Rules features.

Block Dojo‘s Matthias De Cnuydt-Hope brought along several members of the Dojo’s latest cohort, detailing the role the incubator plays in turning ideas into reality. He noted he and his friends might have invented Uber (NASDAQ: UBER)… had they acted on the idea instead of simply talking about it. The Block Dojo exists to package those ideas into something that appeals to investors and potential customers, and support structures like this are just as necessary as coding and building themselves.

Mihael Šinkec talked about sCrypt‘s role in companies like Tokenovate (financial instruments), Adeus (affordable trusts), and Hodlocker, and said his company’s Python BSV SDK will help developers bring an idea to market without having to build from scratch. Šinkec also described 1Sat Ordinals as a “match made in heaven” for sCrypt contracts, just before Ordinals protocol devs David Case and Luke Rohenaz spoke of how minting tokens “brings back the feeling of mining Bitcoins on your laptop”, though as Rohenaz added, “there’s a lot still to be done.”

For BSV’s developers, the job is never quite finished. There’s always a new boundary to push and new use cases to discover, and BSV has a way of delivering results any time a developer thinks of one.

HandCash‘s Rafa Jimenez talked about how his company’s much-used wallet has found its killer apps in gaming, storing rich-featured game items that move across apps and can make their owners money. With the recent support of the new MNEE USD stablecoin, there’s the opportunity for anything to be priced in denominations users can understand, along with microtransactions, something rarely, ever seen in dollar payments.

Kurt Wuckert Jr. presented GorillaPool‘s aim to be much more than just a miner and how JungleBus is making sense of on-chain information, which is “still just a big chunk of data sorted only by time.” Gate2Chain‘s Bart Olivares demonstrated his company’s role in getting all that data from the app to the blockchain, making it meaningful, and how it’s done.

BSV DevCon 2024 also saw presentations from nChain, the BSV Academy, TAAL, and the BSV Technical Standards Committee, all of which are turning blockchain into something the real world can make use of.

Wrapping up the day (and in many ways saving the best for last), Siggi Oskarsson talked about Teranode’s progress towards a million on-chain, Layer 1, transactions per second, even if, as Project Babbage thinks, it’s still not enough. There were also several talks on BSV’s topology upgrade to create a Mandala network and how it affects the way network participants interact with each other wherever they are.

Even the slightest mention here could one day be something of world-changing significance, and only those who really understand blockchain could explain it. Perhaps. Despite the collected intelligence in DevCon’s main presentation room today, there’s that nagging feeling that someone new could arrive tomorrow and suggest something that leaves everyone speechless. Face-to-face events like BSV DevCon remain an integral part of this discovery process, and any developer looking to take their first steps into the blockchain world should look seriously at coming to future meetings.

Want to learn more about the fundamentals of blockchain technology? Check out the BSV Blockchain Resources page where you can download useful ebooks—from unleashing the value of extreme scale data to understanding the potential of the Metaverse, among the many topics—for free. 

Watch: Merging digitality & physicality onto truth layer of digital humanity