BSV DevCon 2024 highlights: Yes, please do look behind the curtain

Blockchain, blockchain, blockchain. Apparently, if you say this word three times into a mirror, magical things start to happen. Data becomes more secure, a global micropayments economy forms, unicorns appear to hand the Internet back to its users… etc. But that word actually does mean something, as do the code, processes and structures backing it up. I’ve said before that BSV DevCon 2024 was the best part of the London Blockchain Conference (though technically a side event), and I’ll say it again. Here’s a highlights video from that day, so you can have a taste of the work going on behind the mirror when you say those magic words.

Watch CoinGeek’s short video of BSV DevCon 2024 highlights here. A video with all the complete interviews from the day will be available later on the CoinGeek YouTube channel.

Back in the days of the “CoinGeek Conference,” and especially during the COVID-era events when international borders were closed, I’d always be assigned to report on the first two presentations. These were the technical updates where we got to hear about how many transactions per second the BSV Testnet was doing now and what would be possible soon. I was more than happy to get this assignment each time since these were the presentations I looked forward to the most.

These days, the London Blockchain Conference (no longer a CoinGeek-organized event) represents the “front-end” or world-facing side of the blockchain world. It’s mostly business/media influencers, tech visionaries, policymakers, entrepreneurs and others who will definitely say the magic “blockchain” word enough times to keep everyone happy, but whose actual understanding of blockchain’s mechanics isn’t always clear. To be fair, there were still enough tech-oriented presentations on the main stage, but you could tell the audience wasn’t always “getting” them.

BSV DevCon, for want of a better word, is the “back-end” to all that. To enjoy the event, it’s assumed you already know about things like UTXOs, the superiority of proof-of-work (PoW), Mandala Networks, how tokenized assets and management contracts work, and the importance of protocol governance. You’ll also want to hear how some developers are pushing the envelope on what blockchain tech can do, and have at least a conceptual understanding of how they’re doing it.

By now, you might have guessed, I really enjoyed BSV DevCon 2024. It’s a far more hands-on, up-close-and-personal event where most attendees already know each other and were free to chat on the balcony with presenters without the glamor and green-rooms. That said, it was still big enough to require a PA system and it wasn’t always easy to score a chat with the most in-demand personalities. These people are busy, after all.

It wasn’t all technical, either. The BSV Association was there to tell us how blockchain interfaces with regulatory structures and what cultural shifts need to happen. U.K.-based venture builder Block Dojo organized a rousing presentation on why app builders need support to transform their plans into working companies. There were some policy-heavy speeches and discussions on libraries and standards; guiderails and foundations for developers that were lower on the wow factor but (once again) someone’s gotta do it.

With all those structures in place, we can hear more about gaming wallets, asset ownership/transfer/locking contracts, the “Bitcoin CPU,” how Ordinals should work, and how to read, index, and write the internet-level volumes of Big Data that blockchain is supposed to manage for us.

This is what Bitcoin and blockchain are really about.

Despite all the winking and trolling whenever someone claims it, yes, there are actually some of us who are into Bitcoin “for the tech”—that is, not for speculative trading, parties, no-effort riches, nor anarcho-capitalist larping. And even if you are into those things, someone’s still got to do the work to make it exist for everyone to enjoy.

BSV DevCon is where those “someones” gather to share some new ideas, show off their technical accomplishments, and put the pieces together to give everyone an idea of where it’s all going. I recommend watching the highlights video, as well as the extended version—in this case, you really should pay some attention to the man (or woman) pulling those levers behind the curtain.

Watch: Day One Summary at the London Blockchain Conference 2024

Day Two Highlights at the London Blockchain Conference 2024

Day Three Highlights at the London Blockchain Conference 2024