Calvin Ayre joins CoinGeek Backstage in Zurich: BSV is about solving data problems

This article was originally published on CoinGeek on February 20, 2020.

CoinGeek Backstage is back, and Becky Liggero Fontana kicks off the series with an interview with CoinGeek founder Calvin Ayre backstage at the CoinGeek Conference in Zurich. She began by asking Calvin, why Zurich?

Ayre said that the CoinGeek Conference had toured a number of major international cities already, and with Zurich’s reputation as a financial center, it was a logical next step. Zurich is also of strategic importance to the region in spreading the word about the BSV enterprise blockchain, providing an ideal launchpad for the technology across the German speaking markets of central Europe.

He discussed how CoinGeek has evolved from covering the origins of Bitcoin in those early days, with cyberphunks and anarchists looking for alternatives to government systems, through to the much more mainstream technology platform espoused today. He said with BSV blockchain, there had been a move towards enterprise and governments, bringing a maturity and credibility to the space that was previously lacking. For Ayre, only governments and enterprises can propel the technology to the mainstream—and this happens once they understand how BSV blockchain can solve their practical data problems.

Liggero said a lot of the events of this type in the digital currency sector are blockchain talking to blockchain, and fail to reach beyond a core digital currency audience. However, at CoinGeek Zurich, there were representatives from the likes of PwC and IBM. Ayre said that there are digital currency events, then there are blockchain events—for him, CoinGeek is the only real blockchain event, because there is only one blockchain with the scale capacity to actually solve problems in the real world.

They spoke about the need for a rebranding, and a move away from the baggage of Bitcoin for BSV. Ayre said there was a desire to get rid of the brand confusion disaster caused by BTC. If governments or enterprise clients hear ‘Bitcoin,’ they immediately roll their eyes, having reached the wrong conclusions of what the BSV blockchain is about.

According to Ayre, this is about solving data problems, and there is a need for a campaign around that aimed at government and enterprise to alert them to what this technology does and why they need it—without any of the baggage that comes from ‘Bitcoin.’

Rounding off, Ayre urged viewers to look out for a CoinGeek Conference in their local city.

BSV is not slowing down: CoinGeek TV premieres with Calvin Ayre and Connor Murray

This article was originally published on CoinGeek on February 20, 2020.

Day 1 at CoinGeek Zurich conference saw an action-packed agenda of speakers, panel sessions and presentations, covering a mind-boggling array of real-world applications for BSV enterprise blockchain. CoinGeek’s own Charles Miller and Claire Celdran caught up with Calvin Ayre and Connor Murray for the premiere of CoinGeek TV, where they discussed the conference and some of the key issues affecting the future direction of the BSV blockchain.

Ayre, founder of Ayre Group and CoinGeek, first spoke of his morning session highlights, including Steve Shadders’ demonstration of 50,000 transactions/second volumes.

Ayre also pointed out how Switzerland was a key strategic location for the BSV network, not just as a launchpad into German-speaking markets, but also as an emerging hub for the sector. As the location of Bitcoin Association, TAAL Distributed Information Technologies Inc. (CSE:TAAL | FWB:9SQ1 | OTC: TAALF), nChain and others, Zurich was also a natural choice for a CoinGeek Conference, helping put BSV blockchain on the map in the region.

Asked about the impact of COVID-19 restrictions on events like CoinGeek conferences, Ayre said it was fortunate that the ecosystem had continued to grow strongly throughout the period, with influential developers still able to carry on their work from home. Emerging at the other side of the pandemic, he said he had consolidated the number of influencers in government and enterprise who understand BSV blockchain’s value lies in its utility, the blockchain of choice for enterprise scale projects.

“I don’t really think that there’s been much of an impact because the ecosystem keeps moving ahead with people working at home, so I don’t think there’s a major impact,” Ayre said. “I think coming out of the pandemic though, we’ve consolidated the number of influencers in government and enterprise that understand why this blockchain is different than the crypto space, of course, BSV isn’t crypto at all, it’s a utility blockchain, enterprise scaling utility blockchain, so I think we’re going to come out of here, and you’ll see a tipping point, we’re going to get a lot more attention from mainstream media. I’m excited for what’s coming ahead, but I don’t think the pandemic’s really slowed us down.”

Notably, some delegates from IBM attended the conference to learn more about BSV, though Ayre conceded it was not yet at critical mass with big business, due to linger confusion about how BSV differs from BTC. In Ayre’s words, the speculative side of BTC and token trading was an unfortunate offshoot of the original invention of Bitcoin, which in itself was created to solve data challenges. Ayre predicted more big businesses would join the next conference in New York, in the same way as IBM, to learn more about what BSV blockchain has to offer.

He was joined in the morning interview session by Connor Murray of Britevue. Murray began by saying the debate around scaling Bitcoin is as old as Bitcoin itself. He praised Calvin Ayre specifically for being the reason BSV took the lead on scaling, as was always intended through the founding white paper.

