Introduction
Bitcoin SV (BSV) was a hard fork of the Bitcoin Cash (BCH) protocol, which was a hard fork of the original Bitcoin (BTC) protocol. But the BSV blockchain is not connected to the BTC blockchain or BCH blockchain.
BSV follows Satoshi Nakamoto’s original protocol as specified in the Bitcoin-whitepaper, that is:
- each block in the chain contains
- a cryptographic hash of the block before
- a timestamp of the transaction
- transaction data
- proof of work (POW) is used for the consensus method.
BSV is made to be a faster, better, and less costly peer-to-peer electronic cash system than BTC. The primary feature for BSV is that it has a larger block size than BTC. This lets BSV process more transactions (scalability) at a faster rate (speed) than BTC. It is thought that more transactions and faster processing makes the BSV blockchain better for businesses than BTC.
There are many applications in development for the BSV blockchain. At this time there are almost 400 ventures and projects around the world in the BSV ecosystem click here for more information. These different projects have made BSV blockchains for:
- peer-to-peer payments
- banking
- media & entertainment
- social media
- casino gaming
- online games
- supply chain
- digital advertising
- data marketplaces
- Internet of Things
Also, there are multi-purpose protocols and tools which make tokenization and smart contracts available on the BSV ecosystem.
All of these different applications can be on one public BSV blockchain. The increased use of BSV ecosystem has the result that the number of transactions on the BSV network and average block size block is larger than those on the BTC network. On some days, the number of transactions on the BSV network and average block size block is also larger those on the Ethereum network.
Performance comparison of BSV to BTC
Here are some performance metrics for BSV and BTC. The values for BSV are in the left-hand column and the values for BTC are in the right-hand column All the data shown below is from BitinfoCharts.
Transactions
On May 11th, 2020, the day when BTC “halved”, the total number of transactions for BSV is 4¾ larger than for BTC. But on average for the last six months (as shown below), the number of BSV transactions is more than 1½ times larger than the number of BTC transactions. This larger amount of transactions occurs in an interval time that is 1 sec faster. Thus, BSV can process more transactions than BTC is a less time.
Blocksize
The BSV block size is 128 MB and the BTC block size is 1 MB. At this time the average daily block size for BSV is less than 1.8 MB. The BSV network can increase by more than 70 times before it is at its maximum value. The average block size for BTC is 875 KB. It can only increase by 10% before it is at its maximum value.
Profitability
Since, BSV uses the same mining algorithm as BTC, called SHA-256, the same type of equipment is used to mine BSV and BTC. Thus, the profitability per THash/s is equivalent.
Transaction fees
The average transaction fee for a BSV user $.00031. The average transaction fee for a BTC user is more than $.50. This BTC transaction fee is 166 times higher than the BSV transaction fee!
What is the effect for users and miners?
Users
The lower transaction fee and faster transaction processing time for BSV make it a better alternative for users.
Miners
At this time the profit per block for mining BTC is $60,174 and the profit per block for mining BSV $1183. The profit for mining BTC is 50 times higher than it is for mining BSV, . But the BTC network can only increase by 10% while the BSV network can increase by more than 70 times. Thus, if or when the number of users for BSV network increase it will become more profitable than BTC.
