Get technical with Bitcoin and Genesis at CoinGeek London

The CoinGeek London conference is only days away now. As the first major Bitcoin BSV focused event since the February 4th “Genesis” upgrade, attendees can expect several of the discussions to explain its technical workings—and how they can finally deliver the Bitcoin economy Satoshi Nakamoto promised back in 2008.

First day technical track

The first day of CoinGeek events have always looked more at the technical and development site of things, and London is no exception. Guest speakers Jimmy Wales (Wikipedia) and Tom Lee (Fundstrat) have been getting the buzz lately, and for once the main talking point isn’t Dr. Craig Wright—it’s time to talk about the future.

Here’s a little of what you can expect to hear about the nuts and bolts side of Bitcoin, and the changes Genesis is bringing.

Bitcoin SV Node team Technical Director Steve Shadders appeared at the last CoinGeek event in Seoul, where he presented “the Road to Genesis”. This time around, Lead Developer Daniel Connolly will kick things off on Thursday, February 20, with “Bitcoin SV: Genesis is Here, Teranode is Next”.

Teranode is nChain’s multi-layer version of the Bitcoin protocol aimed at large-scale enterprise use. The “tera~” in Teranode refers to terabyte-sized blocks, so it’s designed to handle large-scale applications—that is, until ordinary users of the Bitcoin network need it too. Connolly will look at the challenges involved, and what sorts of software/hardware infrastructure improvements will be necessary.

Bitcoin SV Scaling Test Network Operations Manager Brad Kristensen follows to present the findings from Genesis’ testing period. After that, Steve Shadders will present “Instant Transactions & the P2P Network as Satoshi Designed”.

Wallet and exchange developers Alex Agut (HandCash), Lorien Gamaroff (Centbee) and Jack Liu (RelayX, FloatSV) will talk about their experiences building apps. All that is before lunch on the first day.

Following that, there’s a panel on Bitcoin’s mining economy with TAAL Distributed Information Technologies, Inc. CEO Angela Holowaychuk, and Lin Zheming, founder and CEO of Mempool.

Aaron Russell of Operate will then present “Building on Bitcoin: Developer Tools To Fuel an App Explosion”. Sean Pollock of _unwriter’s Planaria Corp will talk about Bitcoin Computing, and there are several other presentations from different aspects of BSV’s future economy including tokenization, smart contracts, development platforms, and updates from past Bitcoin Association Hackathon finalists UptimeSV and Codugh.

Pay extra attention, because Genesis has now arrived

The atmosphere of the entire conference will differ from 2019’s offerings, moving from “here’s what’s coming” to “here’s what we now have, now let’s get things moving”. Developers will now be able to actually experiment with Bitcoin’s new capacity and capabilities, finding new use cases and getting them to market ahead of others.

Genesis brings not only massive scaling capacity. For the first time in Bitcoin’s 11-year history, the protocol has been stabilized and locked, introducing a set of hard fundamental rules that may not be changed in future versions.

The capabilities of Bitcoin’s scripting language have also been upgraded, with a new and formalized grammar. It allows data inputs in byte lengths far longer than previously permitted, and “non-standard transactions” performing complicated functions can be validated by any miner—soon to become commonplace, rather than an experimental curiosity.

Additionally, Genesis will allow for more secure instant (or zero-confirmation) transactions, needed to handle payment transaction volumes as well as the demands of enterprise applications. Miners will be able to validate blocks and (soon) even transactions themselves in parallel, in order to chew through large blocks without holding up smaller ones. Functionality such as timed transactions (using nLockTime and nSequence) will be restored as they existed in Bitcoin’s early days, ensuring code will still execute years into the future.

Mining operations will now be able to specialize depending on their abilities and economic aims, processing non-standard transactions in a different priority queue than regular transactions.

Event details—don’t miss out!

CoinGeek London 2020, the first post-Genesis event, will take place at Old Billingsgate on February 20-21 (Thurs-Fri). If you don’t yet have tickets to the event, they’re available here.

For more information on the conference and a more detailed agenda, check out CoinGeek’s guide and speaker list. There will also be plenty of meetings and side events for developers to attend, so watch out for announcements from third-party attendees on social media.