- In December 2022, Calvin Ayre continued a tradition of making predictions about BSV for the following year
- Ayre’s predictions have been famously bad in the past
- A year on, we look and see how he has fared in 2023
For those who have followed a certain section of the crypto space for a while, Calvin Ayre’s holiday message is an event not to be missed. Not only does Craig Wrigth’s sugar daddy and BSV’s lifeline apply the broadest brush of whitewash to BSV’s various missteps each year, he also throws out some grand predictions for the years to come.
History hasn’t been kind to him so far, with every year in which we’ve been covering his antics seeing him come up short. Has he fared any better in 2023? Let’s find out.
Prediction: “2023 will be the year that transaction value follows volume as developers look to harness the benefits of BSV’s cost-efficient platform.”
Result: It’s hard to check this given that none of the typical block explorers to which one might refer actually support BSV anymore, due to the issues and the costs associated with running a node. Those that do only give transaction volume, not value, so it’s impossible to verify.
However, seeing as Ayre predicted that value would follow volume, let’s have a look at the volume in 2023:
https://bsvdata.com/applications
As we can see, apart from those huge spikes, the transaction volume has only grown from around 1.2 million transactions per day to 2 million over the year, we can assume that transaction value has been equally as sluggish.
Score: N/A
Prediction: “ROW8 will soon announce a technology licensing deal with nChain, and I anticipate a flurry of similar announcements in 2023”
Result: ROW8 is billed as a “premium movie streaming service”, and in December last year it acquired metaverse/Web3 platform Rad, which Coingeek said at the time would help in “bridging the gap between Hollywood studios, smart contracts and non-fungible tokens (NFTs) on the BSV blockchain.”
There is no evidence online of ROW8 announcing any such deal with nChain, and things aren’t looking great elsewhere; the last post to the company’s X account was in March and there have been no reviews for the ROW8 app in any popular app store since January 2022. The company’s website is also totally blank.
And the “flurry” of similar announcements in 2023? We’re hardly buried, let’s just say that.
Score: 0/1
Prediction: “Mainstream media is beginning to recognize the implication of nChain’s ever-growing and world-leading IP stack, and I expect this to be a major theme in press coverage in the year ahead.”
Result: To test this, we searched for the word ‘nChain’ in the USA’s top five mainstream media outlets by readership. Here are the number of hits per outlet for 2023:
USA Today: 0
The Wall Street Journal: 0
The New York Times: 1*
The Washington Post: 0
*A piece about how Christen Ager-Hanssen allegedly drugged a lawyer to make a confession that favored nChain and was then hired as its CEO.
How about the UK where nChain is based?
Metro: 0
The Daily Mail: 0
The Evening Standard: 1*
The Financial Times: 0
The Guardian: 0
*Sponsored piece about the London Blockchain Conference
Seems like mainstream media outlets aren’t that bothered about nChain’s IP stack after all. Who’d have guessed?
Score: 0/2
Prediction: “Christen’s impressive entrepreneurial record, his vast network of contacts, and his boundless energy and enthusiasm will help accelerate nChain’s growth into a trillion-dollar enterprise”
Result: Christen Ager-Hanssen was sacked (or quit, depending on who you believe) in September after less than a year in the role, having discovered alleged fraud behind nChain’s operations, including fraudulent claims by nChain’s Chief Scientist, Craig Wright, that he created Bitcoin.
Ayre has since bought out nChain entirely and has excommunicated Ager-Hanssen, claiming he never wanted to hire him in the first place. A legal battle is likely. nChain is not a trillion-dollar company.
Score: 0/3
Whoops, He Did It Again
So there we have it, a basement level 0 out of 3, giving Ayre a total of one and a half correct predictions out of 15 in the past three years.
Will 2024 be any better? Let’s hope not.