He described the sheer number of companies currently using BSV blockchain for data or for payment use cases as incredible, and said he was amazed at the progress in the BSV community since the early days. Despite the roadblocks placed there by others, he said he is very excited for the future trajectory of the BSV network.

“I think that this space has evolved so rapidly and it’s not slowing down. The amount of companies that are leveraging the global blockchain for data use cases, for payment use cases is actually incredible,” Murray said. “I actually am amazed at how far we’ve come since the first BSV conference in London, you know, BSV has not slowed down despite the roadblocks that people tried to put in front of it. I’m excited for where BSV is and where it’s going.”

Britevue is a consumer facing business, using micropayments to monetize transactions that would otherwise be monetized by ads. Microtransactions, according to Murray, provide an inherent opportunity to monetize content with BSV. Arguably the biggest use case for BSV in his view came through using the ledger as a timestamp ledger. Britevue makes use of this by providing tokenized proof of purchase, which can then be tied to consumer reviews—Murray said this makes verified reviews easy to validate on the blockchain, something that can only be possible on a low fee blockchain like BSV.

Murray is also building a business platform that allows companies to own their location on the blockchain, without having to rely on the likes of Google, Amazon, and Yelp to control and manage their data. With the help of BSV blockchain, companies no longer have to lobby a third party to manage their own data—they can simply manage that data on the blockchain, and also issue rewards and other incentives for reviews and other feedback.

According to Murray, the benefit of the CoinGeek Conferences comes from the networking opportunities, and the chance to meet people in real life. So much of Bitcoin is hidden behind avatars and profile pics online, and having actual conversations and networking opportunities with people in the flesh is good for innovation, cooperation and community cohesion. Murray says all BSV stakeholders share the same ultimate goal—they are all incentivized for BSV to succeed, and there is a lot of cooperation going on at these events.

Watch CoinGeek Zurich Day 1 – morning sessions here:

Calvin Ayre on ‘Hashing It Out’ premiere: Operators will drive gaming industry’s transition to blockchain

This article was originally published on CoinGeek on April 26, 2021.

Gambling is all about being innovative and having interesting content offerings, but let’s face it, innovation in the gambling industry has slowed down in the last couple of years—something that blockchain technology can help with.

In the premiere episode of Hashing It Out with Becky Liggero, Calvin Ayre, founder of Ayre Group and CoinGeek, talks about the closure of CalvinAyre.com and how the gambling industry fits right in to what’s happening in Bitcoin.

“My prediction is everything exciting that’s going to happen in the next 10 years in online gaming—other than the games themselves—but everything else, in the running of business, the operating of the business, the payments of the business… that’s all going to be done on the blockchain,” Ayre said. “But the decision to shut [CalvinAyre.com] down was really my realization that there’s no need to have the other site anymore because all the fun stuff that I’m attracted too—of course all the innovation and craziness—that’s happening on CoinGeek.”

The transition to blockchain—the original Bitcoin (BSV), in particular—is going to be operator-driven, according to Ayre.

“How it’s going to work is operators are going to wake up to the fact that they can run their entire business on it, and it’s the cheapest way to get money in,” he said. “I think also this year, you’re going to see that there’s more gaming sites that are going to wake up to the fact that BSV is the only payment platform that makes sense as well because it’s the cheapest one out there and it’s the safest one, and you can scale it and it gets even cheaper.”

Ayre and Liggero started discussing Bitcoin as early as 2012-2013, when the gambling industry was exploring the technology for payments. But the technology—as designed following the original Bitcoin whitepaper—is capable of doing more as “it’s fundamentally a data management evaluation platform.”

“BSV is this platform from 10 years ago that was originally launched that was then killed and so the one’s 5 years ago didn’t work and we brought the original platform back and it actually works again like it did 10 years ago. Everybody that says blockchains don’t work hasn’t checked out what BSV can do. This technology is actually ready for enterprise adoption today,” Ayre said. “We’re building real businesses that use the data management powers and we’re solving real enterprise problems or companies that aren’t even in this industry that have a data problem that this technology is uniquely able to solve.”

At the moment, there is still a lot of misinformation around those “crypto speculative casino nonsense stuff” that are leaving a lot of people confused about the true capability of the original Bitcoin protocol. Ayre believes there will be tipping point where people will realize that BSV is different from the other protocols, and that’s when the gambling space—and other industries as well—will jump on board with the technology.

“My fundamental prediction is with all these, looking back in hindsight at this whole kerfuffle over what’s the real Bitcoin, what’s best and all that, it’s all going to look stupid because scaling is the only thing that matters. It’s not only important, it’s the only thing important. All of them that can’t scale will disappear, and this platform is going to penetrate everything and everywhere, and it’s going to disappear. Ten years from now, everybody’s going to be using it and nobody’s going to even know what it is,” Ayre said.