UptimeSV is an Australian startup which won the CoinGeek Hackathon earlier this year. Its cofounder and lead developer, Dean Little, sees the work that Uptime will do as a way to increase the value of the whole Bitcoin SV ecosystem.
The idea is to offer a service that allows businesses to check their online presence in different places, on different devices and conduct other technical tests. To do that, Uptime will recruit an army of ordinary people who will allow their devices to be used for testing. In return, they’ll receive micropayments in Bitcoin SV.
Dean has high hopes of big businesses becoming Uptime customer: “if you onboarded Google ...the effects are beyond just the income that Google is paying you to do these tests. Because now [Google] is aware of this global, scaleable platform that they can build their business on and by doing so, they’re increasing the value of your investment in BSV.”
That’s where the idea of the BSV ecosystem comes in - because all businesses that work with BSV will benefit from others using it at the same time by increasing the value of the network: “even if my business is out-competed by someone who does it better than me, I still benefit as a holder of BSV.”
There’s a big emphasis on storing transactional data on the BSV blockchain at the moment, but Dean says there’s no conflict between thinking of BSV as a data storage solution and as money: it’s both. “The unique thing that makes this system work is that you have the ability to value information on a very small scale ...until now there’s been no way to value it. We’re monetizing useful information. We’ve got data everywhere, on everything. The problem is filtering out what we care about and what we don’t.”
As an Australian, Dean has a different perspective on BSV than that of a European or North American. “There’s a lot of things happening in the East that the West is not aware of. And I think more and more you’re going to see these things coming out.”
So how should the rest of the world prepare for those kinds of development? “All I can say is “learn Chinese”! It’s really amazing to see how quickly they’re building things on this platform. There’s some really creative stuff coming out of some Chinese teams that I’ve been speaking to.”
When Dean says he’s been “speaking to” Chinese teams, he means in their languages. He speaks Mandarin, Cantonese and Hakka. There’s no question, Dean is something of a languages sponge: “I like languages. When you do business with people, you learn a couple of things to try to befriend them and over time you learn a couple more little things and all of a sudden, ‘oh, I can speak this language’.” Dean admits that ‘coming to Korea, it’s the first time I’m going to a country where I don’t speak the language.”
But by the end of day one of the CoinGeek conference in Seoul, South Korea, Dean had taught himself to order a beer at the bar in Korean. In fact, he says, without a hint of boasting, that he’d already learnt that on the plane from Australia.