In the final episode of CoinGeek Discussions for 2023, Zachary Weiner and Alex Vidal hosted a year-end party with a surprise appearance from Instasize CEO Hector Lopez. The discussion centered on the latest news and events in blockchain, the ever-growing Ordinals trend, and the Bitcoin ETFs. Check it out via this link.

BSV number goes up

Weiner kicks things off by saying that, for him, the biggest news is that the price of BSV appreciated massively. People are excited, and new miners are dedicating their hash power to BSV. User ‘Craig was Wright’ agrees that the BSV price increase is the biggest news of the week.

Weiner points out that there are now 2.5 billion Ordinals on the BSV blockchain as compared to 55 million on BTC. Fungible tokens with free and fair mints are a big deal, with tokens like ORDI dominating the headlines. Ordinals have spread to multiple blockchains.

Why are there so many Ordinals on the BSV blockchain? Aside from the insanely low price to mint tokens, there’s one called OJBK with 210 billion tokens available, but you can only mint them one at a time. It’s nowhere near minted out, so the number will increase significantly as time goes on.

Vidal underscores how, within less than a week of the price appreciation, TAAL is no longer the majority miner on the BSV blockchain (at the time of the discussion). Aaron Day says miners appear to make the move, and Weiner agrees with this assessment. New miners coming in is beneficial; the network has become more distributed, and it only took three days of prices increasing before Mining Dutch took notice and began pointing hash power at the BSV blockchain.

Hector Lopez on altering open source software

Lopez joins in just as the group discusses the need for the Bitcoin protocol to be set in stone to be truly decentralized. While there’s a narrative that Dr. Craig Wright is attacking open-source developers through lawfare, Lopez said he is protecting creators.

Lopez adds that you can’t make fundamental changes to open-source software just because it’s open-source. For example, you can’t make massive changes to Python, an open-course programming language, and still call it Python. It’s the same with Linux—the name or brand is trademarked.

Speaking of the Bitcoin network, ‘Craig was Wright’ says someone appears to have taken down GorillaPools’ backup node (based on posted screenshots). David Case says that, even if this is true, it’s possible to take down some nodes due to how they’re implemented without affecting the protocol itself. Doing so would just mean no blocks would occur for a while; then things would resume.

The Bitcoin ETF—will it be switched to BSV?

Throughout 2023, there’s been much discussion about the BlackRock Bitcoin ETF. Vidal points to a post by ‘Craig was Wright’ on X where he said we should prepare for it to be switched to BSV blockchain and asks about that.

‘Craig was Wright’ speculates that if you have a lot of power and you know BSV blockchain is the better technology, driving the price down and accumulating is the smart thing to do. He notes that the BlackRock ETF application had a whole page dedicated to Dr. Wright and the COPA v Wright case.

Weiner posits that they’re likely just protecting themselves. However, if he was in charge at BlackRock, he’d be trying to accumulate unsplit coins. It’s a simple insurance policy that would cost them very little.

Regarding COPA v Wright and the legal battles BSV blockchain is associated with, Weiner says that court cases are difficult to discuss because we’re not on the inside. We think all the evidence is in, but we can’t be certain. Weiner made the mistake of believing the chatter on social media before Kleiman v Wright, and yet what appeared to be something that would be against Dr. Wright ended up helping him. He emphasizes that we don’t know the strategy Dr. Wright’s team is pursuing. However, he doesn’t think there will be one piece of evidence that makes everyone gasp.