Bitcoin SV

Bitcoin SV (BCH SV)
Founded	2018
Key People	Craig Wright, proponent, notable developer
Twitter	@BitcoinSVNode
Website	nChain Home

Bitcoin Cash SV, or simply Bitcoin SV, is a cryptocurrency created in 2018. It is the result of a software upgrade to the Bitcoin Cash (BCH) protocol that resulted in a hard fork, which also created Bitcoin Cash ABC.

Overview

In 2018, a software developer called ABC Bitcoin proposed an upgrade to the Bitcoin Cash protocol. The changes included potential scaling solutions for the cryptocurrency by changing the way its blockchain stored information. The upgrades were endorsed by Roger Ver and Bitcoin.com. They also had the potential to allow software developers to create smart contract software platforms on the Bitcoin Cash blockchain. This proposal was met with contentious feedback, especially from prominent Bitcoin Cash developer nChain and its founder, Craig Wright. In response, nChain made its own proposal for a software upgrade, which they dubbed Bitcoin Cash SV (the SV being short for "Satoshi's Vision"), which they argued would be closer to Satoshi Nakamoto's original vision. On November 15th, 2018, Bitcoin Cash forked, which began an intense conflict between miners supporting Bitcoin Cash ABC and Bitcoin Cash SV respectively.

In December 2018, a cryptocurrency researcher named Reizu wrote a blog post describing how he was able to spend the same BSV coins twice in what is called a "0-conf transaction" double-spend. This raised serious concerns about the robustness of SV's security.

In April 2019, Wright registered himself with the U.S. Copyright Office as the pseudonymous author of the bitcoin white paper attributed to Satoshi Nakomoto. On May 22, 2019, a day after the news broke, the U.S. Copyright Office published a statement: “As a general rule, when the Copyright Office receives an application for registration, the claimant certifies as to the truth of the statements made in the submitted materials. The Copyright Office does not investigate the truth of any statement made...In a case in which a work is registered under a pseudonym, the Copyright Office does not investigate whether there is a provable connection between the claimant and the pseudonymous author.” Despite this, the price of BSV spiked following the news, increasing by over 90 percent.

Craig Wright was ordered by a District Court of Southern District of Florida judge to provide a list of his digital asset holdings as part of a lawsuit against him by Ira Kleiman, the brother of Wright’s former business partner. Wright initially claimed that he had lost access to his wealth of bitcoins, but in January 2020, said that he had found them. After the news broke, the price of bitcoin SV spiked, more than doubling in value, though some speculated that this was due to a coordinated price pumping effort.

BSV de-listed from major exchanges

In April 2019, Craig Wright began arguing with a Twitter user called "Hodlnaut," a bitcoin user who became known for the "Lightning Torch" experiment, which was a promotional demonstration of the Lightning Network's capabilities. After achieving a large Twitter following, Hodlnaut made public posts criticizing Wright, who later sent Hodlnaut a letter accusing the Twitter user of being a "fraud," and threatening legal action. This triggered a huge wave of support for Hodlnaut, as well as renewed hate for Wright, from thousands of Twitter users.

Binance later announced it would delist BSV. Binance's CEO Changpeng Zhao said over Twitter that Wright is a "fraud," and that "anyone who supports BSV from a tech perspective should be attacking the fraudulent Craig Wright, who is poisoning YOUR community, and not attack the rest of the world." He also said that "Anyone thinking CW is Satoshi should read about how a private key works, ie, learn about crypto;" this comment was made in reference to the controversial method by which Wright allegedly "proved" to Gavin Andresen and others that he is Satoshi Nakamoto, a claim he has made multiple times.

Later that month, Shapeshift announced that it would also delist BSV. Kraken announced that it would be doing the same, citing "community sentiment" around Bitcoin Cash SV as their primary reason for doing so. According to the announcement, Kraken planned on disabling BSV deposits on April 22, cease trading pairs on April 29, and stop withdrawals of BSV May 31. The BSV community responded with ire. Ed Pownall, a PR representative of Calvin Ayre, founder of CoinGeek.com and one of SV's biggest supporters, accused these exchanges of "market manipulation" and "playing God," and that delisting BSV sets "a dangerous precedent."

Technical issues

On July 24, 2019, Bitcoin SV's network underwent an upgrade that resulted in a hard fork. Following the upgrade, 20 percent of BSV nodes failed to upgrade, and were still running the old software. This caused those miners to mine a total of 50 blocks without receiving mining rewards. A few weeks later, in early August, a number of nodes struggled to process a block containing 210 MB of data, preventing them from successfully processing transactions on the network.