A bitcoin and blockchain consortium should be created this year that would unite the cryptocurrency community, thinks Valery Vavilov, CEO of BitFury, bitcoin and blockchain infrastructure provider and transaction processing company.

Within this consortium, business would formulate the demand for development while developers would improve the technologies behind bitcoin, Vavilov said in an interview at the World Economic Forum in Davos. The consortium is necessary to create standards, just like the World Wide Web consortium has been doing from the beginning of the Internet era.

The discussion regarding the ways of bitcoin’s further development should involve major universities such as MIT, Harvard, and Stanford, Vavilov suggests.

BitFury CEO also shared his view on bitcoin in general. Bitcoin is not so much a currency, he said. It is rather an “empty digital certificate” where anything of value can be put and transacted through blockchain. For example, bitcoin can be used for property registration. Bitcoin’s potential in this field is such that emerging markets where people have difficulties with property registration, and not Europe or the USA, will soon become the main area for bitcoin implementation.

Vavilov doesn’t agree with the recent claims that bitcoin has come to an end. He reminds that the cryptocurrency is secured by 750 petahashes of computing power, which makes it the safest blockchain in the world. Bitcoin being a cutting edge technology, claims that the currency is about to die may be voiced however often, but, all the same, it will survive with its block size increased in order to make it more scalable, says Vavilov. Yet, he doesn’t specify which of the block size increase projects he supports.

The discussion whether or not bitcoin is a “failed experiment” arose after recent exit of one of the core bitcoin developers Mike Hearn. Hearn was the co-author of one of the block size increase projects, namely Bitcoin XT, which he introduced in August 2015.



Andrew Levich