The Bitcoin Association for BSV recently sponsored the first annual Unbounded Capital Summit in New York City at Dream Downtown. The exclusive event was invite-only and featured some 80 attendees including prominent venture and hedge fund managers, fintech and blockchain entrepreneurs, and institutional and family office investors.
The summit was hosted by Unbounded Capital to help promote a network and provide excellent opportunities for on-chain companies to meet experts and investors.
One of the keynote addresses at the summit was given by Kurt Wuckert Jr, CoinGeek’s Chief Bitcoin Historian. Wuckert Jr’s presentation focused on the history of BSV blockchain and how, unlike other crypto-assets, it has never deviated from the original vision laid out by Satoshi Nakomoto in his white paper.
Bitcoin – in the beginning (2008 – 2011)
Wuckert Jr began his presentation by focusing on the original white paper and the world’s need for a reliable electronic cash system and how Nakamoto solved the ‘double-spend problem’. Wuckert Jr also provided a basic example of ’proof of work’ and how the system encourages people to reconcile the ledger properly.
‘You are trying to solve the problem of whether this ledger is accurate or not. People need to make payments on the Internet. In 2008 you had a couple of options but largely it came down to credit cards and Paypal. This means the typical person had no way to simply send $1 over the internet as they were subject to minimum spending limits.’
‘Bitcoin solves that problem. If you look at what Satoshi Nakamoto created, it was a way to solve small, casual transactions.’
Hijacking and control of Bitcoin (2011 – 2014)
Almost immediately after publishing his white paper in 2009, Nakamoto faced criticism about how the system would work. He added that unsavoury characters also tried to co-opt the technology so they could perform illicit business transactions.
Ultimately, Nakamoto lost control of the Bitcoin project – although it is not immediately clear when exactly this happened, said Wuckert Jr.
He was very explicit about his concerns that Bitcoin was being infiltrated by anonymous developers, criminals were misusing it and it had become associated with projects like WikiLeaks. This distortion of his tool was unacceptable and thus he removed himself from the project. The situation worsened when it emerged that Nakamoto’s account had been hijacked and started making changes to the source code.
During this malaise venture capital companies showed up, including Visa and Mastercard, creating a new economy specifically around Bitcoin being slow and a financial asset, and therefore needing third parties, Wuckert Jr said.
The Bitcoin Scaling War (2015-2017)
By 2017, the discussion around what Bitcoin is actually for had become increasingly muddied, with the focus inevitably moving away from electronic cash towards other vested interests, said Wuckert Jr.
This ultimately led to a big split and multiple forks away from the original Bitcoin protocol – including the new BTC. Segregated Witness or ‘SegWit’, was designed to remove the tracing capabilities of Bitcoin allowing the introduction of off-chain, opaque exchange solutions such as the Lightning Network. The introduction of this broke Bitcoin’s original protocol and clearly renders BTC as non-Bitcoin compliant and intentionally ineffective.
‘BSV is the restoration of the original Bitcoin stack. There are around 20,000 blockchains available today but only one is built on the assumption that Satoshi Nakamoto is right and we should give it a shot,’ Wuckert Jr said.
Where we are today with Bitcoin
BitcoinSV (BSV) became the new ticker symbol for the original Bitcoin Protocol when BCH decided to divert from Bitcoin’s white paper and introduce non-Bitcoin compliant features which included introducing anonymity that hinders government and financial regulation. This is why it’s considered Bitcoin’s Independence Day.
In February 2022, the Genesis upgrade restored the original Bitcoin Protocol as closely as possible to Satoshi’s original design, locking it down to create stability for developers and enterprises to build upon. Unbounded scaling returned, as did the original Bitcoin script language that allows developers to build on-chain applications easier.
‘BSV today is a fixed protocol that is set in stone and has no roadmap. This is because it is the only blockchain in existence where protocol-level consensus does not choose what the network is capable of. Instead, there are policy limits among node operators.’
Numerous world records have now been set on Bitcoin’s original protocol including regularly surpassing 50,000 transactions a second, and is capable of around 100,000 transactions a second, said Wuckert Jr.
‘We can disrupt the world and change everything. The future of Bitcoin is that we are going to laugh at 100,000 transactions or a 4GB block. We are now talking about Terabyte blocks which means millions of transactions a second.’
