After having problems with a recent 51% attack, it seems that the Bitcoin SV blockchain has recovered, and now it has announced a new record for the size of one of its blocks, which has reached 2 gigabytes.
This record occurred last August 16, precisely at the height of block 700606, and it would be essential to get more scalability on this blockchain.
Bitcoin SV’s Technical Director of Infrastructure, Steve Shadders, explained:
“Over on the BTC network, it took years of Bitcoin scaling battles to get nowhere and remain restricted at tiny 1 megabyte blocks that can handle at most 7 transactions per second. But on BSV, it took less than a week for miners to see value in opening the door to 2 GB blocks. While this sounds big, we’re really just getting started on our journey towards terabyte – 1 million megabyte – size blocks so that BSV can process millions of payment and data transactions per second, and support the global population along with our one world Internet.”
The miner who mined this block received a higher fee than the current 6.25 BTC that is set on Bitcoin’s blockchain, and according to the press release issued today by the Bitcoin Association, this increase in fees could incentivize more miners to do this work due, of course, to more lavish earnings.
In fact, this 2 gig block provided 139% higher fees, coming in at 14.94 BSV.
Moreover, already a few weeks ago, precisely last August 6, BSV’s blockchain had instead marked for the first time the first 5 blocks of 1 GB, as opposed to BTC’s blockchain, whose block reaches 1 megabyte.
Bitcoin Association President Jimmy Nguyen said:
“After years of watching Bitcoin crippled on the BTC network, we are thrilled to see BSV finally take Satoshi Nakamoto’s vision to the next level with the recent wave of gigabyte size blocks. The new world record 2 GB block and its substantial proportion of transaction fees demonstrate that the future lies in a blockchain that can meet users’ demand for greater data capacity and miners’ need to generate greater fee revenue. That future is BSV, which is supporting real utility and real value, just as Satoshi always intended.”
Bitcoin vs. Bitcoin SV
Born as a fork of Bitcoin, according to its founder, Craig Wright, Bitcoin SV would maintain the true nature of the blockchain conceived by Satoshi Nakamoto. And in fact, Wright claims that he is indeed the creator of BTC.
The Bitcoin Association is nothing but an association founded in Switzerland by Wright to promote BSV and push its adoption against BTC, considered by them to be the fake copy of the real Bitcoin.
For this reason, the two blockchains differ and clash mainly on the issue of blocks and their size. Simplifying, on one side, we find the developers of Bitcoin – also called Core to differentiate it from the various forks – who believe that the blocks should be smaller to have greater security (and in fact, a 51% attack has never happened on Bitcoin), on the other side we find BSV who believes it is important to have larger blocks to achieve greater scalability and speed.
Similarly, the other fork of Bitcoin, namely Bitcoin Cash, thinks the size of the blocks significantly affects the usability of the blockchain, making transactions much cheaper and faster.
For these reasons, on BSV, the block capacity is not limited by default by developers but adjusts based on the usage of the blockchain itself.
