The Bitcoin Masterclasses #4 highlights: nLocktime and delayed transactions

The fourth installment of Dr. Craig Wright’s The Bitcoin Masterclasses series returned to London on April 19 and 20 with a theme of nLocktime and delayed transactions.

As usual, the in-person audience was intimate by design to facilitate group discussion, including a collection of internal folks from nChain and local VIPs. The content from the entire two days was livestreamed for free, providing a unique educational experience for anyone interested in learning about Bitcoin and its true potential.

Alec John Burns, the new propositions manager at nChain, was positioned right at the front of the classroom on both days, actively participating in the workshop with thoughtful questions and comments.

“It’s been great. It’s been really interesting. I think Craig is always ten steps ahead of anyone…it’s so worthwhile because you get those golden nuggets where you’re like, ‘wow, that’s a real-world use case that no one’s thought of yet .’ And it’s really exciting,” he shared with CoinGeek.

“This is a university. This is an opportunity where people challenge Dr. Wright’s ideas, and we learn tremendously from him,” added Julio Alejandro of JADA Consulting, another active participant on both days.

“I think that everyone benefits whenever he challenged my ideas. Whenever I listen to him, I also change my ideas, and the community overall that is just getting these rich inputs from everyone having a different idea. Dr. Wright is Dr. RIGHT,” he said.

Sebastian Plötzeneder, senior strategy manager at nChain, has been working closely with Dr. Wright for five years now, including editing CraigWright.net blog posts, which is also an amazing source of information for those who want to learn more about Bitcoin.

“If there is one way of capturing all the different things that Craig’s able to do from being a banker, lawyer, mathematician, and all sorts of other things, I think one way to describe him, to capture most of it, would be to say he’s a great teacher,” Plötzeneder shared.

“He’s always been an incredible teacher to me, and I’m sure to many other people by being able to pass on things that he’s been exploring for quite some time and that he knows more about than anyone else, particularly when he’s able to cross-reference across different, things. And that just makes it a lot more special,” he added.

nChain’s Research Director Wei Zhang constantly learns from Dr. Wright but still manages to learn something new at The Bitcoin Masterclasses about complexity.

“What Craig said very well today is that the reward is complex. You can’t get rid of complexity. And what we can do is to hide complexity in a solution so that [the] user does not have to deal with the complexity,” Zhang revealed.

“So by using nLocktime, we actually have some very complex solutions to address users’ concerns and potentially security and flexibility issues, but we can use a product to hide the complexity so that the complexity does not affect the user but still achieve the solutions we want,” he added.

Returning for his second masterclass experience, music producer and DJ Rui Da Silva attended the first Bitcoin Masterclasses in London back in January and did not want to miss an opportunity to learn from Dr. Wright again.

After attending both masterclasses, Da Silva is convinced there is still a lot to be built and a lot to be developed.

“I see that there’s so much applications for my industry where we have so many issues with licensing rights and then retrieving those rights back,” he said.

“I think hopefully there’ll be some developers that are interested in building solutions for my industry. That would be fantastic,” Da Silva added.

To get a bit more granular, the subject matter for the fourth masterclass was nLocktime and delayed transactions, what some refer to as “smart contracts” and future payments.

“So basically what we’re doing with sequencing and nLocktime is creating a scenario where we can have updated and ordered transactions that will finalize at a point in time,” Dr. Wright told CoinGeek.

“There are many misconceptions around this based on the whole Cypherpunk idea of not trusting anyone, but the reality is that there are very secure ways you can build these type of systems,” he said.

“So we have to get away from this idea that we have to remove all trust. And because you don’t build systems that work in commercial reality, that work without trust,” Dr. Wright added.

Plötzeneder confirmed Dr. Wright talks about succession planning often and that there is no absolute certainty when it comes to what will happen. Yet, people try to account for everything possible.

“There always needs to be an out element that allows you to adjust according to what has actually occurred, and so Craig allows you to capture that and still have the ability to perform actions if something unknown has happened,” Plötzeneder explained.

“When you talk about nLocktime, there’s certain things that you can plan ahead for, but sometimes we want to think about 20 years time,” he said.

“So that’s why the BSV network and how Bitcoin was always envisioned makes a ton of sense because the transaction you want to make now, you want to ensure that that’s valid way into the future. Otherwise you can’t plan ahead,” Plötzeneder added.

Watch The Bitcoin Masterclasses #4 Day 1 with Craig Wright: nLocktime and Delayed Transactions

Watch The Bitcoin Masterclasses #4 Day 2 with Craig Wright: nLocktime and Delayed Transactions