CoinGeek’s Kurt Wuckert Jr breaks down his blockchain journey on BreakintotheFuture

CoinGeek’s resident Bitcoin historian Kurt Wuckert Jr. was a guest on the BreakintotheFuture podcast, discussing his blockchain journey from total noob to expert.

A well-known face around the Bitcoin SV scene, Kurt Wuckert Jr began his Bitcoin journey back in 2012, after being offered payment in Bitcoin for services delivered by a printing company he owned. A client pitched him on Bitcoin, described as “like video game money,” as a means of paying for a print job.

Coming from a libertarian, free market, sound money background, Wuckert was immediately curious about the concept, and decided to agree to accept a payment in this new-fangled currency he hadn’t yet heard of. It was to be a significant turning point in his life story, ultimately pushing Wuckert into the respected role he plays today within the BSV and wider digital currency communities.

By his own admission, Wuckert says he didn’t ‘get it’ for a number of months after accepting his first Bitcoin payment. According to his Facebook timeline, the penny appeared to have dropped by 2013, when he began to engage in more numerous and frequent discussions online about Bitcoin— discussions today he reflects on with humor, showing a naivety and lack of awareness of what Bitcoin is and how it works.

After falling into the idea, Wuckert began to look for more ways in which his company could engage with Bitcoin—from mining it, to paying vendors, to accepting payments more generally in what was then BTC.

In 2013, Wuckert says he joined forces with a couple of like-minded partners to start a small mining operation, which ran reasonably successfully on a small scale before they all moved on in late 2014 or early 2015. Always in the ‘big block’ camp, Wuckert says he understood from this early stage that Bitcoin needed unlimited block sizes to be able to reach its true potential—a view that fell out of fashion with the consensus around BTC Core, and the desire to push Bitcoin merely as a form of digital gold.

With Wuckert seeing people removing cool features from the protocol and artificially limiting what Bitcoin was capable of, he found himself graduating to other blockchains and tokens. He began mining Ethereum and Monero, and started to learn more about the idea of smart contracts and tokenization, becoming an increasingly more vocal advocate for these ideas online.

It was then that life took a new direction for Wuckert, as he got married, and took a ‘honeymoon’ from the Bitcoin space for around a year and a half, leaving his Facebook groups and other social media communities behind. Into early 2017, he became more engaged again, and immediately noticed that the communities he was part of had grown considerably in size, with many more people now asking those same beginners questions he was asking himself back in 2012.

It was around that time that the cash split happened, the hard fork which separated BTC from BCH. Wuckert says he was very pro Bitcoin Cash at this stage, and was engaging actively in this community. The subsequent split of Bitcoin Cash into BCH and BSV saw Wuckert move towards the technologically superior protocol, the one which still to this day adheres most rigidly to the original white paper vision drawn up by Dr. Craig Wright, Satoshi Nakamoto himself, back at the dawn of Bitcoin.

Today, Wuckert is actively involved in CoinGeek Conferences and the BSV community, one of the leading voices in encouraging more people to learn about the value of BSV as the ultimate protocol for building and developing blockchain solutions.