Steve Shadders: Bitcoin SV proving it can scale for businesses now

Bitcoin SV’s (BSV) recent Quasar upgrade is cause for much celebration, as it not only helped return Bitcoin one step closer to its original protocol, but also introduced a whole new level of blockchain scaling to BSV. CoinGeek’s Sarah Parsons caught up with nChain Technical Director Steve Shadders at a recent London BSV meetup, where they talked about the upgrade and its importance.

The London BSV gathering was a merry one, as the Quasar upgrade went as well as you could hope for. “We’re kind of giving a bit of a post-mortem of the Quasar upgrade, I think I can safely say that it was a very boring event, which is fantastic because with enterprise software changes, that’s kind of exactly what you want,” Shadders said. “I mean, we had an operations stream set up and we had contact with all of the kind of key players in the Bitcoin SV ecosystem. But we pretty much sat there and watched the upgrade activate. We fired Satoshi Shotgun and mined a block bigger than 128MB, which was necessary to lock the upgrade in. And it all went pretty smoothly, nothing unexpected. So yeah, job done.”

Parsons asked Shadders what businesses should take away from the Quasar upgrade. “I think it’s really quite critical for businesses that are looking to invest time and money in building a service on top of Bitcoin SV, Shadders replied. “Because most services, I mean, if you’re building a business, the aim is to scale. You want your business to start at whatever size it does, and it gets bigger and bigger, and bigger, and bigger. And of course, if your business is related to Bitcoin that means it’s got to be able to scale on top of Bitcoin.”

While other crypto hobby projects have promised that their blockchains will be ready at some point in the future, Shadders explained that such a thought process just won’t cut it for the real Bitcoin. “Now, I think, our philosophy at the Bitcoin SV Node team is that it’s not good enough for us to say to people, ‘Oh, by the time your business has scaled, we’ll be ready. Trust us,’” he said. “What we’re actually doing with the Quasar upgrade is demonstrating right now, that we can handle the future scale of whatever your business is. So you’ve got the confidence, not hoping that we’ll be able to pull it off some time in the future, we’re showing that it can be done right now.”