Bitcoin SV (BSV) recently underwent the Quasar protocol upgrade, lifting the block size hard cap from 128 MB to 2 GB. The upgrade enables BSV to increase the number of transactions processed per second from the current 300+ to 1,000+, making it the only Bitcoin project that unlocks the true power of Bitcoin’s original design, proving that it’s not a hobbyist project.
And as would be expected of any protocol upgrade in the Bitcoin ecosystem, there were a few minor set-backs and opportunities to improve; however, a few media outlets and research firms blew this out of proportion, reporting that there was a temporary fork of the blockchain into three chains.
According to one media outlet, over 35% of nodes failed to follow the update and this was portrayed as a monstrosity. It further claimed that this was the result of miner centralization in the BSV ecosystem, with small miners were just acting as pawns, standing no chance of making a profit.
One of the most misquoted and misunderstood events was with Money Button. The wallet went down for a few hours after its BSV node ran out of memory and crashed during a stress test. The Money Button team quickly upgraded their underpowered node to be sufficient for the largest block sizes that are currently possible.
Some media outlets quoted Money Button’s blog post in which it stated, “Since we do not earn money from transaction fees like miners, it will be too expensive for us to run a node.”
While this is true, the Money Button team went ahead to explain that wallets don’t need to run a node. Instead of entering an arms race in upgrading infrastructure, the wallets are best served by moving towards the Simplified Payment Verification (SPV) as Dr. Craig Wright envisioned when he launched Bitcoin a decade ago. This was conveniently omitted from these reports.
BSV has also been criticized for being ambitious and futuristic enough to increase the block size hard cap. According to some, these “unrealistic” block sizes will prove to be an attack vector, effectively making BSV less secure. What’s more, there have been claims that current hardware is unable to handle such volumes.
These claims have been proven false. As is publicly available on the BSV website, the recommended system requirements for BSV miners prove that mid-range hardware can sufficiently participate in BSV mining.
On July 24 when the Quasar protocol upgrade occurred, BSV functioned exactly as Satoshi Nakamoto envisioned. A majority of the miners were running one of the Quasar update compatible versions. For the miners, the upgrade was a godsend since it gave them more responsibility over Bitcoin and enabled them to earn more from transaction fees than they have previously. After the upgrade, the non-consensus chain was mined for a short time until the miners on that chain were economically incentivized to join the consensus chain. After all, this is how Satoshi intended for Bitcoin to function.
There have been calls for Bitcoin to scale for years now. Ironically, when BSV found the solution through the Quasar protocol upgrade, some media outlets were quick to criticize. The little mishaps as happened with Money Button aren’t something to criticize but rather to learn from. In any case, in the past, we’ve seen plenty of global businesses experience hitches in scaling. Amazon is the best example, with the global e-commerce giant being known to experience technical difficulties on days such as Black Friday. However, no one ever calls Amazon out and asks them to stop selling so much. Similarly, BSV will continue to scale and fulfill Satoshi’s vision of a global secure and scalable peer-to-peer payments system.
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