BSV society members from across the globe recently convened in South Korea for the CoinGeek Seoul conference and related events. The experience was inspiring and made clear that the future of Bitcoin SV is brighter than ever. The event focused on the technical capabilities and new business models made possible by BSV’s massive scaling power. With the message of his speeches, Bitcoin Association Founding President Jimmy Nguyen set the stage for both the conference and the next phase of BSV’s journey – It’s Time to Build.
Let’s recap highlights from CoinGeek Seoul.
Hackathon
The winners of the 2nd Bitcoin SV Virtual Hackathon were determined and announced on day one of CoinGeek Seoul (October 1). Previously, participants spent 48 hours on August 17-19competing in a virtual hackathon; they were asked to create applications that charge a very small amount for an action that has value to the user. The challenge was to find meaningful ways that people can use these small amounts of Bitcoin to get them further engaged.
From those original entrants, three fantastic projects were selected as finalists. The finalists each came to Seoul to present their project in front of a panel of judges and the live audience (acting as the 5th judge).
The final voting named Codugh, led by Shashank Singhal and Andrew Snow, winning the US$20, 000 (paid in BSV) top prize. The Hive project by Robin Kohze took second place and won US$10,000 in BSV, followed by BitQ&A by Janez Urevc in third place with US$5,000 in BSV.
Codugh is a simple solution to monetize APIs. The platform connects API developers and API users, each time a user makes a successful API call, they pay a microtransaction. This creates an incentive for new developers to enter the BSV ecosystem and support existing developers with their work.
Hive uses a beehive structure that connects information added by users around the world. Each content node containing information needs to be connected to one or more linked nodes. Every link to a node has a dynamic cost. The users are notified when new content is added, and the information is retrieved directly from the blockchain.
BitQ&A allows a user to ask a question or answer ones submitted by other people. Like Quora or StackOverflow, however with a Bitcoin-based incentive model. BitQ&A can be used as a general knowledge platform and for specialized knowledge sites aimed at niche groups. A bounty is put on a question and payment is required to respond, so it encourages high-quality answers and provides a disincentive for spam. Answers are voted on and funds are distributed to the best answer and previous voters.
BSV Venture Pitch day
Bitcoin Association organized its first ever BSV Venture Pitch Day in the lead up to the CoinGeek Seoul conference. Bitcoin start-up entrepreneurs were screened and 14 ventures and projected were selected to pitch as part of an all-day event. They each had 25 minutes to pitch their business idea to a room full of venture capitalists and equity fund representatives. There was a great diversity of ideas and businesses at various stages of development. The Pitch Day is a service provided by Bitcoin Association to support growth of the BSV venture and investment ecosystem.
We will conduct a 2nd BSV Venture Pitch Day in conjunction with CoinGeek London conference in February 2020. Entrepreneurs and innovators will have a chance to pitch their BSV start-up business idea to investors in February 2020 in London, United Kingdom. To be considered, you can submit your applications here.
Road to Genesis
The first day of CoinGeek Seoul was a Technical Day and commenced with nChain CTO, Steve Shadders, who took the stage to explain the Genesis upgrade.
Shadders began the discussion by giving a bit of a history on Bitcoin and explaining that now that it is following the original vision as BSV we are seeing its growth and potential. Increasing transaction counts, block sizes, and usage, are all positive indicators that BSV can scale.
He then outlined the changes coming when BSV returns to its genesis on February 4th, 2020. OP_RETURN, which has been limited will soon have multiple OP_RETURNs in the same transaction. Retoring big number capability to math op codes will also allow it to have cryptography in script for the first time and removing the idea of “standard transactions” expands script flexibility beyond the current three scripting options.
The removal of Pay-to-script-hash (P2SH), is being done for both technical and philosophical reasons. One option for replacing the multisig function that P2SH is currently used for is introducing the accumulator multisig script construct.
Teranode
Teranode is an enterprise-class Bitcoin SV client software, being developed by nChain. Daniel Connolly, Lead Developer of the Bitcoin SVNode project, explained to the audience that “Teranode is bitcoin server software that has been rebuilt from the ground up for enterprise and scale”. He further explained that it hopes to accomplish 4 million transactions per second, with big blocks and big transactions.
