On 3rd January 2009, the bitcoin network came into existence with Satoshi Nakamoto mining the genesis block of bitcoin (block number 0), which had a reward of 50 bitcoins. Embedded in the coinbase of this block was the text: The Times 03/Jan/2009 Chancellor on brink of second bailout for banks. This year, the cryptocurrency community is celebrating the 11th anniversary of the Bitcoin network. Satoshi brought the network to the world two months after publishing the whitepaper on October 31, 2008.
One of the most pressing issues for the cryptocurrency has always been its scalability, which upon the creation was limited to 1MB. The limit was originally implemented to lower the possibility of potential potential spam and DDoS-attacks but this has been causing substantial delays in transaction processing times. While there were not that many transactions happening in the network, the limit wasn’t affecting anything at all but as Bitcoin grew more and more popular, the limit started causing blocks to pile up. The situation got out of hand around May 2017, when some users reported having to wait for confirmation for up to four days and miner fees skyrocketed.
Increasing block size met some heavy resistance, with some refusing to change the original code.The two factions couldn’t find middle ground, after years of debate, so, in the summer of 2017, a split happened and a brand new cryptocurrency was created: Bitcoin Cash.
The disputes amongst the developers however continued and different Bitcoin Cash development teams did not reach an agreement regarding important consensus changes. On the 15th of November 2018, Bitcoin Cash suffered a hard fork, resulting in separate Bitcoin Cash chains that implement no replay protection between each other: one following the rules of the BitcoinABC implementation, and one following the rules of the BitcoinSV implementation.
While BTC kept its block cap restricted to 1MB, allowing about 7 transactions per second and BCH at 32MB, BSV has a block cap at 2GB which can handle “1000 transactions per second and theoretically up to 9000 transactions per second.”
There is no denying of the fact that the civil war is still on between the BCH and BSV camps. Roger Ver is still emphasising on the huge potential of Bitcoin Cash while Craig Wright is urging to look beyond BCH and focus on the BSV chain. Roger Ver recently declared that BCH holds all the potential to witness a 100,000 percent rise in the near future. On the other hand, Craig Wright is tirelessly advocating for the authenticity of BSV.
But, despite all the debates and controversies, one thing is clear: both coins show immense potential in the contemporary crypto space. At present, BCH is the 4th largest cryptocurrency, while Bitcoin SV is the 5th one.