Block Size War 2.0 Heats Up as Bitcoin SV Increases 33%

Bitcoin SV is up 33% in the last 24 hours – while Bitcoin is reeling as rising transaction fees and chain bloat from Ordinals transactions take hold.

Is Bitcoin SV a better Bitcoin?

Buyers have flocked to Bitcoin SV, sparking a near tripling in trading volume since May 8. At press time, BSV rose to $40.44, marking a nine-week high for the controversial cryptocurrency.

Despite leading the top 100 on the back of this performance, BSV posted its all-time low on May 8, bottoming out at $29.17. Moreover, the token is down 92% from its high of $490 – achieved in April 2021.

BSV was established in November 2018 by hard forking from Bitcoin Cash, which in turn had hard forked from the original chain in August 2017.

Founders Craig Wright and Calvin Ayre claim that BSV fulfills Satoshi Nakamoto’s vision of a peer-to-peer (P2P) electronic money system – as described in the original white paper.

BSV offers block sizes of up to 4GB to differentiate itself from rivals, more than a thousand times larger than Bitcoin’s 4MB block size limit.

Furthermore, since its inception, BSV has incorporated scripting commands that enable native tokens, smart contracts, and other Ethereum-like features. Bitcoin followed suit in November 2021 with the Taproot upgrade – which later spawned the Ordinals protocol.

BSV supporters point to the chain’s claimed 50,000 transactions per second and low transaction fees as reasons why BSV is a better Bitcoin.

Per bitinfocharts.com, BSV transaction fees have increased recently, but are still relatively low at an average price of $0.0374. Meanwhile, average Bitcoin fees hit $31.91 as users pile into BRC-20 tokens – overloading the network.

Ordinal’s woe

Given the objective advantages of BSV over BTC, the question of enlarging BTC’s block size is once again on the table.

A larger block size enables greater scalability as more transactions (or other data use cases) can fit into a single block – increasing capacity and lowering the average transaction fee. However, the trade-off comes at the expense of decentralization – as fewer people are prepared to run a node operating at high bandwidth.

Analyst comments on calls for BTC to increase block size Dylan LeClair planted his flag in the ground, calling proponents of the idea “idiots”.

Mark Harvey acknowledged that Ordinals had significantly strained BTC’s block size capacity. However, referring to the first block size war, he pointed out that Bitcoin Cash was “slowly bleeding out into irrelevance.”

To remedy the congestion and network bloat, Bitcoin developers are looking at including spam filters on Ordinals transactions, per @frankdegods.