Bitcoin Association, headquartered in Zug, Switzerland, is pleased to announce Angus Brown as the new Chair of the Technical Standards Committee (TSC).

Brown has been in the banking and payments industry for over 20 years and has long been a proponent of the Bitcoin SV ecosystem. In 2000 he was one of the founding team, and later CEO of eBucks.com – at the time the world’s first bank-backed digital currency. 

After serving FirstRand for 11 years in various senior roles, he was appointed as Head of Alliance Banking and CIO at Mercantile Bank Limited for four years.

In 2016 he co-founded Centbee, one of the leading Bitcoin SV businesses creating an ecosystem using Bitcoin SV to revolutionise payments. Angus was educated at Wits University (Johannesburg) and the University of Oxford.

Part of the work undertaken by the Bitcoin Association includes the formation and management of a Technical Standards Committee focused on delivering a robust and feature-packed set of standards, which will simplify the process of interconnecting services and products operating on the Bitcoin network. 

The committee promotes technical excellence and furthers Bitcoin SV’s utility by enhancing interoperability through standardisation, facilitating industry participation in the development of global standards, and ensuring technical standards are maintained and freely available. 

Speaking on his appointment, Brown noted that the TSC helps formalise standards, tools and libraries so that they can be widely used by developers in the Bitcoin SV ecosystem. 

‘Standards make it easier for developers to build unique offerings, and to leverage off other members of the Bitcoin SV ecosystem. An ecosystem needs interoperability, and technical standards allow for this to be done faster, and with less risk.’

‘The TSC is highly professional in its processes, making sure that all contributions are fairly assessed. Developers who contribute to the creation of standards must be protected, and the people who use the resultant standards and libraries must be protected from unnecessary legal risk.’

Not an ivory tower

However, Brown stressed that the TSC is not an ‘ivory tower’ and will be in the trenches with the Bitcoin SV community, understanding their challenges and helping to identify areas where standards and tools can help the community advance faster.

He added that one of the priority areas that the TSC needs to explore further – is opportunities that IPv6 creates for Bitcoin SV.

‘I definitely sense that there are business and technical benefits from IPv6 that have not yet been fully defined. The TSC will be looking closely at this topic in the coming weeks, helped by the other teams in the Bitcoin Association.

‘We hope to help the Bitcoin SV ecosystem by identifying standards that we can form working groups around. We are also grateful to have learnt from Latif Ladid’s experiences of creating global standards.’