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Why transaction volume matters

In a previous piece detailing record-breaking transactions happening on BSV, CoinGeek outlined the explosive growth of on-chain transactions and why these will lead to BSV ‘taking it all’ in the long run. As 2021 draws to a close, we are once again seeing a massive surge in on-chain transactions as CryptoFights gets over its initial teething problems and begins to realize its potential.

BSV surpassed 3 million transactions this week, leaving blockchains like BTC, Ethereum, and the non-blockchain XRP ledger in the dust. Let’s take a closer look at what happened and why transaction volume matters.

A day to remember in BSV history

It’s important to keep perspective and remember that 3 million transactions are merely a warmup lap in the grand scheme of things. However, it’s also crucial to celebrate as new milestones are reached.

As Calvin Ayre commented on the tweet above, the transaction volume is already over 50% of the total since XRP doesn’t technically run on a blockchain at all. Sure, it’s digital ledger technology of sorts, but it doesn’t use proof of work, and Silicon Valley venture capitalists centrally control it. It’s a stretch to call the XRP ledger a blockchain in any meaningful sense.

What drove the massive spike in BSV transactions? Once again, it was CryptoFights. After experiencing some early technical difficulties, most of the bugs have now been ironed out, and the game can take full flight as play-to-earn gamers across the world discover what functional, fun blockchain games can really be like.

  • CryptoFights experienced 2,442,628 on-chain daily transactions. It also stored over 1GB of data on the blockchain yesterday alone.
  • PeerGame, a popular BitcoinSV casino app, had 8,179 transactions.
  • Memo.sv, Twetch, and Showbuzz all experienced thousands of daily transactions.

Even after the huge transaction surge, the mean fee remained at $0.00052. On the same day, fees on Ethereum sat at $2.85 per transaction. When you consider that nearly half of the world’s population still lives on under $5.50 per day, it’s easy to see why these unscalable blockchains will never reach global adoption.

The last time this happened, other BSV apps experienced a spillover effect as CryptoFights players discovered them and realized how inexpensive and hassle-free it is to use BSV apps compared to other blockchains. If CryptoFights really takes off, you expect more of the same as a new wave of users discovers how advanced BSV is compared to Etheruem, Solana, BTC, and others.

The BSV ecosystem is growing at a rapid clip

BSV is growing at a furious pace, and in the next year or two, the blockchain industry will witness its true power as several positive feedback loops kick in.

  • As the number of daily transactions increases, eventually causing block rewards to be dwarfed by the value of transaction fees in blocks, miners will begin to switch their hash power onto the BSV blockchain to become transaction processors. After all, ongoing transaction fees are a more sustainable source of long-term revenue than diminishing block rewards on BTC.
  • As miners switch to becoming transaction processors, the perception of BSV’s network security will be enhanced. Futile 51% attacks will become even more expensive and pointless than they already are.
  • As the perception of the network’s security is improved, the scalability of BSV is clearly demonstrated, and the larger miner revenue from fees inside big blocks grabs attention, more developers will begin to consider BSV as an alternative to the broken blockchains they’re currently building on. This will lead to more development on the BSV blockchain.
  • Of course, more development on the BSV blockchain creates more applications, further increasing the number of transactions in blocks, increasing miner revenue, attracting more miners to switch, and so on in a positive feedback loop.

All it will take is one ‘killer app’ to show the world what BSV can do. It seems like CryptoFights has a great chance to be the one that leads the way. Thanks to incubators like Satoshi Block Dojo and Ayre Ventures, there are many other contenders on the way, too.

Transaction volume matters more than anything else

What is being demonstrated on BSV is that Satoshi had it right all along; Bitcoin does scale to enterprise levels, and it is indeed a peer-to-peer electronic cash system capable of small, casual transactions, aka micropayments.

It’s not digital gold, and it never will be. Anyone who has fallen for the BTC narrative of Bitcoin as digital gold should think through the following:

What is going to happen to BTC as the block reward continues to diminish with every halving, the transaction fees inside BSV big blocks continue to grow, incentivizing miners to switch and grab some of that revenue, and the transactions on BTC continue to fall or remain stagnant as people HODL it for no other purpose than to sell it for more fiat someday in the future? And while some will argue that BTC block rewards will remain worth more than BSV transaction fees for some time to come, consider what they might be worth when Tether is inevitably exposed as the colossal fraud it is.

Despite what many have been led to believe, BTC is not the revolutionary technology it is made out to be. It’s an attempt to recreate the old system and suppress Bitcoin.

Wishful thinking will not change Bitcoin

It doesn’t matter what anyone thinks Bitcoin is; it matters what Satoshi objectively designed it to be. All of the economic incentives were designed for it to function as a peer-to-peer electronic cash system that handles massive volume. It’s the only way Bitcoin is economically sustainable in the long term. Embracing Satoshi’s original vision is the only way to make this technology change the world in the ways early Bitcoiners hoped it would.

Those who really want to eliminate parasitic middlemen in the financial system, hold banks and governments accountable, and build a more transparent world where true peer-to-peer transactions of all kinds are possible, should embrace BSV. Transaction volumes matter, and that race is one BSV is sure to win in the long run. No amount of wishful thinking or narrative spinning will change that.

Watch: CoinGeek New York presentation, BSV Blockchain: It’s About Time

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