The lion’s share of cryptocurrency and blockchain projects focus on driving up the price of their tokens.
Although the value of corporate and retail investments are valued by Bitcoin SV, the Bitcoin Association for BSV ranks the network’s utility, growth, and sustainability as key factors for adoption – as it will ensure the profitability of all involved in the ecosystem.
The Bitcoin SV technical standards programme (TSP) is one of the ways in which the Association promotes this long-term vision.
To give you insight into how the TSP contributes to the profitability, growth, and sustainability of the entire ecosystem, we spoke to five TSC members and technical standards programme contributors.
According to Angus Brown (TSC founding member and CEO, Co-founder of Bitcoin SV wallet, Centbee), every business in the blockchain space can benefit from the technical standards without necessarily participating in the Technical Standards Committee or technical standards process.
‘Once those standards are put out there into the world and get adopted by businesses, they improve the efficiency of communication because you don’t have to have one-to-one communication between you and your business partners, or you and your customers. By leveraging these standards you’re able to communicate with everyone in your value chain.’
Brown believes that such cooperation not only enables efficiency of process and communication but introduces you to people who already know how to use those standards. By leveraging these people’s experience, you can shorten your own development time and maximise your staff’s efficiency.
Bernhard Muller, General Manager of Swiss payment service Centi views interoperability, and guidance as the main benefits of industry standards. ‘You’re always free to do your own proprietary implementations besides or along with it, or even not go for these standards at all. But if you follow the standards, it’s going to be a lot easier for you to get traction by being interoperable with others.’
Rafa Jimenez (the CTO and co-founder of HandCash) explains that their company’s wallet and tools enable businesses to integrate payments in a very easy way. As a result, the interoperability generated by standardisation is of key importance.
‘For businesses that have to deal with new technology like Bitcoin, there’s a lot of uncertainty. So having some standards to solve problems in the same way for everybody is very beneficial – it reduces the uncertainty and helps us to speed up the integration and share knowledge to further adoption.’
What he’s learned from other industries is that certain problems should only be solved in one way. ‘You have one problem and there’s one evident solution that everybody should use. I think the Technical Standards Committee is doing a great job in that area.’
Technical standards contributor, Xioahui Liu, is the Founder and CEO of sCrypt, a company doing smart contracts on Bitcoin.
He points out that a lot of companies in the Bitcoin ecosystem are creating similar things. This is where standards have a tremendous impact. ‘If we all work from a reference implementation, we can reuse the effort so not everybody has to do the same thing again and again.’
Another benefit is the interoperability that results from standardisation. ‘If everybody is doing their own thing in their own way, we’re going back to the walled garden approach where Wallet A does things this way and Wallet B does it another way so they can’t talk to each other, which is not good for the whole ecosystem to grow.’
Recently elected member of the TSC and Executive Director of Sharealedger.org, Kip Twitchell points out that the operating systems of the computing world are standards in themselves. ‘I could decide to do all of the work of writing everything the operating system does for myself. And yes, I have unlimited freedom to do that. But boy, I’ve got a lot of responsibility if I’m going to take on everything that that software stack brings to the table.’
He noted that in the financial world, digital financial systems were automated very early on to ensure accuracy. ‘Because they were automated at the beginning, we can look at new ways of doing those things and enhance and improve them, lower the cost on them, make them more available, more ubiquitous. Now that we’re reinventing the financial system, standards will unlock the process of integrating systems into it.’
‘The BSV focus on technical standards and its integration and low-cost focus is going to be key to that process because it’s bringing the energy of innovation to a new space.’
James Belding (founding member of the TSC and CEO of Tokenized) considers industry standards as a way to share the workload of figuring out how to build higher quality products and services. In addition to that, he sees such a programme as an opportunity to work with other companies to develop implementations that build on these standards. ‘That saves a tremendous amount of time – time to market, lower costs, better solutions, more robust outcomes effectively.’
‘A blockchain approach to standards is a fundamentally novel approach that lends itself well to accountability, leading into ESG and unlocking other opportunities.’
The TSC furthers Bitcoin SV’s utility for such projects by promoting technical excellence, enhancing interoperability through standardisation, facilitating industry participation in the development of global standards, and ensuring technical standards are maintained and freely available.
You can get involved in developing Bitcoin SV technical standards by:
To read descriptions of these roles and register as a contributor, head over here.
