🤔 What is Bitcoin Satoshi visoin(BSV) ?
Bitcoin Satoshi Vision(BSV) is hard fork of Bitcoin cash which is also a hard fork of Bitcoin.
BSV does not have any upper bound to block size as compared to 1 MB block size of Bitcoin. This allows a lot more transactions to be accommodated in the block making it more scalable and cheap, which the BSV community believes to be the real vision of Satoshi when he created bitcoin ie peer-to-peer electronic cash.
💡 What role does BSV token play ?
BSV is used as a native currency within the Bitcoin Satoshi Vision network. BSV can be used for peer-to-peer payments and value storage within the Bitcoin Satoshi Vision network.
📝 Origin of Bitcoin Satoshi Vision
As early as 2010, shortly after Satoshi implemented a block limit into Bitcoin, discussions around block size began. However, discussions around the block limit largely stayed in the background until 2017 when tensions within the Bitcoin community rose over rising transaction fees and increasingly divergent opinions on scaling Bitcoin.
Supporters of bigger blocks believed that for Bitcoin to fulfill the vision of a peer-to-peer electronic currency as outlined in the original whitepaper, it was crucial to raise the block limit in order to increase transaction capacity.
Bitcoin Cash proponents pushed for a system that could scale to VISA level transaction throughput without second layers and while maintaining affordable transaction fees.
In 2017 at the Consensus conference amidst rising transaction fees on Bitcoin and increasingly tense debate around the Bitcoin block limit, a meeting with miners and Core Developers took place in what is referred to as the “New York Agreement”, where an agreement was reached to support SegWit and a 2MB hard fork.
Known as SegWit2x, this proposal was backed by over 80% of the network’s hash rate. Despite the desires of miners, users wanted to activate SegWit without the block size increase.
They set a date (August 1, 2017) where Bitcoin would soft fork to support SegWit and keep the 1MB block size. Enough nodes signaled support for it that they forced miners to accept or have their blocks rejected by the network.
A faction of the bigger blocks camp, rejected SegWit altogether, citing frustrations with the prioritization of SegWit over bigger blocks, and on August 1, 2017 they launched a hard fork of Bitcoin called Bitcoin Cash, with 8MB block limit.
Bitcoin cash community wanted to reorder canonical transactions which would enable the graphene algorithm to run more efficiently and script enhancements enabling oracle data to be imported to the blockchain.
In opposition, Bitcoin SV rejected these proposals and instead planned to increase the block limit to 128MB (later increased to 512MB in a hard fork) and restore certain opcodes from the original Bitcoin 0.1.0 protocol implementation.
On November 15, 2018, Bitcoin Cash split into two giving birth to Bitcoin Satoshi Vision.
On July 24, 2019, BSV community increased the block limit to 2000MB and removed any upper limit on the block size in Feb 2020 update.
👴🏻 Craig Wright - Founder
Wright graduated from high school in 1987 from Padua College in Brisbane. Wright was a researcher at Charles Sturt University, where he worked on his Ph.D. on “The quantification of information systems risk”.
Wright worked in information technology for various companies, including OzEmail, K-Mart and the Australian Securities Exchange, as well as working as a security consultant for Mahindra & Mahindra.
Wright was the CEO of the technology firm Hotwire Preemptive Intelligence Group (Hotwire PE), which planned to launch Denariuz Bank, the world’s first bitcoin-based bank, though it encountered regulatory difficulties with the Australian Tax Office and failed in 2014.
Wright is also the founder of cryptocurrency company DeMorgan Ltd., which claimed to receive $54 million AUD in tax incentives via AusIndustry.
Wright also claims to be Satoshi Nakamoto, however he has never provided any proof(which is very easy to do!). Wright registered US copyright in the bitcoin white paper and the code for Bitcoin 0.1 in April 2019.
In May 2019, Wright started using English libel law to sue people who accused him of lying about being the inventor of bitcoin, and who called him a fraud. Wright also served legal notices to Vitalik Buterin, the founder of the cryptocurrency Ethereum, who called Wright a fraud; Roger Ver, an early bitcoin entrepreneur and advocate; and Peter McCormack, a podcaster.
🤖How is it different from Bitcoin
Bitcoin Satoshi Vision has undergone several updates since the hard fork:
- Maximum block size: BSV does not have an upper bound to block size, unlike Bitcoin which has a max block size of 1 MB. While Bitcoin typically processes between 3-and 7 transactions per second, BSV has the capacity to process as many as 300 transactions per second.
- Smart contract support: BSV developers can use smart contracts to enable more complex functions than the basic transactions that are possible on Bitcoin.
- Token issuance: Developers can issue new tokens that live on the BSV blockchain similar to how ERC-20 tokens live on the Ethereum blockchain.
- Non-Fungible Tokens: BSV also supports Non-Fungible Tokens (NFTs), similar in function to Ethereum’s ERC-721 standard.
🏛️ Governance model
Protocol development is governed by a proposal process whereby anyone in the open-source community can submit draft proposals.
After debate by the community, the client implementation editors accept or reject the proposals.
Decisions from the process are written into the specification, as well as the software that runs the network. Finally, protocol changes are “ratified” on-chain when the majority of the network adopts the upgrade and doesn’t break consensus.
😨 51% hack
BSV was attacked 3 times by 51% attack in Aug 2021. These attacks take place because BSV does not have sufficient hash rate. Therefore, large minning pools mining other blockchains like Bitcoin can easily mount a 51% attack on BSV to double-spend their BSV holdings.
💰 Tokenomics
Bitcoin SV shares Bitcoin Cash’s genesis block and entire blockchain history up to November 12, 2018 (block 556759). Bitcoin SV kept the block time, block reward, and supply cap parameters from the original Bitcoin Cash chain, which itself kept the specifications of the original Bitcoin chain it forked from on August 01, 2017.
🧐 Indicators to watch out for
- There are not enough transactions to fill the blocks. Average block size:
- Not enough hash rate backing the blockchain:
- On-chain volume:
- Active addresses:
👋Final remarks
Money has several use-cases: store of value and medium of exchange are just two of them.
Bitcoin at layer 1 is a store of value, whereas Bitcoin Satoshi wants to become a medium of exchange.
The market has already decided which property is more valuable(market cap and hash rate).
Satoshi definitely envisaged Bitcoin as the peer-to-peer electronic cash system.
However, one should not be a whitepaper maxi and compromise on decentralization for scalability.
Moreover, solutions like lightning network are being developed that are trying to make Bitcoin more scalable at the second layer.
