The Bitcoin Association should be focused on advancing and improving the way Bitcoin SV works rather than just trying to sell the technology, according to Jad Wahab, the Association’s Director of Engineering.
Jad believes that the role of the Switzerland-based non-profit organisation is to act as a middleman and establish connections with different partners in the space, with a view to making the system as functional to the outside world as it can be.
One of the partnerships that the Bitcoin Association has formed that Jad is particularly excited about is the work that it’s been doing with nChain and the IPv6 Forum, as he discusses with Charles Miller on this week’s CoinGeek Conversations.
The three organisations have been working together to integrate Bitcoin SV with IPv6. IPv6 is the updated version of the internet protocol, which was created in 1998 because the original internet architecture (IPv4) was due to run out of IP addresses, which ended up happening in 2011.
Jad explains that by using IPv6, Bitcoin can become truly peer-to-peer in the way it was originally invented to be, as there are enough IP addresses for every device that is connected to the internet.
“If you don’t have a unique address then it’s not a direct peer-to-peer, it’s not going directly from me to you, it has to go from me to the central hub to your central hub, that’s where the peer-to-peer aspect is missing,” he says.
Another project that BA has delivered that Jad is confident will have a positive impact on the digital currency space is the software Blacklist Manager, that was released at the beginning of October 2022.
Blacklist Manager is a listening tool that can be run by miners to enable nodes to add digital assets identified in a court order to a freeze list. This means that lost or stolen Bitcoin can now be recovered through a legal process, a potentially game changing development which will bring digital asset technology within the remit of the law.
“We live in this world where you’ve got law and legal systems in place, you know, Bitcoin doesn’t magically create a new world that lives outside of the purview of existing legal systems that we have right now,” Jad says.
Jad believes that it is projects and partnerships like these that will make Bitcoin appealing to outsiders and will lead to its widespread use in the world. He says that he can see Bitcoin SV being more easily deployed in developing countries where traditional systems of money are less widely accepted.
For example, he talks about his hometown of Beirut, where the currency has lost more than 90% of its value and citizens no longer use credit cards because they don’t trust the banks, saying that he thinks that the lack of financial infrastructure and confidence in legacy systems will make it easier for new technology, like Bitcoin SV, to fill the gap.