Calvin Ayre’s predictions for 2024: Fewer crooks, more enterprise blockchain adoption

Enterprise blockchain technology’s future looks bright as the efforts of regulatory and law enforcement agencies resulted in the overdue cracking of some prominent ‘crypto’ skulls.

As I write this, Christmas has yet to arrive but Santa has already been making his rounds, doling out lumps of coal to all the naughty crypto kiddies who thought they were above the law. Lo and behold, it seems that I was right all along. There is no need for bespoke regulations, because digital assets are already covered under the same laws—civil and criminal—that govern other financial instruments.

Having predicted that this crackdown was imminent in last year’s article, I’m even more confident in my predictions for how the next 12 months will unfold.

First, the issuing of civil complaints and criminal indictments in the U.S. and other jurisdictions is by no means over. There are some major bad actors still roaming free, wreaking havoc, foolishly convinced of their own untouchability. Some of these same bad actors are involved in projects fundamental to both the continuation of the sham ‘crypto’ economy and the criminal networks that rely on lax regulatory oversight to fund their activities.

This includes U.S. exchanges Coinbase (NASDAQ: COIN) and Kraken, both of which continue to engage in questionable tactics, including their embrace of the controversial Tether stablecoin. The CEOs of these exchanges appear convinced that their lobbying cash and the desire by some federal pols to favor domestic operators at the expense of international entities will keep them safe from harm. Famous last words.

The recent $4.3 billion settlement between U.S. federal authorities, Binance and its founder Changpeng Zhao includes five years of unrestricted monitoring of Binance’s future transactions. Criminals might find other exchanges willing to look the other way but, with U.S. political figures now signalling an imminent crackdown on U.S. dollar-denominated stablecoins—Tether, FDUSD, Justin Sun’s various unbacked tokens, etc.—the fuel that feeds the crypto crime engine will be drained from the tank.

The impact of this long overdue smackdown will be profound. It will be like a rapid decompression event in an orbiting space station, robbing exchanges of the oxygen on which their operations depend and complicating efforts by customers looking to convert their utility-free casino chips into cash.

Enterprise adoption

The purge of blockchain’s bad actors will finally extinguish the prevalent ‘number go up’ mantra in favor of a new focus on utility. Enterprises will finally see the signal that has always been lurking behind all that ‘crypto’ criminal noise. And as more and more enterprises explore blockchain’s potential, others will follow.

Enterprise Blockchain technology has already demonstrated its potential in a wide variety of sectors; everything from supply chain monitoring to authentication of luxury goods to protecting health care data from unapproved eyes.

Enterprise blockchain adoption can help reduce or outright eliminate data silos. Streamlining data access between multiple parties in a transparent and traceable fashion will reduce the costs of creating, storing and sharing documentation while ensuring authoritative record-keeping for all participants.

Conversely, companies such as nChain have already demonstrated the ease with which individuals can more strictly protect their personal health care data by deciding which medical professionals can access relevant aspects of this data. Crucially, this will also allow users to revoke access to this data should a patient move or simply desire to change doctors.

Smarter AI

There’s no question that AI got the world’s attention in 2023, offering exhilarating examples of the potential for data processing and audio-video creation. But AI also offered examples of the technology’s limitations as well as the ongoing need for human oversight.

Some of the more amusing examples of AI’s vulnerabilities included lawyers filing briefs citing phantom precedents and researchers citing nonexistent studies they allegedly used to support their findings. More sobering views of AI’s inroads into areas of extreme sensitivity came courtesy of reports that Israel was using AI to help plan potential bombing targets in Gaza. As I’ve previously argued, AI needs guardrails and it needs them yesterday.

To ensure accurate results, large-language models (LLM) can’t just hoover up data willy-nilly. They need to be trained on verified data immutably recorded on the blockchain. LLMs also require tokens to represent (among other things) recurring sequences of characters in text strings, which are used to train LLMs on statistical relationships between characters that help predict what comes next.

The BSV Blockchain’s rock-bottom transaction fees give it the unrivaled ability to facilitate cost-effective token generation. And unlike other chains that restrict the size of individual blocks, BSV’s unbounded capacity to expand to meet whatever its users need make it the only chain that can store the vast volumes of data on which more accurate LLMs will be trained.

Scaling

The BSV blockchain has always refused to accept the artificial capacity constraints that other chains seem content to live within. I was raised to not impose limits on what I hoped to achieve, and I carried this belief from a sleepy little farming town in northern Canada to the cover of the 2006 Forbes billionaires issue. The only way one travels that great distance is by rejecting the accepted wisdom that such limits exist.

BSV recorded well over a billion transactions in 2023—after taking 14 years to process the first 2 billion—including a record 128 million set in a single day this summer. Both those figures are set to explode early in the new year when the Teranode scaling solution finally puts its rubber to the road. It all starts in January with a hardcore six-month stress test that will see BSV process over a million transactions per second.

Teranode’s impact will be massive, publicly confirming the fact that BSV is the only blockchain that can make Web3 a reality and complete the internet’s development. BSV’s unbounded capacity, combined with transaction fees measured in fractions of a cent, will lead enterprises to put more and more of their data on the blockchain, where it will be safer than if stored on a single centralized server.

CSW

Teranode is proof positive of the message that Dr. Craig Wright has been promoting since 2008. Scaling was always possible on the original Bitcoin, which exists today only on the BSV Blockchain. Then as now, skeptics and those with ulterior motives are trying to refute and/or downplay this message, but the truth will always out.

Early in the new year, Dr. Wright’s long-awaited legal faceoff with the COPA cabal of Silicon Valley giants will get underway in a U.K. court. Based on the presiding Justice’s actions and words to date in knocking down some of COPA’s arguments, I can’t see how COPA emerges victorious, at least not to the degree they appear to be expecting. I believe Wright will either win the case outright or the Justice will conclude that neither side has sufficiently proven their case to warrant a lopsided ruling.

COPA claims to be fighting to ensure technology remains freely available, by which they mean free to use by COPA members. Like entitled hippies without tickets forcing their way into music festivals while chanting ‘the music belongs to the people,’ COPA doesn’t understand that if you want to dance, you have to pay the band. In this case, the band that wrote the blockchain music is none other than Dr. Wright. COPA will be forced to acknowledge that sooner rather than later.

As the saying goes, a lion doesn’t concern itself with the opinions of sheep. And yet here is a pride of supposed lions that seems extremely concerned with—dare we say fearful of—the opinions of a lone Australian polymath. It’s almost as if they understand all too well how greatly Wright’s vast patent library will impact all of their current and future operations in the blockchain space.

London Calling

Finally, I’d like to close by inviting all of you to check out the London Blockchain Conference, the latest version of which gets underway May 21 at Excel London. The only conference exclusively focused on Enterprise Blockchain technology, London Blockchain Conference has become a must-attend event and this year will prove the largest and most ambitious to date.

By and large, 2023 was one of the more encouraging years in blockchain’s still early history. We’ve cleared out some of the deadwood that was inhibiting the growth of healthier specimens. With enterprises increasingly able to see the vast, rich forest lurking behind those diseased trees, the BSV Blockchain stands tall and ready to make history.

In order for artificial intelligence (AI) to work right within the law and thrive in the face of growing challenges, it needs to integrate an enterprise blockchain system that ensures data input quality and ownership—allowing it to keep data safe while also guaranteeing the immutability of data. Check out CoinGeek’s coverage on this emerging tech to learn more why Enterprise blockchain will be the backbone of AI.

Watch: Seasons greeting from Calvin Ayre! 2024 will be pivotal for Enterprise Blockchain adoption