Creations

There is a conversation that comes back every few months, and this week it came back again. Someone puts up a poll, or a thread, and the question underneath it is always the same: should we be trying to get BSV listed on the big exchanges again? The people who say yes are not fools. Their argument is simple and sounds like common sense. A listing lowers the barrier to entry. More people can buy the coin. More people with the coin means more people using the apps. What is there to object to?

I object to it, and I have been trying to put into words exactly why, because "I don't like exchanges" is a mood and not a reason. This is my attempt at the reason.

Content is no longer scarce. Articles, images, video, music: in the age of AI you can have any of it in seconds, and more of it than you could read in a lifetime. So why write? Why pick up a camera? Somewhere, something has probably already generated a better version of whatever you were about to make.

This year China hosted sports events for robots: humanoids sprinting, boxing, playing football. Underneath one of the videos somebody asked what the point of becoming an athlete is now. Why train for years to run a race a machine will eventually win without trying?

The answer someone gave stayed with me. Robots will eventually outrun us, and nobody will care. We watch athletes because they are human. The 100 metres matters because a person is at the edge of what a person can do, with everything that person is riding on it. A faster machine does not make that less interesting. It makes it more so.

Why renaming BSV would cost everything and buy nothing

Imagine the Bitcoin movie lands. It is well made, it is sympathetic to the original protocol, and for a few weeks a lot of people who never cared about any of this go looking. They type "BSV" into a search engine, an exchange, a wallet, YouTube.

Now imagine that three months earlier we renamed the chain to "Bitcoin Protocol", ticker BCP.

What do those people find? A six-month-old name with almost no footprint. Behind it, a decade of articles, videos, code, tutorials and forum threads that all say BSV, and that no longer obviously point at the thing they are looking at. The one moment when being findable mattered most is the moment we chose to move house without leaving a forwarding address.

Internet connections were once too slow for people to stream movies from Netflix. Instead, they borrowed videotapes from Blockbuster to watch at home. In September 2000, after months of trying to set up a meeting, Netflix co-founder Reed Hastings and CFO Barry McCarthy finally got together with Blockbuster CEO John Antioco. Netflix was in trouble. It was on track to lose $50 million that year while tens of other internet-based companies just went bust in the dot-com crash. Blockbuster on the other hand, after having just raised $465 million through an IPO the previous year, was doing very well.

Reed and Barry hoped to work with John. They could develop and grow the online arm of Blockbuster, while John and his team maintained its stores. The Blockbuster team presumed the Internet hysteria was overblown, so they were not interested in such an arrangement. Instead, they asked how much it would cost for Blockbuster to buy Netflix. When Reed and Barry asked for $50 million, John Antioco was struggling not to laugh. One of his team members claimed that online business would never make any money. The meeting ended, and Reed and Barry drove quietly to the airport, disappointed. Ten years later, Blockbuster filed for bankruptcy.

Blockbuster represented an old way of thinking: that we can only buy, rent or sell things we can touch and hold. It took a leap of imagination to consider consuming music and film without their physical manifestations like CDs, tapes or DVDs. When the internet came along, streaming and Netflix showed the world another way.

Here is the deal on offer. You write something. Someone reads it. They pay you — not a platform, not an advertiser, you — and the money lands in your wallet before they have finished the first paragraph. Nobody in the middle. Nobody holding it. Nobody taking a share on the way through. That deal has never really been available to a writer, and it is the whole reason Creations exists...