Bitcoin SV Year in Review
Bitcoin SV Year in review! Happy birthday to Bitcoin SV! Bitcoin SV is officially one year old! While Bitcoin is almost 11 years old, November 15th 2018 marked the start of a movement to restore Satoshi Nakamoto’s original vision and with it, the revolution we were promised in 2009.
Please keep in mind that this is not a full year in review – rather, notable events in the brief infancy of Bitcoin SV. This is your Bitcoin SV Year in Review!
First a comment from our own Kurt Wuckert Jr.
Kurt on Bitcoin SV Year in Review
I have been a big blocker since Bitcoin Unlimited came out with their roadmap toward gigabyte blocks and parallelization techniques for bitcoin in 2015. Bitcoin Cash grew out of that camp, and going into November 2018, I was a casual supporter of the BSV node software, but I wanted Nakamoto Consensus to choose the rule set for BCH. Most of us had vowed to support whoever won, because we believed BCH was Bitcoin, so governance by proof of work would rule the day, while the losing implementation would be orphaned. Unfortunately, the Bitcoin ABC team added a couple lines of code to force a split with “Deep Reorg Protection” similar to Dash “Chainlocks.” So the “hash war” started off with a bit of subterfuge from team ABC that would not allow reorganization under any circumstances. In short, ABC cheated, and old partners of Roger Ver granted the BCH ticker immediately to the ABC chain before consensus had even been achieved. BitPay, Binance, Kraken and other players declared the war over as if they knew how it would shake out ahead of time.
Rather than coming to consensus, ABC nodes split away from BSV nodes, and Roger Ver diverted customer mining contracts through the Bitcoin.com mining pool over to the ABC chain to make sure that ABC stayed split from BSV at all costs. This led to a massive dip in BTC hash power, loss of customer profits and a year of lawsuits against Bitcoin.com and other actors in the Bitcoin Cash ecosystem.
Amid the drama, Coingeek, SVpool, BMG mining and a couple other smaller players followed the BSV roadmap (which was the original BCH roadmap,) and BitcoinSV had fully emerged with little to no merchant support, exchange support and most of the wallets and businesses had to start from scratch!
Crypto Traders Pro was one of the very first merchants in the entire world to start accepting BSV payments in November 2017, and we have been excited to see the growth in the SV economy since.
Block Sizes
One of the big points of Bitcoin was whether or not it could handle a block size increase from 1MB to 2MB. But scaling and transaction block size was at the heart of the disagreements that lead to the original Bitcoin and Bitcoin Cash split in 2017. Bitcoin SV has not disappointed in this area. On March 30th and the 31st, the Bitcoin SV mainnet mined a 128MB block. nChain’s BMG Mining and CoinGeek Mining respectively, mined the two largest blocks ever on a public blockchain. Both proved an important demonstration of how OP_RETURN capacity could be used to store larger files on the blockchain.
Since then, users have used apps like BitPaste and bico.media to upload photos and compress HD video – this is the foundation for the future MetaNet. The 128MB blocks generated over 1.27 BSV each in transaction fees – demonstrating that there is a financial benefit to mining BSV above the regular block reward subsidy. The current halving of BSV is set to occur in 2020 and will yield 6.25 BSV. Another example of BSV’s revenue potential was demonstrated when the testnet mined a 1.42GB block on May 21st yielding 12.5 BSV as a block reward for the first time.
Pushing Limits
Quasar, the last major upgrade to the Bitcoin SV protocol before February 2020, pushed block sizes even further when it went live in July. Theoretically, it’s now possible to mine a 2GB Bitcoin SV block, although most miners are exercising their option to a lower cap – 512MB. The MainNet responded after Quasar went live, mining a 1.48GB block that included 27,117 transactions and supplied its miners with 2.91 BSV in fees.
Binance Delists BSV
BSV has underwent some rocky patches. Most notably, big exchanges like Binance and Kraken delisted BSV, causing the movement to stutter and watch as the price of BSV tanked. Once Binance and Kraken delisted, ShapeShift and Blockchain.com both delisted the token as well. While exchanges were virtue signaling and stating that they were doing this in order to distance themselves from the controversy surrounding BSV, they ended up shooting themselves in the foot – the exchanges sullied their reputation by effectively stating that they were prepared to manipulate markets and cause their customers to lose money.
BSV is still traded on OKEx, FloatSV, CoinEx, HitBTC, Bittrex, and Kucoin. BSV dropped to below $60.00 following the delisting campaign but it rebounded to hit an all-time high of $255 within two months. At present, it is one of the top 10 blockchain assets by market cap.
MicroPayments
BSV’s capacity for large transaction volumes and miniscule fees have demonstrated that it is a suitable token for micropayments. Once again – hearkening back to restore Satoshi’s vision of Bitcoin, BSV fulfills this area of being able to do what traditional financial institutions do today via payment networks.
Yours.org had existed prior to Bitcoin’s forks. They have led the charge with a blogging platform that pays content creators with purchases and votes. YouTube challenger Streamanity has delivered a viable pay-per-view video publishing service. Social media networks such as Twetch and Weiblock are paying users for likes and reposts.
The above have created revenue streams with BSV that weren’t possible with fiat currencies or even BTC.
What’s next?
BSV has a bright future. Whether or not you’re a fan, it’s hard to deny the fact that, despite BSV’s constant attacks, it has been surprisingly resilient. Here’s to hoping for a prosperous 2020 for all our industry! Let us know what you think on our Facebook page!
