In this edition of the BSV Weekly update, we review more recent BSV developments from the community and enterprise. This includes the news that several new businesses have started to accept BSV as payment, in addition to many that already do.

The Bitcoin SV Node team has also announced exciting news with the Bitcoin SV Scaling Test Network (STN). This means that more businesses can develop, grow and thrive on the BSV blockchain.

 

 

Jimmy Nguyen

Founding President, Bitcoin Association

and your BSV Global Advocate

 

Scaling News

The Bitcoin SV Scaling Test Network (STN) is now open and ready for business. Enterprises and developers who want to test Bitcoin’s scaling limits for their applications and services can now use the STN, and contribute to the future of the Bitcoin SV blockchain.

The STN is an initiative of Bitcoin Association’s Bitcoin SV Node project, developed by nChain with funding from CoinGeek; transaction traffic is provided by the Satoshi Shotgun (Professional Stress Test) team. This global public network is continuously loaded with transactions to enable BSV developers to test under heavy load. Interested businesses and developers from around the world can join and use the STN to test Bitcoin applications and systems that require large transaction volumes or large data capacity.

In his blog post, Steve Shadders, Director of Engineering at nChain and Technical Director of the Bitcoin SV Node project, states “In the coming months, we plan to increase the maximum block size of the STN to 10GB. We are moving past the era of filling up blocks and stepping into the realm of boundless growth. Our goal is not to push the limits, but to prove there are no limits.”

Applications

LINK

A new privacy tool created by twitter user @BitcoinSofia is available for use called LINK; this allows you to store encrypted information on the BSV blockchain. An example would be to store an encrypted back-up of your wallet on the blockchain so that you never have to worry about losing it from your PC.

Users upload encrypted data on the BSV blockchain, yet it is unreadable to anyone without the key.
They can also share the data easily, by just sending a URL. By clicking on LINK, it will automatically decrypt the file in your browser and allow you to download it meaning both encryption and decryption happen in your browser itself, the decryption key is never sent to the server.

BitIndex

BitIndex just launched version 3 of their real-time Bitcoin SV API platform built for developers. New features include Webhooks for Bitcoin payments, insight-API compatibility, new JavaScript-SDK and can easily be used in browser or node run-time.

BitIndex allows developers to get real-time UTXOs and balances for addresses and XPub keys. Also manage wallet XPub keys in the cloud and have BitIndex auto-discover your addresses and UTXOs. This product also allows developers to broadcast, query, and search transactions on the Bitcoin (SV) blockchain.

Businesses accepting BSV

A number of new business have started to accept BSV, and users can access the BSV Merchant Map on bsvdevs.com and  bsvmerchants.com to see what’s near them. Business owners can register for free on both sites.

Cafetaria De Spoorbrug – a restaurant in the Netherlands now accepts Bitcoin SV.

ZUMBA with RUSHKA– located in Port Elizabeth, South Africa. Now you can get fit using BSV. Just this past week, Ruska had its first Zumba dance student pay with BSV using a Centbee wallet.

Howzat Sports bar – located in the Makati district of Manila, Philippines, it is the first bar to accept BSV for all food and  beverage.  Payments are made via POP by Handcash.

Café Aimée – a restaurant located in the Netherlands this week also announced that it accepts BSV.

Satoshi Shout-Out

The Satoshi Shout-Out this week goes to Twitter user @Street5Wall for taking the initiative to sponsor BSV developers to attend the CoinGeek Toronto conference’s Developer Day. With support from @SatoshiEngineer, @Street5Wall sponsored 13 developers, by contributing $500 towards costs for each of them to attend the event.

With years of experience in the financial sector, he states in an interview with CoinGeek that he has “Been working on Wall Street for 20+ years. The Street has been good to me, but also provided unique insight into all the inherent bottlenecks and inefficiencies that can be solved with Bitcoin (SV).”  He adds: “This is a once in a lifetime paradigm shift, and I’m thrilled to be a small part of the revolution that Dr. Wright started in 2008.”

This generous way of supporting Bitcoin SV helps the future of Bitcoin grow by helping developers who will build on the original Bitcoin.