The Bitcoin Vision: Episode 20

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In this week’s Bitcoin Vision, Founding President of the Bitcoin Association Jimmy Nguyen highlights the latest major developments that have taken place in the Bitcoin SV (BSV) ecosystem—from Quasar protocol upgrade to Agora’s new features. Bitcoin SV is the rebirth of the original Bitcoin, finally unlocking the true power of Bitcoin’s original design, protocol and Satoshi Vision.

On July 12, the BSV node team released version 0.2.1 of the BSV node implementation. Though it’s an optional release and is not a requirement for the Quasar upgrade, it adds some key improvements. This version’s main feature is an improvement that cuts down the time it takes to produce blocks with numerous transactions. This enables the miners to produce larger blocks even more easily. The 0.2.1 version removes support for the Bitcoin ABC cashaddr format, which means those using this format are best advised to stick to version 0.2.0. The 0.2.1 version is best run on machines with at least 32 GB of data.

Nguyen highlighted the biggest development in the Bitcoin ecosystem this week: the Quasar protocol upgrade. This upgrade focuses on scaling, lifting the default block size hard cap from the previous 128MB to 2000MB (2GB). While the default block size hard cap is 2GB, a significant portion of miner hash rate will initially manually set their hard cap at 512MB.

Currently, Bitcoin SV can already handle over 300 transactions per second comfortably, but with the Quasar upgrade, this number will exceed 1,000 transactions per second. This will enable BSV to fulfill its goal of being the global enterprise blockchain.

Meanwhile, Agora, the self-styled home page of the Metanet, has added some new features to its alpha version as the team continues to work on Agora Beta. Agora allows its users to create a home page on the Bitcoin SV blockchain, add apps, buy and sell items, aggregate their favorite news channels and more. Agora users can now add their WeatherSV channel, Twetch handles and Paymail addresses, all without the need for passwords. This is just one of the many applications that prove the Bitcoin SV blockchain will be the basis of a whole new Internet.

Jimmy also highlighted Metahandle, a service that lets its users bookmark or tag any onchain file with an immutable handle which is always accessible. One can use the service to tag similar content, as a password for personal files or to give a file an individual name. Metahandle makes it much easier to access information onchain, a crucial service as the BSV ecosystem continues to expand with each passing day.

For this week’s Satoshi shout-out, Jimmy lauded the team behind Legally Chained, an onchain identity and document management application powered by the BSV Metanet. As more governments continue to recognize the validity of digital signatures, it has become crucial to secure such signatures and make them easily verifiable. Users can create documents for others to sign for as low as $0.99 and sign documents themselves for free. The uses of Bitcoin SV’s public blockchain continue to increase.

While you’re at it, also check out the previous episodes of The Bitcoin Vision here.