It will achieve this with better messaging, allowing for large data and streaming data support. Teranode will also have more efficient data stores and already exists in an experimental stage, working on both the Mainnet and Scaling Test Network (STN). Daniel also noted that a P2P system is currently in development.
Nakasendo SDK and Simplified payment verification (SPV)
John Murphy is the Lead Developer of the Nakasendo SDK team at nChain. Nakasendo allows for public shared secrets or functions, without individual members giving up any privacy involuntarily. He stated, “You don’t have a single private key, the private key has been split into multiple shares and these can be distributed across multiple parties or players,”.
Dr. Alex Mackay, researcher at nChain, talked about how simplified payment verification (SPV) can be introduced in a low bandwidth process to increase merchant adoption.
One Store – BUSKON music content delivery platform
Jay Lee is the CEO of ONE Store, which is touted as South Korea’s answer to Google Play or Apple’s App Store. The ONE Store app store is preloaded on all Android devices in the country, creating a has a potential customer- base of 35 million. It was launched less than four years ago as an offshoot of a major telecoms company.
Jay announced that ONE Store is launching the BUSKON music content delivery platform, , which will be the first enterprise-level application for BSV. The platform allows music artists to upload their work and get paid by fans in tokens bought for BSV. Users will convert BSV to buy and spend BUSKON tokens, however for its launch, Buskon will encourage traffic by subsidising the site and issuing tokens for free.
Jay explained in his presentation that he had made the decision to build a BSV application after studying other alternative platforms, such as Ethereum, and found them lacking. BSV met all his company’s needs.
UptimeSV
UptimeSV’s Lead developer Dean Little took the stage on Day 1 of the conference. The winners of the first Bitcoin Association BSV hackathon have been working on their app and are aiming for an October 30 private beta release. Their project crowdsources the process of website uptime and downtime monitoring, and allows individual users to earn BSV by providing the idle computing power of their mobile devices to conduct the uptime testing for business websites.
Dean also discussed new tools that UptimeSV have developed which will be available soon for other developers to use. Unplanaria was created as a peer to peer data system and will allow businesses to be more efficient in how they receive data. Datapush is the other tool and works by allowing businesses to write data to the blockchain more efficiently.
Kronoverse
David Case reminded the audience of the CryptoFights game’s December beta release. He then went on to reveal the broader gaming platform that his Kronoverse company have been building, which will allow other game developers to release their own games using the Easy Button built with BSV. Using the platform, games can be developed with JavaScript code and plugged right into the system, allowing all the BitcoinSV component to happen easily in the background. The platform, importantly, allows for as anti-money laundering (AML) and know your customer (KYC) checks that are required.
As stated on the website “The Kronoverse platform was born from solving the problems of legacy gaming and esports. True transparency for the game mechanics and player actions creates new data opportunities for auditing player moves, player move broadcasting, analysis, and the metaverse. Using blockchain technology the Kronoverse platform can innovate the esports space by challenging the network layer of games and the future of how games are made”.
Bitboss
Bitboss’ Matt Dickson provided an update of the work they have been doing. BSV developers are familiar with the company’s Keyring library. He announced Bridge, which will be a big win for the gambling industry; it is technology that plugs into casino slots machines, linking them to both the casino’s back-end and an app on a player’s smart phone- allowing casino gamers to play slot machines with a smart, BSV powered experience throughout a casino.
Two Hop Ventures
Alex Fauvel, of Two Hop Ventures whom have recently invested in Pixel Wallet talked about VOAM to be launched by Pixel Wallet at the end of 2020. VOAM, a new digital privatized identity system will enable users to take control of their online identity and profiting its use. Users will also be able to restrict access from activities that they don’t want to participate in.
Satoshi Shout-Out
This Satoshi Shout-Out goes to all the conference attendees for coming to Seoul. Your enthusiasm created an electric atmosphere and inspired us all. We hope you learned much, created new friendships, and left Seoul with even greater belief in BSV and the Satoshi Vision. For your participation in CoinGeek Seoul, you deserve a big Satoshi Shout-Out. And now, it’s time to build.
