Block Size War 2.0 heats up as Bitcoin SV spikes 33%

Bitcoin SV has surged 33% over the last 24 hours — while Bitcoin falters as rising transaction fees and chain bloat from Ordinals transactions take hold.

Is Bitcoin SV a better Bitcoin?

Buyers have flocked to Bitcoin SV, triggering a nearly threefold increase in trading volume since May 8. At press time, BSV spiked to $40.44, marking a nine-week high for the controversial cryptocurrency.

Despite leading the top 100 off the back of this performance, BSV posted its all-time low on May 8, bottoming at $29.17. Moreover, the token is down 92% from its $490 all-time high — 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 BSV fulfills Satoshi Nakamoto’s vision of a peer-to-peer (P2P) electronic money system — as set out in the original whitepaper.

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

Furthermore, since its inception, BSV has incorporated script commands enabling native tokens, smart contracts, and other Ethereum-like capabilities. Bitcoin followed suit in November 2021 with the Taproot upgrade — which later spawned the Ordinals Protocol.

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

Per bitinfocharts.com, BSV transaction fees have spiked recently but remain relatively low at an average price of $0.0374. Meanwhile, average Bitcoin fees hit $31.91 as users pile into BRC-20 tokens — congesting the network.

Ordinals woes

Given the objective advantages of BSV over BTC, the issue of enlarging BTC’s block size is once again doing the rounds.

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 tradeoff comes at the expense of decentralization — as fewer people are prepared to run a node that operates using high bandwidth.

Commenting on the calls for BTC to increase its block size, Analyst Dylan LeClair planted his flag in the ground, calling advocates of the idea “morons.”

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 “slowly bled out to irrelevance.”

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