Bitcoin society, are you ready for 2020?

Submissions for the Bitcoin Association’s 2020 Pitch Day in London closed this past weekend and based on the initial applications, this will be the most successful Pitch Day yet.

The number of applications doubled from 25 to 50 groups representing at least 10 countries on four different continents looking for a chance to pitch their Bitcoin SV idea to a room full of investors.

When creators participate in any one of the pitch days or a hackathon at one of the Bitcoin Association events, it can provide a plethora of experience, as Bryan Daugherty explained last week.

It can also cement your place in the Bitcoin SV ecosystem as it did with Brent Beaver and his UptimeSV idea. UptimeSV won the CoinGeek.com Toronto Hackathon and is now in its beta testing phases. I’ve heard plenty of positive feedback from the websites and applications monitored and the users who are earning Bitcoin SV by acting as a node for the service.

The Pitch Day in London represents the first time the training wheels have been removed from Bitcoin. On February 4, 2020, the Bitcoin SV network will undergo the Genesis hard fork, which will be a full restoration of the Satoshi protocols and take another step towards limitless scaling by increasing the blocksize to 1GB before eventually removing all caps.

Raylene Wilson of the Bitcoin Association and an integral part of the group’s Pitch Days and Hackathons has this to say, “The rapidly growing maturity of the Bitcoin SV entrepreneurial ecosystem is demonstrated by the sheer volume of high-quality applications received. We also see a lot of interest from the mainstream business community with applications no longer primarily come from the BSV enthusiast community. The Genesis upgrade will broaden the range of future applications.”

After the Genesis upgrade, it’s the broader range of applications that Wilson mentions that has me the most excited. With the full return of the Satoshi protocols, new apps will go beyond wallets and highly niche web applications and open up to full-enterprise solutions that can’t run on other public blockchains.

What can we expect after Genesis?

Here are a few of the changes and some of the possible ideas that could come from them that I’ll throw into the ether and wait for some enterprising group to turn into reality:

The return of the nLocktime protocol adds a parameter to a transaction that mandates a minimum amount of time or block height that must pass before a transaction is added to the timeline.

The immediate possibility for an application that could release a transaction in the future could be an escrow service or some form of payroll software. Perhaps one where an employer could schedule an employee’s salary every two weeks or semi-monthly as their payroll dictates. Maybe something where a government can schedule social security payments to their elderly citizens.

The removal of the consensus limit on the maximum number of signature operations per transaction will allow developers to build far more robust, transaction-heavy applications. Removing the restrictions will allow global enterprise businesses to treat Bitcoin more than a hobby project and build applications that are more than just clever niche products but rather projects for worldwide usage.

By increasing the maximum consensus transaction size limit to 1 gigabyte will allow developers to upload bigger files on chain. It will enable applications like Bitsagram or Twetch to upload videos instead of just images. Then they could become true competitors to Instagram or Twitter.

Those are just a few ideas I’m putting out into the ether for someone to pick up and build. After meeting so many of the talented and creative people in the Bitcoin SV ecosystem and the knowledge that more Ethereum devs will make the transition sooner rather than later, I’m confident we’ll see an explosion of new and creative uses for Bitcoin SV.

Perhaps the best application that comes in the new year will be one that we didn’t even know we needed until its creation.

If you have an idea that you want to bring to the market, please send your business plan to Ayre Ventures via the contact form.

Learn from the people, like Connor Murray of TrueReviews, who pitched their projects to a panel of investors in Seoul for the first ever Bitcoin Association Pitch Day. Watch all Pitch Day videos on The BSV Pitch YouTube playlist.