Bitcoin SV STN block mined with 2.7 million transactions

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Even greater scaling looks like it will soon be coming to the Bitcoin SV (BSV) blockchain. A recent test on the Bitcoin SV Node team’s Scaling Test Network (STN) set a new record for the number of transactions in a single block at over 2.7 million, destroying the previous record.

The test was announced by Brad Kristensen, STN operations manager, in a November 7 tweet:

The #Bitcoin #BSV Scaling Test Network (#STN) just broke its last transaction count record by almost 1 million transactions.https://t.co/PW3PejQlti pic.twitter.com/vyWaQQjynV

— Brad (@brad1121) November 7, 2019

Not much is known about the test or activity that helped fill this monster block, but looking at the block, the 2.7 million transactions would have created 5.4 BSV worth of fees, and the block took just under 30 minutes to fill.

The significance of this number of transactions can be seen when you look at Satoshi Nakamoto’s original quote about the need for Bitcoin to scale to match Visa’s processing ability. He noted at the time (in 2008) that Visa could handle 100 million transactions per day. At either 2.7 million transactions per block, or more realistically, 1 million transactions every 10 minutes, the BSV network would easily surpass Visa’s capabilities while maintaining low fees for users, and incentives for miners through transaction fees.

This isn’t the only instance where the STN has been used to flex BSV’s scaling capabilities. In May, Kristensen’s team used the STN to demonstrate that BSV was capable of block sizes over 1GB. Since then, the Quasar protocol upgrade raised the block limit to 2GB on the mainnet. Now that we know nearly 3 million transactions can fit in a single block, the STN is giving us a peak of what might come next.

To celebrate the event, and reminding everyone of Bitcoin’s detractors, who once upon a time said that it was impossible to scale it any bigger than a couple of megabytes, nChain CTO Steve Shadders took to Twitter with a little quip of his own.

This happened… Someone forgot to tell Bitcoin-SV node team that bitcoin can't scale. Nice work Ark riders… https://t.co/1rXRzoXQdU

— Shadders (@shadders333) November 8, 2019