What is BSV Blockchain?
BSV is a blockchain that was created after a hard fork chain split of Bitcoin Cash on November 2018. The person behind the inception of BSV is Craig Steven Wright, who also claims to be the man behind the pseudonym Satoshi Nakamoto, the person responsible for the creation of Bitcoin. Wright’s claims have been wildly refuted by many crypto experts and users alike.
The BSV blockchain stands for “Bitcoin Satoshi Vision”, which means they follow the original Bitcoin White Paper to the letter. The BSV blockchain is the largest of all Bitcoin forks, exceeding 2.5 terabytes. The creators of the BSV blockchain claim that it was created to restore the original Bitcoin protocol, which Satoshi Nakamoto envisioned. These protocols, which they mentioned, currently need to be adequately followed in the Bitcoin blockchain. BSV uses the proof-of-work (POW) protocol to verify transactions and, like Bitcoin, has the same number of tokens (21 Million) that miners can mine. It also follows the halving protocol after every four years. The significant difference between BSV and BTC is that the block size of BSV is much bigger than that of BTC.
The necessity of BSV Blockchain
When Bitcoin was first introduced to the world in 2008, scalability did not gain anyone’s attention at the time. The reason scalability is an essential feature for any cryptocurrency is that if you want to use the currency network as an electronic cash system, then the blockchain should be easily scalable due to the possibility of a large number of transactions taking place on the network.
The original Bitcoin blockchain had a small block size of just 1 MB. While it was later upgraded to 2 MB, more was needed to process many transactions made on the network quickly. This means there would be a bottleneck when simultaneous transactions are waiting for processing, which increases the transaction fee as traffic increases. Those who are willing to pay the higher energy costs may be able to get their transactions processed in the next block, whereas those who are not willing will have to wait for a long time before their request goes through.
The scalability issue led to the first hard fork in August of 2017, where a separate Blockchain was created called Bitcoin Cash (BCH). BCH has a block size of 32MB, which is much more significant than Bitcoin. While initially, BCH was adhering to the original Bitcoin protocol, it later made structural changes which led to a small faction within the Bitcoin community rejecting it. They felt that the structural changes must conform to the security and validity guidelines of the original Bitcoin protocol.
From there originated another fork called BSV blockchain. The BSV blockchain was created keeping one crucial purpose in mind: scalability. The original block size of the BSV blockchain was 128MB. With time, the hard cap on block size was removed, and currently, the BSV blockchain is the largest of all Bitcoin forks, exceeding 2.5 Terabytes in size.
According to the official website of BSV, they claim that their blockchain has three salient features which are ideal for miners and traders alike to prefer their blockchain over the original BTC.
- Scalable
Bigger blocks mean that the network can handle a large number of transactions in a short time, reducing the energy cost required to carry out the payments. They also claim constant expansion of the blocks and reduction in their sizes on its network, which is again data and cost-efficient.
- Stable
A stable blockchain is necessary for the optimum working of the said blockchain. The entire system can be compromised if changes are made to a particular blockchain. BSV claims its blockchain requires a strong consensus and demonstrated testing before any chain can be carried out. The feature of stable blockchain, according to BSV, is preferred by Businesses and governments. They can make plans years in advance for the resources, applications, and services they want to create using the BSV blockchain with peace of mind that they will continue to remain supported by the BSV blockchain.
- Secure
BSV has stated on its site that not only do they support an environmentally-friendly blockchain ecosystem, but they are fully regulation-compliant as well.
According to the stats provided by BSV, it conducts 300 transactions per second on average, with a peak capacity of 2800 transactions per second on its main net. The team also claims that the Gigabit Testnet of BSV can process up to 50,000 transactions per second. These results are achieved due to the removal of the hard cap on the block sizes. The Bitcoin Cash network can only process an average of 116 transactions per second. As a result of larger block sizes and quick response to a transaction process, BSV has a meager transaction fee, as low as $0.01, compared to the Bitcoin blockchain, where the transaction fee for one transaction can go as high as $62.
