On New Year’s Eve 2024, Kurt Wuckert Jr. hosted a special episode of the CoinGeek Weekly Livestream to recap the past year. Joining him was entrepreneur and big block OG Eli Afram, creator of AnonSurvey.com, the first scalable blockchain voting platform.
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A sobering year and a worrying trend
Wuckert kicks the weekly livestream off by thanking RockWallet and Champions TCG for being sponsors this year. The two fast-growing firms advertised on the livestream throughout 2024, which Wuckert describes as a “sobering year” with plenty of highs and lows.
On the one hand, 2024 was a halving year, with miner revenue declining substantially. The drama of Dr. Craig Wright’s court cases was another lowlight for BSV, but it wasn’t all negative. On the positive side, Teranode is going from strength to strength, and TAAL recently mined the first Teranode block. Ordinals continued to be popular throughout 2024, and many new people became interested in scaling and the underlying technology because of it.
Wuckert reminds us that Bitcoin has always been about the system and what it can disrupt in the long term. However, the industry’s incentives are currently warped. Every dollar deployed has likely underperformed simply holding BTC, and while lots of people are making money now, it’s worrying for the long term.
Wuckert invites us to imagine this trend at scale—MicroStrategy (NASDAQ: MSTR) has shut down its original software business and is now focused solely on stacking BTC—what if other companies did this? It would lead to a widespread economic slowdown with serious consequences.
Yet, as if that isn’t worrying enough, President-elect Donald Trump has appointed Howard Lutnick as Commerce Secretary. The CEO of Cantor Fitzgerald (NASDAQ: ZCIIFX) is “Tether’s bankers’ banker,” meaning the shady characters at the head of the stablecoin company are one step closer to the center of the network. Wuckert is concerned that the fraud and early shenanigans can be papered over and Tether can reach “escape velocity.” Afram wonders if, at this point, there’s some government involvement in Tether, to which Wuckert replies it is almost certain since they’re one of the biggest bondholders.
The near-religious sentiments in blockchain and the disappointing COPA v Wright outcome
Wuckert and Afram briefly discuss their Christian backgrounds before the latter makes an astute point: there are many similarities between religious ways of thinking and those in the blockchain industry. In this industry, people get riled up when you criticize the technology or coin they believe in; it’s almost as if it has become part of their identity, and they cannot view things rationally. This is only exacerbated by the fact they often have a lot of money on the line, and being wrong has actual costs.
Wuckert believes this is partly because many people don’t have another anchor in life. If they had families and communities, it wouldn’t be so intense. However, for many, their favorite coin is their community, and they will fight to defend it.
Speaking of beliefs, the pair switched to the COPA v Wright trial earlier in 2024. Afram says he honestly thought Wright would win. Wuckert says he was always cautious, given how powerful COPA players are and how many holes are in Wright’s story. He points to the sterility of the evidence as one reason he wasn’t 100% certain as so many others were. Afram says he still thinks Wright is Satoshi but accepts he could be wrong. He admits he found some of the emotional reactions bizarre and overdone.
So close, yet so far—the deal that never was
Afram reveals that before the COPA v Wright verdict, he and his team at Amleh talked with Peter Schiff and held as many as 20 meetings. He says Schiff started to get it and understand how the BSV blockchain could be used to create immutable records. While Schiff had heard a few negative things about BSV, he remained open-minded. However, the outcome of the COPA v Wright trial led to a marked change in tone, and ultimately, the discussions never went anywhere. “We were close,” Afram says.
Speaking of deals, sales, and marketing, Afram says he thinks some BSVers have thrown too many stones and burned too many bridges. Even terms like ‘Turing Complete‘ mean little to most BSVers, let alone outsiders. He believes we need to focus on putting things into layman’s terms for outsiders and on a more positive message everyone can understand.
Wuckert agrees, but he believes it’s because it’s too difficult to explain the politics and nuances of the whole thing to newcomers. It’s also because the other side is excellent at marketing; after all, they’re Silicon Valley bros and have pioneered the marketing for companies like Uber (NASDAQ: UBER), which are less successful in reality than their images may portray.
Despite the potential deal with Peter Schiff falling through, real things are happening in BSV. Wuckert points to the success of Champions TCG, which has a real card game in stores nationwide. Although it doesn’t generate a lot of on-chain transactions, it does utilize the BSV blockchain in novel ways.
What’s so incredible about Teranode?
Wuckert says he doesn’t know the exact release date for Teranode, but he suspects it will be in January. The team has been saying Q1 2025 for a while, so it could be any time in that window.
Afram wonders what’s so special about it apart from the one million transactions per second processing capacity. Wuckert highlights how efficient it is: it’s orders of magnitude more efficient than SV Node, and it allows operators to focus on what’s happening, e.g., script or token transactions, and beef up capacity to handle that without having to beef the whole thing up. In a nutshell, it’s super efficient and smart, and it’s a huge improvement overall.
Watch: Memetics and the mechanics of information
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