Phase 2 – _unwriter – Medium
I have started seeing a lot of exciting projects and companies starting to form around Bitcoin SV. A lot of them make use of some of my tools in some ways, be it a library such as Datapay, or infrastructure tools and services such as Planaria and Bitbus.
And I am sure many of these entrepreneurs and developers have been wondering “how do we guarantee to our users if the blockchain data will be there forever?”, “how do we know the APIs we’re using will suddenly stop?”, “how do we know all the open source projects we’re using will suddenly stop being maintained?”, “how will this scale?”, etc.
Here’s a typical answer I’ve been giving to questions about future uncertainty:
However, it is also true that my answer has been more philosophical than practical. This is a very legitimate question that needs to be addressed.
We need A LOT of transactions to provide miners a lot of revenue. This is the only way Bitcoin will survive, since block rewards will eventually go to zero. And a lot of transactions can only come if businesses and organizations who create these transactions have more certainty about whether the blockchain will be around after a decade, after a hundred years, and after a thousand years.
I can just sit around and keep saying “Some economically incentivized actor will come around someday and solve all the problems”, or I can become that economically incentivized actor.
And to do that, I must take a leap.
Everything is about timing.
Until now, this question of “Who will store the blockchain” was not really an important issue. I could just give the same philosophical answer, and that was good enough because not enough people were building on Bitcoin SV.
But time is changing. We are ready to conquer.
In EVERY measure, we are growing very fast. It’s just a matter of time. Here’s a point of view from the mining aspect:
A while ago I said, “one day you’ll wake up to find that all the puzzle pieces have come together”:
That day is today.
Open your eyes.
Just last week, someone posted Bottle browser on Hacker News and it reached the front page within minutes. When the builders start recognizing the potential of a disruptive platform, it’s just a matter of time.
But this is just one example. We are just beginning to see an explosion of “Bitcoin as backend” applications. Today there are so many applications being released every day on Bitcoin, I cannot keep track anymore.
Here are just some recent apps I can remember from top of my head which use Bitcoin as a backend:
- Bitcoin-native Advertising Network
2. Crowd-sourced On-chain Weather Network
3. Audio Streaming over Bitcoin
4. Distributed commenting system over Bitcoin
5. Reddit over Bitcoin
6. Web Archive over Bitcoin (Using C protocol, a Content-Addressable File system over Bitcoin)
7. Private file hosting over Bitcoin
8. Distributed Crowdsourced Uptime monitoring system
9. Portal
10. Search Engine
11. Tokens
12. Bitcoin-powered Video Service
13. Twitter Killer
Bitcoin won’t win by winning the hearts of coin flippers and fake experts. It will be the capitalists of the nation of Bitcoin who will build the economy.
And I believe, that time is now.
I have decided to gradually give up anonymity.
The reason is straightforward.
My main goal has been to build infrastructure to help developers move faster without having to worry about all kinds of headaches (which they will probably never have to worry about forever anyway, since most businesses won’t be running their own Bitcoin full node). But what good are those systems if you can’t trust them? After all, I am just one guy behind a black and white emoticon, and nobody knows who I am. I could just disappear one day and nobody would find me.
And this is where Bitcoin SV is fundamentally different from all other “cryptocurrency” high school science projects.
All these get-rich-quick projects think they can implement something, sell whole lot of tokens, make tons of money from by selling to the “peasants”, and then walk away, never again have to worry about working again. They call it “permissionless”, I call it “lazy”. They call it “Proof of Stake”, I call it “Oligarchy”.
That’s the opposite of how Bitcoin works. All actors in Bitcoin ecosystem believe in accountability. Everyone believes in work. You get exactly what you deserve, just like how Bitcoin miners get exactly what they deserve through investing in Proof of Work mining. If you stop working, you no longer make money. If you want to provide value, you make yourself accountable. If what you provide doesn’t function as advertised, you should take responsibility.
All other “crypto” projects have the opposite philosophy. That’s why you see all of them try to do one of two things:
- Hide accountability: These are projects and features that hide transactions from the blockchain. They want to get away from accountability. The inventors and early adopters want to make money the easy way and just walk away without getting caught. There is no way any serious business can use this type of system. There’s a reason why “accounting” is called “accounting”. Businesses are created for the exact purpose of providing accountability.
- Offload accountability onto the blockchain: This is how all the amateur “blockchain” projects are different from Bitcoin. The reason Ethereum put all the state transition history on the blockchain is because they want to build a system where anyone who runs a business on top of their blockchain can get run away from accountability. For example, if you build a dark market on Ethereum, you would like to start the market, sell some tokens, watch it appreciate in value, and then walk away. If somebody hires an assassin to kill another person on the market, you don’t want the accountability. You’re already rich. In fact you’ve already walked away. You call it “decentralization”. I call it irresponsible human being. This is how you create a sci-fi dystopia.
Bitcoin never ends up in this state because it’s based on creating more human trust, not eliminating it. Bitcoin does not offload accountability to the blockchain. Instead it delegates it to humans and empowers humans to trust one another more.
Trust exists on-chain. Accountability exists off-chain.
And this is why I have decided to take a leap. I will make myself accountable for the value I create. Bitcoin should create more trust, not eliminate it.
I will incorporate a legally binding business that can serve global audience, provide a professional infrastructure service to various businesses, and provide 100% accountability.
“Storing the blockchain forever” doesn’t mean what you think it means.
For example, I may try to convince you today that I will be storing the blockchain forever. But this really has nothing to do with what will actually end up happening. The startup land is littered with cases where companies go broke after making false promises.
There are at least three cases when a company goes broke:
- All Gone: 99.9% of startups end up this way. Most people by now have experienced this at least once with one of their once-favorite apps that just disappeared.
