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A team of Central West tech wizards has trumped web users around the world with a competition-winning idea to make digital currencies accessible to all. Orange IT trainee Jye Turner was part of a three-person team which took the top prize at a CoinGeek conference in Canada, beating finalists from New Zealand and the United States. The competitors were asked to create a business idea to encourage people to invest in a new digital currency, Bitcoin SV. Mr Turner's team, which included Brent Bevear, formerly from Blayney, and Dean Little from Sydney, designed a website which would allow businesses to monitor internet connectivity issues around the world which may affect their sites. Individuals around the world could sign on to be part of the monitoring process via a mobile application which would run in the background of their phones, detecting any issues to connectivity in their region. The individuals would be paid in Bitcoin SV to be part of the process, and the businesses would pay in Bitcoin SV to sign up. Mr Turner said his team won because of the potential for big business and individual users to begin using the new currency for the first time and because of the potential social impact it could have for users in developing countries. The mobile app the team designed could downloaded by any smartphone user, turning even the technologically incapable into Bitcoin SV converts. The team won 250 pieces of currency for their efforts, worth $75,000 on May 29, the day of the competition. Since their win, the trio have been approached by several businesses interested in backing the concept to make it a reality, and negotiations are under way. The competition was put on by a global technology developer, Nchain, which wants to take Bitcoin, the cryptocurrency which boomed in 2017 and crashed in 2018, to a new set of users by changing public perception of online transactions. "Bitcoin is frowned upon because it was used in drug markets and it's too technical so normal users can't understand it," he said. Mr Turner said the amount of people which signed up for Bitcoin during its peak meant processing transactions has become very slow and user fees are very high, unlike Bitcoin SV. If it succeeds, Mr Turner believes all other currencies would be obsolete.

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