Steve Shadders's guest appearances

Steve Shadders

Bitstocks Media

CoinGeek Conversations

Stephan Nilsson

David Case

Stefan Matthews

Daniel Connolly

James Belding

Jimmy Nguyen

Josh Petty

Adam Kling

Michael Hudson

Joshua Henslee

Craig Wright

Lorien Gamaroff

Zach Resnick

Calvin Ayre

Ian Grigg

OwlTail

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“Art washes from our souls the dust of everyday life,” claimed Pablo Picasso. But while that may still be true of art  and everyday dust, Bitcoin SV is changing attitudes to its own variety of dust. Bitcoin dust is a computational leftover, a by-product of transactions measured in minute quantities of Satoshis (one Satoshi being a ten millionth of a Bitcoin). Until now, these leftovers were too small to be worth worrying about – or, more precisely, would cost more to do something with than their own value.But now, as the CTO of nChain, Steve Shadders, explains, new possibilities for making use of dust are becoming available: “there is really nothing revolutionary about this at all. All it required was to remove some artificial restrictions that had been put in place quite a few years ago.”Now it will be possible to ‘clean up’ data that is actually costing the miners money to maintain, by allowing them accept ‘piles’ of dust, which, added together, are worth something: “it's probably not the end of the world if you never did clean it up. But it turns out that there is a way that you can clean it up relatively cheaply or almost for free and provide a net benefit for everybody involved.”So that’s useful, up to a point, in tidying up the records that have to be kept on the Bitcoin blockchain. But this capability also opens up new possibilities for providing services which, until now, would not have had an economic model, because their units of revenue would have been too small. But in future, nanopayments could provide the basis for new kinds of businesses. Steve explains: “the idea behind collecting a whole lot of individual bits of dust and putting them together to turn it into a more useful denomination of Bitcoin opens up the idea of a service provider being able to charge so little for a service that it falls into the realm of dust, but be able to actually accumulate that value until they reach a point where they've got enough of it to collect together and turn it into meaningful value.”So what kind of business models might be able to take advantage of dust accumulation? Steve mentions functions including micro-computations and payments for validating a Bitcoin signature. There’s also been talk of its use in Internet of Things applications, where millions of pieces of data are being collected from sensors in the environment. Steve is reluctant to speculate in much detail about the opportunities: “now that this this model has been demonstrated, it's going to be up to other creative minds to work out how that maps onto a business model.”But he adds, intriguingly: “I can think of a few myself that are very fundamentally to do with how Bitcoin works in the back end and the infrastructure required to make Bitcoin work. So that's enough to convince me that there is a use case, which suggests to me that there's probably plenty of other models out there that I haven't thought of.”That sounds like a challenge to BSV entrepreneurs. We have already seen an ecosystem of startups based on micropayments. Are we at the start of a ‘second wave’ based on nanopayments?

