Kurt Wuckert Jr. at Unbounded Capital Summit: History of blockchain and today’s landscape

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At the recent Unbounded Capital Summit in New York City, Kurt Wuckert Jr. a keynote address on the history of blockchain and the current landscape.

Explain Bitcoin

Wuckert introduces himself as the CEO of GorillaPool, a Bitcoin historian, and someone intent on righting the wrongs of Bitcoin.

He begins by explaining that Bitcoin could only be invented by a person of multiple interests, a polymath and a renaissance man. He describes how Satoshi Nakamoto solved the problem of double spending, and demonstrates how nodes seek to unify the ledger using proof-of-work.

Wuckert shows the audience the first part of the white paper, explaining how Bitcoin was designed to facilitate small, random payments. It is specifically payments under $5 Bitcoin was designed to solve.

Wuckert delves into Bitcoin’s history and explains how people initially abused it to commit crimes on the Internet. However, this is not what Bitcoin was designed for. Satoshi Nakamoto expressed displeasure with this culture of crime, and eventually disappeared from the project.

Then BTC Core developers took over, fundamentally changing the original protocol. These changes made Bitcoin slow and only able to process medium to large transactions. In the early days, Satoshi Nakamoto said Bitcoin was capable of beating Visa, but the changes made by this team destroyed that ability.

Venture Capital emerges

In 2014 or thereabouts, venture capital appeared, Wuckert tells the audience. He shows a slide showing how Mastercard funds Digital Currency Group, Blockstream and others. Wuckert has previously written about the Mastercard Bitcoin conspiracy and elaborates on it here.

Wuckert explains how these companies created an economy around Bitcoin being slow and a financial asset. For example, they created third-party rails, which they controlled and thus collected fees on.

“The technology to make Visa, Mastercard and some of these other companies obsolete has been around for 14 years and wouldn’t you know it, nobody ever told you,” he says.

They don’t want Visa and Mastercard to run on Bitcoin. They want Bitcoin to run on Visa and Mastercard. – Kurt Wuckert Jr.

Splitters and Scaling

Wuckert then enters the 2017 period when BTC and Bitcoin Cash (BCH) split. He tells the audience more about Bitcoin’s original capabilities, including micropayments, smart contracts and even non-fungible tokens (NFTs).

Wuckert explains how in 2018 Bitcoin SV split from BCH, with the intention of seeing how large blocks could actually become. He explains how many people said 128 MB blocks were impossible, but BSV has done it with ease.

He also illustrates how it is now set in stone and how maximum block sizes are determined by the node operators’ guidelines. Likewise, node operators can decide all other things, such as what types of scripts and tokens they will accept.

As a result, BTC can do seven transactions per second, Ethereum can do 15 transactions per second, and BSV can do 100,000 transactions per second under ideal conditions.

Wuckert briefly explains the potential of Bitcoin and what it will do in the future. This includes sending data and payments globally with stronger than military grade encryption.

Questions and answers

The audience at the Unbounded Capital Summit then asked Wuckert some questions in an open forum.

Q. Can you compare smart contracts on BSV and Ethereum?

Ethereum uses the solvency language and is a global government blockchain. This means that it is like a personal computer, but distributed over a network. The problem, he explains, is that all nodes must cross all thresholds together, so there is no competition between nodes. Therefore, the network can only be as fast as the worst computer on the network. This has a huge impact on fees, driving them through the roof when demand is high.

Q. Why aren’t VCs investing heavily in BSV?

Ultimately, it’s an information gap, explains Wuckert. There is so much funding rooted in business models based on the idea that Bitcoin is slow and does not create smart contracts. Likewise, the incentives continue to reward people who do nothing by making it possible to 100x your money by buying and selling coins.

Q. What are the advantages and disadvantages of proof-of-work versus proof-of-stake?

Wuckert says proof-of-stake is actually a lot like HODL. You get rich for doing nothing but holding coins. On the contrary, in proof-of-work, your node must work to win blocks. You cannot fake proof-of-work. The way to win in proof-of-work is to be extremely competitive.

Q. What do you envision BSV’s market value to be in the future?

Wuckert says other blockchains aren’t even competitors. He wants to disrupt money transfer, record keeping, notary public, public offices and much more related to communication technology and money.

See: Highlights from the Unbounded Capital Summit 2022

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