CoinGeek Conversations

Jack Liu: Just by living, you’re going to be making Bitcoin transactions

Jun 05, 2019 Season 1 Episode 21

Jack Liu, Charles Miller (presenter)

“Three is kind of a lucky number,” says Jack Liu, “you’re not really going to get a fourth chance, fifth chance, a sixth chance - so I look at it as like this is all or nothing.”

Hong Kong based entrepreneur Jack Liu sees the opportunities offered by Bitcoin SV (BSV) today as being the third and final chance to realise the potential he’s always seen for cryptocurrency.

After the decision was made, years ago, not to scale Bitcoin (BTC) and then the problems with Bitcoin Cash (BCH) that followed, Jack is now pinning his hopes on BSV. But to work, he says, reliable revenue streams must be developed for BSV - and fast.

“I think as much as today we sit here with amazing optimism for BSV, if we cannot get BSV adopted on a transaction level, you’re going to see divisions again within BSV. So you’ve got to get transactions going as soon as possible - and that’s where the urgency comes from.”

To that end, Jack and his team - formed since he left Circle just a couple of months ago - have already released two products, FloatSV, an exchange, and RelayX, a ‘superwallet’ that connects BSV with existing payment platforms such as Alipay and WeChat.

Jack’s concern is that transactions must sustain the network of BSV miners by providing them with micropayments. The danger is that the rival version of Bitcoin, BTC, is used purely as a store of value: “the great thing that banks would love to see is if they can make Bitcoin merely ‘digital gold’ - they would love that because it would not alter the world that we live in ...which is really not that interesting at all. If that was what you told me Bitcoin was going to be, I would never have joined this industry.”

Instead, Jack’s vision is to have BSV playing a part in every aspect of our lives, with micropayments being sent and received between people all the time - during work, rest and play: “I think in the future, if someone notices that you haven’t made a hundred transactions in a day, they might call the police and look for you - because just by living, you’re going to be making transactions.”

Although we may find ourselves making micropayments for things we now think of as free, Jack says that on the other side of the equation, “you probably will have hundreds more income streams daily”. But that doesn’t mean they’re all going to be big money-makers: “I mean income streams as in maybe you open a door for someone and they tip you one cent”.

But small payments made to people in developing countries for providing casual digital services, for instance, could make a big difference in those economies. The aim, Jack says, is for people to be able to start using RelayX with no BSV or fiat money. Instead, they would earn money through the app, and it would get into circulation that way.



BSV is uniquely able to make this possible because its rivals “never had the vision that Satoshi did for the entire system”. Instead, they’re marketing individual use cases, which, when the market changes, will have to pivot: “they’re kind of opportunistic blockchains” whose protocol will inevitably change, making them unsuitable for established businesses to build on.



