From newly elected to founding members and contributors of the Technical Standards Committee (TSC) for Bitcoin SV, these five blockchain entrepreneurs consider their contribution to the TSC a worthwhile investment.
‘The process of being involved allows you to explore and understand and build that world, virtually first, which takes much less time to talk and think about before you have to go write code.’
Kip Twitchell, Executive Director of Sharealedger.org.
The TSC announced their drive to recruit new committee members in February 2022, a voluntary position that calls for a passion for and experience with governance, strategic planning, stakeholder engagement and relationship building, research compliance and finance.
While unpaid, members and contributors enlist their expertise and a considerable amount of their time to ‘facilitating interaction with individuals and businesses from all corners of BSV and providing an inside look at the innovation and development occurring across all of the various industries that comprise the wider ecosystem.’
In June 2022, the TSC announced Executive Director of Sharealedger.org, Kip Twitchell’s appointment as one of the newly elected members.
Twitchell sees his customers greatly benefiting from his participation in the Technical Standards Programme as it gives him advanced insight into the framework developing around Bitcoin SV to build into his products and solutions accordingly.
Advocating for companies to consider the profit of such participation, he declares: ‘It increases your expertise, the usability of your products and the breadth of use because standards give you a larger community from which to draw upon for any benefits that your products are going to bring.’
Contributor to the Technical Standards Programme (TSP), Rafa Jimenez, is CTO and co-founder of HandCash, a company that provides a wallet as well as some tools for businesses to integrate payments in a very easy way.
Jimenez relates the TSP strength to their collection of experts from different industries, allowing them to solve problems that are common to Bitcoin SV businesses in a standardised way. ‘We offer solutions that everybody can apply to this common problem. They don’t have to reinvent the wheel.’
Apart from the saving of time and effort such standards deliver, Jimenez values the reassurance it offers businesses. ‘You can know you’re solving the problem the same way that many other companies are already solving it. You know it works!’ This reduction in uncertainty will be a key driver behind adoption, he believes.
As an example of the TSC’s contribution to interoperability, he uses HandCash’s payments use case: ‘We are dealing with payments where the most important factor in our infrastructure is interoperability. We need to communicate with other companies using the same tools and standards. The most important standard so far is called Paymail, which is DNS on top of Bitcoin. Paymail lets us use peer-to-peer transactions as Bitcoin was intended to work. The Paymail standard was brought by the Technical Standards Committee and we were glad to be contributing to that.’
Xioahui Liu, Founder and CEO of sCrypt participated in the Simplified Payment Verification (SPV) working group where he experienced the value of taking the time to develop a long-term solution rather than rushing out an ad hoc solution.
‘It’s a dilemma because you feel like developing an ad hoc solution as fast as possible to get it to the market, but you’ll end up being the only one to support this solution and it won’t be interoperable with other wallets or other token protocols. The whole ecosystem contains about a million users right now, so you’ll be limiting your reach to a very small group. If you take the time to create a standardised solution, you can leverage the network effect.’
For James Belding company, Tokenized, protocols are the backbone of their work towards developing components for the financial system of the future. Participation in the TSC lends the company some key elements for getting it right: ‘Having other people help us with some of the key details and stress test our ideas has ultimately saved us a lot of time. In some cases we don’t need these standards just yet, but we know we will need it in six months. And because of this organisation, we know we’ll have something ready to implement because other people have done great work ahead of us.’
Looking forward in time, Belding knows he can rely on the work of the TSC. ‘The standards are going to work, which takes a huge load off us. I imagine it would be an uphill battle without an organisation like this. We’ve already seen tremendous benefits!’
Angus Brown is a TSC founding member and CEO and Co-founder of Bitcoin SV wallet, Centbee). The way he sees it, technical standards programmes are a means of helping businesses and developers to communicate with each other in a relatively non-competitive environment. ‘A business can benefit by seeing what others in the industry are struggling with and benefit from the standards in that all of their businesses would be able to communicate with other businesses and with customers seamlessly and easily.’
As a TSC member, Brown’s role requires active involvement in the Technical Standards Programme, which he considers a boon. ‘Yes, there is a benefit of being actively involved. You get to share and debate opinions to discover together with other people the best solutions.’
While the solution offers everyone the results of a jointly agreed upon mechanism to solve a problem, being part of the discovery process gives you a unique insight: ‘the added benefit of gaining an understanding in its root cause, the context and constraints. So that is a distinct benefit of participating. However, you can just read the standard, use the standard and exploit the standard for your own benefit in your company as well.
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.
