What’s next for Bitcoin infrastructure?

Mihai
5 min readFeb 21, 2021

Bitcoin has come very far. Despite the lack of price action that everyone wanted to see, we have many big-picture people that see how the world is going to look 20 years from now. This is a very impressive feat.

What is next; what do we need to take BSV adoption to the next level?

Standardized token protocols

Wallets must accept a few standard token protocols. Remember, we are not competing with one another, we’re competing with existing solutions on other chains and future solutions that will launch on other chains.

Ethereum has ERC20, Binance Chain has BEP2, NEO has NEP5, etc. Even Bitcoin Cash has tokens under SLP. BSV is just now starting to see a token explosion, and we need open source, free tokens. This means altruism and social consensus between smartest minds, with no formal conflicts of interest; sorry Fabriik, SFP tokens are a good start but there can’t be 50 different token protocols and especially not ones branded after corporations.

We have the benefit of allowing users to start their own tokens without code, something other chains are lagging behind on. Imagine having some tokens on HandCash, MoneyButton or RelayX that are interoperable for every day use. Here’s your birthday party invite, keep the token. Redeemable for entry into the club with QR code scan. No other chain does this, so we need to drop the politics and create one protocol for tokens to monopolize ASAP.

An e-ticket token that could be easily implemented into BSV if we had a standardized protocol for it that everyone could agree on.

Implement tokens into wallets

These other chain’s wallets all have security (errr, sorry, “utility”) tokens of their own so they, of course, have to allow ERC-20 or other chains’ token standard.

This is pretty straight forward; drop the games and add tokens. Which protocols to add is up to the wallets, but bringing it back to the previous point, when users, developers and wallets come to a conclusion on which protocols are most suitable for mass adoption, we’ll have to stick with those. Infighting is a lot less productive than growing the pie.

The biggest key to this is having USD or other fiat-denominated stablecoins; this opens the gate to huge adoption by outside-of-crypto audiences. Imagine this; it’s now possible to pitch instant fiat transactioning with none of the “crypto” friction to any business wanting to implement micropayments. It costs fractions of a cent to transact on the BSV chain, so it opens up the gate to millions of people that have no desire to use “crypto” and participate in the casino it’s become; the cent required to transact 50 times could be easily given from a faucet.

In-browser wallet add-ons

Ethereum has MetaMask. Bitcoin has … I’m waiting … nothing yet. Combining something like HandCash’s keyless wallet feature and a web add-on is a guaranteed road to greatness.

This is a combination of user-friendliness, secure storage and ease of use. Remember, security also means the user won’t screw themselves over by losing the seed phrase. How cool would it be if HandCash Connect worked on Chrome and Firefox.

We wouldn’t have a “BSV wallet”, we’d have a “top up your game credits” wallet that could be used on any website we pitch it on.

Think bigger than what you’re thinking.

Think of Haste, but for every single competitive game app. Example: GeoGuessr.

100 players play a “Battle Royale” of guessing locations. They each deposit $0.50. Prize pool is now $50, split among the top 10 out of the 100. First gets $25, second $10, etc. GeoGuessr takes an x percentage cut.

The requirements for this are of course easy browser implementations and also fiat tokens; the best GeoGuessr players are interested in making money from their talent, not crypto politics. They want payments in their native currency.

Only possible on Bitcoin if you want instant payouts.

Price oracles

It’s good that we have wallets recognizing the need to price transactions in USD, but it’s required to go a step further. ChainLink is worth a ridiculous amount on the market right now; an oracle service that solves an issue that doesn’t need to exist is the equivalent of a modern Rube Goldberg machine, as Kurt Wuckert Jr. would put it.

However, think of the implications of ChainLink. ChainLink is a 11 figure market cap token that updates on-chain data 129 times a day. Why that low? Because ETH fees are too high to do more; it costs a ridiculous amount. At 129 updates per day that’s roughly once every 12 minutes with a (theoretical) price of $10 per update. They have 21 nodes for the ETH price feed, so multiply that by 21.

On BSV, we could have a reliable price data protocol with 1/1000th the cost and multiple updates per minute. Imagine the possibilities for this: documenting the exchange rates real-time to be able to price everything accurately.

This is needed for the aforementioned services such as multi-currency betting on games in which the proceeds will be given out in the asset of choice via automated atomic swaps.

We don’t need 21 nodes, this isn’t about ideological decentralization; we just need a handful of nodes querying multiple data sources and averaging the price, 24/7. Then, apps that are connected to price-sensitive atomic swaps query the latest UTXOs from given addresses to check the “state” of the price given to the “smart contract.”

Developer documentation

A lot of developers have sadly taken the Ethereum route because by attracting so much speculator money, a developer can simply make a half-assed app, get a good marketing agency on it, then instantly cash out for a million plus dollars via selling the token on the open market.

In Bitcoin, you must make an app, hope Bitcoin gets adopted in the future, hope your app is competitive in the market, and start a real business around it. The benefit is that you can make money from it in perpetuity; but in a world where there are millions flying around with no regard for risk, no one thinks about building a legacy.

So, we must have websites in which the difference between state-based Ethereum/Solidity and UTXO-based Bitcoin/Script is explained and why UTXO-based system scales better as well as is cheaper. Then, they must learn how to code on sCrypt, which is quite similar to Solidity.

If it’s a big barrier to entry, no one wants to do it.

To conclude

Bring incentives to Bitcoin and people will come to Bitcoin.

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