FloatSV and RelayX founder Jack Liu has proved to be a forceful presence in the Bitcoin space. Armed with a fintech background and almost a decade of experience in digital assets, his thoughts and ideas about the bitcoin ecosystem offer both substance and, at times, challenges to entrepreneurs building on Bitcoin SV.
Contrary to belief of the majority in the BSV community, Jack thinks the price of BSV matters significantly. As he tells Charles Miller on this episode of CoinGeek Conversations, his attraction to Bitcoin is partly due to its incentive design: regardless of wealth and stature, any individual has a chance to raise money using the network. “A small business is able to raise five dollars of money the same way as a larger team can raise …billions of dollars. That levels the playing field and that's ultimately the value,” he explains.
RelayX seeks to build businesses on chain in a way that is free of patents and NDAs, as well as products that are interoperable. Jack’s goal is to preserve one powerful aspect of Bitcoin: that it is global. “Anyone can join. What you don't want is to leverage that ledger and build a closed system on top, no matter how nice it is because then as developers and users interact with the closed economy, then you lose a lot of the power of the base layer bitcoin,” he asserts.
In today’s society, dependence on finance is significant. As Jack explains, this has to do with individuals earning in a fiat currency then investing and speculating with that money. He envisions a world where people will be able to be more financially independent. “If people were earning, spending, consuming and producing on a single ledger that itself had a deflationary money supply, then basically people would no longer use finance as a necessity, it becomes an option.”
Unlike fiat currencies, Bitcoin as a system does not have a central authority. Jack is keen to point out that Bitcoin removes power from money and that in itself is liberating. But how do we know how the system is doing? Well, price is one way of gauging Bitcoin’s performance. Jack believes that innovations and building good utility for the ledger will help increase Bitcoin’s price. As he points out, building applications that allow users to monetize instantaneously is the way to go. Users tend to overlook transaction fees if they are able to earn in heaps.
In terms of transactions volume in the BSV network to date, Jack thinks there should be magnitudes more. As he says, “if you have 5 million transactions on Cryptofights per day but it's being done by like a few hundred users, that is not growing the price, that's not growing the economy.”
Jack advises entrepreneurs to come up with a product that Bitcoin holders want instead of building a business based on their own likes and interests. He says its best to monetize their business even as early as inception days. He advises entrepreneurs to raise as much BSV as possible for their business without having to worry too much about failing to return the investment. Bitcoin cannot be outperformed due to its limited number, he says. As he explains, investors will benefit not by getting a return of their investment but by allocating a percentage of their Bitcoin holdings towards a project that contributes to increase Bitcoin’s velocity and utility and in turn increasing the price of Bitcoin. “That is a healthy ecosystem,” he says.