- Strategic M&A: The company sells itself to a larger company which benefits from the competitive advantage it gains from the acquired assets, but doesn’t directly make money from it. For example, Youtube selling to Google. Google subsidizes Youtube because it’s a valuable loss leader asset.
- Private Equity: Sometimes if the startup is large enough but burning money, an opportunistic private equity firm may swoop in and buy the company at a cheap price, improve the cap table over a few years, and try to resell it to another company at a higher price.
The first option is terrible. The second option is not much better because it means the destiny of Bitcoin is in the hands of some company that is not directly incentivized to keep it sustainable. The third is even worse, for the same reason.
Bitcoin is not building a single startup. We are bootstrapping a whole new economy, and we want every actor to be self sustainable. Whichever company that starts doing this must have a FOCUSED business plan, one that’s not based on naive belief and guesstimate. So it is important that companies have a clear business model or at least a plan for how to get there.
This is another reason why I have decided to start a company. There’s a lot of uncertainty in Bitcoin today, and a lot of yet-to-be-entrepreneurs are hesitant to jump in despite all the wide-open opportunities waiting for them.
I won’t say “Trust me I will store the blockchain forever”.
Instead, I will say I have thought about this problem for a long time, and I think I can create a self-sustainable revenue generating organization that can play an important role in solving not only the “forever storage” problem but also building a supercomputer over Bitcoin, I believe this is where all kinds of exponential value will come from:
One sustainable company is great but an entire sustainable ecosystem is even better. It’s desirable if the ecosystem itself as a whole becomes much more decentralized (And No, I don’t mean decentralized in network topology sense. I mean economically decentralized), and more actors are incentivized to redundantly store as much data as possible and participate in as many on-chain economic activities as possible.
I have been thinking about this problem since before I started working on BitDB or Planaria or even appeared on the Bitcoin Cash scene, and have plans and ideas on how to help get there faster.
One of those ideas is portability.
In fact, if you look into all my systems, they are all grounded on this principle.
Here’s an explanation on Bitquery, the query language that powers Bitbus and Planaria:
This philosophy is consistent in every system I have been building and will be releasing. Here’s an explanation on Planaria:
This is just the beginning. There’s a long way to go to truly ensure absolute portability.
And I am about to move at much faster speed.
The first thing I’m planning to do is incorporate as a business. I am still researching to do this the right way, but it will happen.
As for what kind of operations this new company will take on, if you have been following my work you will know that I’ve been mostly focused on the “READ” side of Bitcoin. This will remain that way. The new company will focus on the “READ” side of Bitcoin. It will just be accelerated once everything is taken care of.
The main goals for the to-be-incorporated company are:
- Raise service quality: Reduce (and mostly eliminate) downtime, add replication, solve scalability problems, expand to storing the entire blockchain.
- Provide accountability: Allow ways for businesses to pay for services and become legally accountable for the services provided.
- Become self-sustainable: Create a self-sustainable revenue machine that can economically scale along with the ecosystem.
- Innovate: Push the boundaries of the READ side of Bitcoin even further.
Note:
This doesn’t mean I’m planning to suddenly get rid of free API options. The free APIs will stay. There are various other business models that can be applied in addition to the free model. But at the end of the day, the immediate top priority is to lower the barrier for developers as much as possible.
Another high priority agenda of this new company shall be to contribute to economic decentralization while preserving sustainability.
To be specific, so far I have built a two-tier approach for developers to read from the blockchain:
- [Tier 1] Planaria Network (REST API): Most BSV apps use these API endpoints today. Any developer can just get started building an app without even having to run their own server. Planaria changes the server-client paradigm by using Bitcoin as a backend and providing a publicly accessible REST and SSE (Server Sent Events) endpoints. Anyone can verify the authenticity of a transaction easily, and anyone can easily run their own Planaria machine to verify the authenticity of the current state of a state machine.
- [Tier 2] Bitbus Network (Sync API): Many times businesses may want to OWN their data and serve from their own machine instead of relying on a public Planaria node. This is why I recently released Bitbus. You can think of it as a partial blockchain synchronization engine, which lets you synchronize ONLY the subset of the blockchain you need for your app (instead of storing the entire blockchain). Between Bitbus and Neon Planaria, application developers can build and run their own Bitcoin backend WITHOUT having to run a full node simply by synchronizing a subset of the blockchain to their own server, from which they can generate their own backend and serve to their own audience, from their own machine. Developers could even provide their own services to the Tier 1 audience this way, and even make money from providing these public API access. And I plan to release such monetization frameworks as well.
To summarize, I am going to dedicate the new company to focus on:
- Infrastructure systems and services such as Bitbus (App-specific blockchain synchronization service) and Planaria (Bitcoin state machine + Public API). Provide a robust and flexible infra for consumer applications as well as enterprise.
- Explore “READ” side of things even further, with products such as Bottle, (Bitcoin browser), as well as exploring further on with Metanet (Supercomputing on Bitcoin).
This doesn’t mean I will suddenly make every aspect of my identity completely public today. I will do this on my own terms gradually.
At this point, my top priority is to decide on the best structure for the company to move forward globally. Bitcoin is the first ever platform that has the potential to become truly global (Even the WWW has failed at this) and I am excited to find creative ways to move forward.
Next, I am very willing to learn from various actors — such as wallet companies, miners, and other businesses — in the ecosystem about their challenges, incentives, and interests. I would like to find various ways to cooperate.
Division of labour is extremely important at this stage. We are the early settlers of the nation of Bitcoin. And we can do this, together.
I look forward to working with all of you, more freely.
Twitter: _unwriter
Slack: Atlantis
Published at Mon, 01 Jul 2019 13:48:27 +0000