How does the BSV blockchain work?
Like many other Blockchains, the BSV blockchain works on the proof-of-work (POW) algorithm. For every transaction miners verify, they can earn BSV as block rewards.
The block rewards give miners incentives to continue allocating resources and processing power to mining. BSV blockchain also follows the HALVING protocol, similar to Bitcoin, where, after every four years, the reward size is reduced by 50% after a certain number of blocks are mined.
BSV blockchain native token
Bitcoin SV is the native token of the BSV blockchain. When writing this article, BSV is currently being traded at $39.66. The current trading value of BSV then indicates that Bitcoin is still the crypto of choice for every crypto trader. We need to base our assessment on the fact that the more demand for a particular cryptocurrency, the more market share it will capture, which drives its prices upwards. Bitcoin is still the number one currency in order and market share, and BSV would undoubtedly require years to get to that level if people see a good ROI or better potential on the blockchain.
Does BSV support smart contracts?
In the past year, NFTs and Smart Contracts have burst into the crypto environment. While the adoption and acceptance of NFTs by the crypto market have been relatively slow, there is no doubt that in the future, they will be the hottest assets for any crypto trader to hold. The original Bitcoin protocol doesn’t support smart contracts, whereas the BSV blockchain does support it. This feature would undoubtedly make BSV a likely candidate to one day surpasses Bitcoin, but for now, Bitcoin has stamped its popularity in the crypto community with utmost authority.
Is BSV listed on Binance?
Currently, BSV is not listed on Binance. It was listed on Binance at one time, but in 2019, the CEO of Binance, CZ, ordered the currency to be delisted from the exchange. Now you might be wondering how come the largest crypto exchange in the world, by the number of users and trading volume, would delist a cryptocurrency that claims to be following the original Bitcoin white paper and also has features that the original Bitcoin currency lacks.
Well, this was the result of a disagreement between Craig Wright and Changpeng Zhao. When Craig Wright started to claim in the crypto community that he was the person behind the Pseudonym of Satoshi Nakamoto and the original creator of Bitcoin, he was met with a lot of resistance from the crypto community. Most people, including CZ, claimed that Wright had provided enough evidence to strengthen his claim of being the original Bitcoin creator. CZ said, “Craig Wright is a fraud”, that “the real Satoshi can digitally sign any message to prove it,” and that doing so would be simple.
In response, Wright started to attack the Twitter profiles of people who refuted his claim of being the original Bitcoin creator. His aggressive and hateful tone to his doubters was not received very well by much of the crypto community. In response to Wright’s constant threat to his doubters, CZ announced that his exchange Binance would delist all BSV trading pairs on 22 April 2019.
Binance, the world’s largest crypto exchange by reported volume, will delist Bitcoin SV (BSV) after a week of controversy around the cryptocurrency’s creator, Craig Wright.
In Binance’s announcement, the exchange said. “We periodically review each digital asset we list to ensure that it continues to meet the high standard we expect,” citing several factors it weighs.
Other exchanges like Kraken, Shapeshift, Bittylicious, and Coinbase followed Binance’s footsteps and delisted BSV from their exchange.
BSV filed a claim against these exchanges for conspiring to damage the prospects of BSV and cause financial loss to thousands of people. The lawsuit also alleged that BSV holders suffered losses amounting to £9.9B due to the delisting of BSV by Binance, Kraken, Shapeshift, and Bittylicious. Kraken and Binance were also alleged to have caused further losses to investors by forcibly converting their BSV to other cryptocurrencies without their consent.
Which exchanges allow BSV trading?
Bitcoin SV is trading on 26 cryptocurrency exchanges across 50 trading pairs. The most popular Bitcoin SV pair is BSV/USDT on KuCoin. Other known exchanges which offer BSV are OKX, Huobi Global, Bitfinex, Bittrex, and Bybit.