“Art washes from our souls the dust of everyday life,” claimed Pablo Picasso. But while that may still be true of art  and everyday dust, Bitcoin SV is changing attitudes to its own variety of dust. Bitcoin dust is a computational leftover, a by-product of transactions measured in minute quantities of Satoshis (one Satoshi being a ten millionth of a Bitcoin). Until now, these leftovers were too small to be worth worrying about – or, more precisely, would cost more to do something with than their own value.But now, as the CTO of nChain, Steve Shadders, explains, new possibilities for making use of dust are becoming available: “there is really nothing revolutionary about this at all. All it required was to remove some artificial restrictions that had been put in place quite a few years ago.”Now it will be possible to ‘clean up’ data that is actually costing the miners money to maintain, by allowing them accept ‘piles’ of dust, which, added together, are worth something: “it's probably not the end of the world if you never did clean it up. But it turns out that there is a way that you can clean it up relatively cheaply or almost for free and provide a net benefit for everybody involved.”So that’s useful, up to a point, in tidying up the records that have to be kept on the Bitcoin blockchain. But this capability also opens up new possibilities for providing services which, until now, would not have had an economic model, because their units of revenue would have been too small. But in future, nanopayments could provide the basis for new kinds of businesses. Steve explains: “the idea behind collecting a whole lot of individual bits of dust and putting them together to turn it into a more useful denomination of Bitcoin opens up the idea of a service provider being able to charge so little for a service that it falls into the realm of dust, but be able to actually accumulate that value until they reach a point where they've got enough of it to collect together and turn it into meaningful value.”So what kind of business models might be able to take advantage of dust accumulation? Steve mentions functions including micro-computations and payments for validating a Bitcoin signature. There’s also been talk of its use in Internet of Things applications, where millions of pieces of data are being collected from sensors in the environment. Steve is reluctant to speculate in much detail about the opportunities: “now that this this model has been demonstrated, it's going to be up to other creative minds to work out how that maps onto a business model.”But he adds, intriguingly: “I can think of a few myself that are very fundamentally to do with how Bitcoin works in the back end and the infrastructure required to make Bitcoin work. So that's enough to convince me that there is a use case, which suggests to me that there's probably plenty of other models out there that I haven't thought of.”That sounds like a challenge to BSV entrepreneurs. We have already seen an ecosystem of startups based on micropayments. Are we at the start of a ‘second wave’ based on nanopayments?

Steve Shadders: Creative minds can figure out how to make money from dust

Bitstocks Podcast Ep

Über Bitcoin coder and CTO at nChain, Steve Shadders talks to Bitstocks CEO-Founder, Michael Hudson about Bitcoin’s history, and creating an immutable chronicle with the help of Bitcoin. As one of the team leaders behind the Bitcoin SV development team, Steve runs us through their extensive preparations for the Bitcoin SV’s Genesis upgrade and reveals the name of the final Bitcoin SV hard fork...  “I’m more excited about the fact that I don’t know what Bitcoin (BSV) will look like in 3 years just because the possibility is boundless.”

Über Bitcoin coder and CTO at nChain, Steve Shadders talks to Bitstocks CEO-Founder, Michael Hudson about Bitcoin’s history, and creating an immutable chronicle with the help of Bitcoin. As one of the team leaders behind the Bitcoin SV development team, Steve runs us through their extensive preparations for the Bitcoin SV’s Genesis upgrade and reveals the name of the final Bitcoin SV hard fork...  “I’m more excited about the fact that I don’t know what Bitcoin (BSV) will look like in 3 years just because the possibility is boundless.”

Steve Shadders - Writing Bitcoin’s (BSV) History, and Writing History with Bitcoin - Bitstocks Podcast Ep. 20 

An Australian Bitcoin developer living in London, Steve Shadders is, at first glance, the typical geek, complete with goatee beard, glasses and ponytail. But it only takes a few minutes chat to get way beyond the stereotype. He thinks widely about the politics and economics of bitcoin, and he’s a former DJ, with a love of techno - a calling which he says delayed his entry into the world of software by several years.“Shadders” as he’s known at nChain, the Bitcoin SV development company of which he’s Chief Technology Officer, operates in many dimensions. There’s an ideological side to him, the legacy of youthful, anarchistic attitudes: “as Bitcoin becomes more widespread,” he says, “it puts the power of economic sovereignty into the hands of people who currently don’t have it ...There is nothing more powerful that you can give someone than opportunity.”The mission of nChain, according to its website is “to ignite global adoption and enterprise level of usage of Bitcoin”. To that end, Steve leads the nChain developer team behind a series of “upgrades” to the Bitcoin SV protocol (he prefers “upgrade” to “hard fork”). This year, we’ve had the Quasar upgrade, and next year will be Genesis. The idea is to bring the Bitcoin SV protocol back to how it was when Bitcoin started - hence the “SV”, Satoshi vision.  Part of that process is to allow Bitcoin miners rather than developers to call the shots. As a developer, himself, Steve realises this has implications for him: “ultimately, my goal is to make myself replaceable and redundant - and I hope to achieve that within a couple of years”. By then, the governance role in Bitcoin will be handed to a group of people rather than a few individuals, leaving miners with the ultimate responsibility for the ecosystem.Steve works closely with Craig Wright, nChain’s Chief Scientist. He admits that “it can be challenging to understand what Craig’s talking about sometimes”. About six months after Craig has raised a new idea, Steve says modestly, he finally understands “what he really means”. But it’s a privilege “to be able to pick his brains on a daily basis ...he’s thinking about things years before anyone else”. As for his own ideas about where Bitcoin is heading, Steve is an unashamed ‘Bitcoin maximalist’. He does accept that “probably the notion of private blockchains will be around for a while before the business world gets comfortable with the fact that public blockchains actually offer far more benefits than than the perceived benefits of keeping it private.” But in the end, he predicts, it’ll be “one coin to rule them all”. And he doesn’t expect Bitcoin SV’s rivals to be around “in five or ten years”. If BSV develops the way Steve predicts, he’ll go so far as to agree that the work of nChain today might be of interest to future historians. And he points out that “a lot of that work is going to be recorded there immutably, in the blockchain, so it will be easier for blockchain archaeologists to work out what happened”. It’s just another advantage of blockchain technology!

