Steve Shadders: Bitcoin development approaching exponential payoff

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The continued development of Bitcoin SV (BSV) sits largely on the shoulders of brilliant men like Steve Shadders, chief technology officer at nChain, and his team. CoinGeek’s Becky Liggero caught up with him on Developer’s Day at the recent CoinGeek Toronto 2019 scaling conference, and they talked about the effort that has gone into BSV and what’s coming next.

Developer’s Day was a great opportunity for the world to learn what’s coming down the pipe from all sorts of businesses, but also for the one’s doing the work to feel in their element. “Well today is actually really exciting for us as developers because it’s the time when we can just talk as technical as we want. We can really nerd out,” Shadders said. “But it’s important, I think, for developers to keep their focus on user experience. And in fact, we have a whole section of the day devoted to that.”

As the infrastructure of Bitcoin gets back to the vision it was originally intended to have, there’s been a new focus on a more user friendly experience. “It’s important to make things easy for people so that they’ve got a friction free path into Bitcoin,” Shadders told Liggero. “And that includes developers as well. Our recent hackathon, the twist of the theme was take the onboarding problem for users, but also apply it to developers as well.”

All the same, 2019 continues to be the year where Bitcoin scales the blockchain massively, and that’s been Shadder’s focus. “There’s a whole lot of work sort of behind the scenes to do with scaling, which I won’t get into the technical detail of that because it’s pages and pages,” he said. “Really exciting stuff increasing our capacity.”

He concluded by telling Liggero how close the BSV community is to seeing incredible changes thanks to massive scaling, something that’s already being proven since the Quasar protocol update was pushed out:

“You know, we’ve got incremental changes, but the thing with development life, it’s sort of an exponential payoff. You lay a lot of groundwork and then you reach a point where you start reaping the rewards over and over and over again. And we’re at that pointy end of the curve right now so it’s fantastic. The new mechanism of block propagation really solves one of the big problems of Bitcoin. There is no barrier to us now for scaling.”