- In December 2023, Calvin Ayre continued a tradition of making predictions about the crypto space
- Ayre’s predictions have been famously bad in the past, most notably regarding the adoption of BSV
- A year on, we look and see how he has fared in 2024
Christmas is full of traditions, and there’s one tradition we’ve started ourselves that has been going strong for almost five years now: a review of the predictions made by the self-professed ‘blockchain titan’ Calvin Ayre. Not only does Craig Wright’s former sugar daddy and BSV’s moneyman 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 for the crypto sector as a whole. History hasn’t been kind to him so far; in fact, every year has seen him come up short. Have his predictions for 2024 fared any better? Let’s find out.
The Rektoning
Prediction: “First, the issuing of civil complaints and criminal indictments in the U.S. and other jurisdictions is by no means over..”
Result: Ayre has actually managed to start off with a win this time round, but it was hardly a tricky one: U.S. entities made it very clear in 2023 that their crypto crackdown was going to continue into 2024, so this was hardly a Nostrodamus-like effort. However, we’ll give him a half for being able to read.
Score: 0.5/1
Prediction: “U.S. political figures [are] now signalling an imminent crackdown on U.S. dollar-denominated stablecoins—Tether, FDUSD, Justin Sun’s various unbacked tokens, etc.—the fuel that feeds the crypto crime engine will be drained from the tank. The impact of this long overdue smackdown will be profound. It will be like a rapid decompression event in an orbiting space station, robbing exchanges of the oxygen on which their operations depend and complicating efforts by customers looking to convert their utility-free casino chips into cash.
Result: Despite the mainstream media’s best efforts, U.S. authorities have begun no such crackdown on Tether, which continues to enjoy record profits, or FDUSD. As such, no “rapid decompression” has taken place as stablecoins continue to announce partnerships with global money transmitters, showing their global appeal.
Score: 0.5/2
Prediction: “The purge of blockchain’s bad actors will finally extinguish the prevalent ‘number go up’ mantra in favor of a new focus on utility. Enterprises will finally see the signal that has always been lurking behind all that ‘crypto’ criminal noise. And as more and more enterprises explore blockchain’s potential, others will follow.”
Result: It’s hard to judge this prediction as there are no metrics to which we can turn, but if Ayre was talking about BSV then he was wrong: his pet blockchain has announced no notable enterprise partnerships this year. Elsewhere, there have been a couple of notable enterprise tests of blockchain, but it still remains a very much underutilised technology.
Score: 1/3
Prediction: “…unlike other chains that restrict the size of individual blocks, BSV’s unbounded capacity to expand to meet whatever its users need make it the only chain that can store the vast volumes of data on which more accurate LLMs will be trained.”
Result: There is no evidence that any AI algorithm is using the BSV to train its LLM.
Score: 1/4
Prediction: BSV recorded well over a billion transactions in 2023…including a record 128 million set in a single day this summer. Both those figures are set to explode early in the new year when the Teranode scaling solution finally puts its rubber to the road. It all starts in January with a hardcore six-month stress test that will see BSV process over a million transactions per second.
Result: According to database infrastructure provider Aerospike, who ran the tests with BSV, Teranode processed three million transactions per second, so we can afford Ayre his first full marks this year.
Score: 2/5
Prediction: Early in the new year, Dr. Wright’s long-awaited legal faceoff with the COPA cabal of Silicon Valley giants will get underway in a U.K. court. Based on the presiding Justice’s actions and words to date in knocking down some of COPA’s arguments, I can’t see how COPA emerges victorious, at least not to the degree they appear to be expecting. I believe Wright will either win the case outright or the Justice will conclude that neither side has sufficiently proven their case to warrant a lopsided ruling.
Result: Oh dear. Oh dear, oh dear. Ayre’s admission through a leaked September 2023 that Wright was set to lose the COPA v Wright case proved to be correct: not only did Wright fail in his claim to be Satoshi Nakamoto, but he was accused of forging or manipulating almost 500 pieces of evidence and was referred for potential criminal prosecution.
Score: 2/6
Prediction: It’s almost as if [COPA] understand all too well how greatly Wright’s vast patent library will impact all of their current and future operations in the blockchain space.
Result: Craig Wright’s ‘vast patent library’ has not impacted COPA in any way in 2024, mainly because his so-called library actually belongs to nChain, the company from which he was fired at the same time as Ayre dropped him last September. As an aside, three of nChain’s patents have been revoked this year based on the work of volunteers and donations.
Score: 2/7
Review
Perhaps unsurprisingly, Calvin Ayre has suffered yet another appalling defeat in the prediction stakes this year (to show him some mercy, we haven’t included his claim this year that “BSV Blockchain stands tall and ready to make history” in 2024). His truly appalling 2/7 score takes Ayre’s cumulative tally for 2020-2024 to a truly impressive 3.5/22, showing that he is as much a blockchain titan as Craig Wright is a sound and rational human being.
Given that Ayre has abandoned Wright and appears to have abandoned BSV, too, following Wright’s shambolic defeat, there is every sign that this year will be the final year Ayre dares to make any predictions on the crypto market and BSV’s place within it.
We can only hope…