An Australian Bitcoin developer living in London, Steve Shadders is, at first glance, the typical geek, complete with goatee beard, glasses and ponytail. But it only takes a few minutes chat to get way beyond the stereotype. He thinks widely about the politics and economics of bitcoin, and he’s a former DJ, with a love of techno - a calling which he says delayed his entry into the world of software by several years.“Shadders” as he’s known at nChain, the Bitcoin SV development company of which he’s Chief Technology Officer, operates in many dimensions. There’s an ideological side to him, the legacy of youthful, anarchistic attitudes: “as Bitcoin becomes more widespread,” he says, “it puts the power of economic sovereignty into the hands of people who currently don’t have it ...There is nothing more powerful that you can give someone than opportunity.”The mission of nChain, according to its website is “to ignite global adoption and enterprise level of usage of Bitcoin”. To that end, Steve leads the nChain developer team behind a series of “upgrades” to the Bitcoin SV protocol (he prefers “upgrade” to “hard fork”). This year, we’ve had the Quasar upgrade, and next year will be Genesis. The idea is to bring the Bitcoin SV protocol back to how it was when Bitcoin started - hence the “SV”, Satoshi vision.  Part of that process is to allow Bitcoin miners rather than developers to call the shots. As a developer, himself, Steve realises this has implications for him: “ultimately, my goal is to make myself replaceable and redundant - and I hope to achieve that within a couple of years”. By then, the governance role in Bitcoin will be handed to a group of people rather than a few individuals, leaving miners with the ultimate responsibility for the ecosystem.Steve works closely with Craig Wright, nChain’s Chief Scientist. He admits that “it can be challenging to understand what Craig’s talking about sometimes”. About six months after Craig has raised a new idea, Steve says modestly, he finally understands “what he really means”. But it’s a privilege “to be able to pick his brains on a daily basis ...he’s thinking about things years before anyone else”. As for his own ideas about where Bitcoin is heading, Steve is an unashamed ‘Bitcoin maximalist’. He does accept that “probably the notion of private blockchains will be around for a while before the business world gets comfortable with the fact that public blockchains actually offer far more benefits than than the perceived benefits of keeping it private.” But in the end, he predicts, it’ll be “one coin to rule them all”. And he doesn’t expect Bitcoin SV’s rivals to be around “in five or ten years”. If BSV develops the way Steve predicts, he’ll go so far as to agree that the work of nChain today might be of interest to future historians. And he points out that “a lot of that work is going to be recorded there immutably, in the blockchain, so it will be easier for blockchain archaeologists to work out what happened”. It’s just another advantage of blockchain technology!

Steve Shadders: “Ultimately, my goal is to make myself replaceable and redundant.”