Bitcoin SV

Overview

Bitcoin SV (“Satoshi Vision”) split from Bitcoin Cash in November 2018 in a bitter dispute over scaling philosophy and protocol changes, led by Craig Wright — who publicly claims to be Bitcoin’s pseudonymous creator, Satoshi Nakamoto — and businessman Calvin Ayre.

History

Origins

As Bitcoin Cash’s community debated further protocol upgrades in 2018, a faction led by Craig Wright’s company nChain and Calvin Ayre’s Coingeek mining operation rejected the direction favored by Bitcoin ABC’s developers and proposed radically larger blocks and a return to what they described as Satoshi Nakamoto’s “original” protocol design. When consensus wasn’t reached, the disagreement escalated into the November 2018 “hash war,” in which opposing mining factions directed hash power at each other’s chains in an effort to force the other off the network, ultimately resulting in a permanent split into Bitcoin Cash (BCH) and Bitcoin SV (BSV).

Funding

Bitcoin SV had no premine or public sale; it inherited BCH’s ledger at the fork block, giving every BCH holder an equal balance of BSV. Its ongoing development has instead been heavily funded and directed by nChain and Calvin Ayre’s business interests.

Technology

Consensus Algorithm

Like its Bitcoin and Bitcoin Cash ancestors, Bitcoin SV uses SHA-256 Proof of Work, but it has pursued far more aggressive block size increases, at times supporting blocks in the gigabyte range, in pursuit of very high on-chain transaction throughput.

Network & Ecosystem

Bitcoin SV is part of the Bitcoin lineage but is highly centralized in practice around nChain and Coingeek, which control a large share of its mining and development resources — a point frequently raised by critics as contradicting the decentralization ideals of the chains it forked from.

Smart Contracts

Bitcoin SV has extended Bitcoin’s original scripting opcodes further than Bitcoin Cash, aiming to make Bitcoin Script itself more expressive for data storage and application logic, rather than adopting a separate Ethereum-style virtual machine.

Use Cases

Bitcoin SV’s stated goal is to fulfill what its backers describe as Satoshi Nakamoto’s original vision for Bitcoin: massive on-chain scaling supporting enterprise-grade data storage and micropayments on a single base layer. In practice, adoption has remained limited, and most major exchanges delisted BSV following controversies around Craig Wright.

Controversies & Incidents

• Craig Wright’s Satoshi claims: Wright has repeatedly claimed to be Bitcoin’s creator, Satoshi Nakamoto, a claim rejected by most of the broader Bitcoin community and, after years of related litigation, by a UK High Court ruling in 2024 that found he was not Satoshi Nakamoto and had forged evidence to support his claims.
• Mass exchange delistings (2019): Following an incident in which Wright threatened legal action against critics who disputed his Satoshi claims, several major exchanges — including Binance, Kraken, and ShapeShift — delisted BSV in April 2019, significantly reducing its liquidity and accessibility.
• The 2018 hash war: The chain’s founding event was itself a public, costly conflict in which competing mining factions burned resources attacking each other’s networks rather than cooperating, drawing widespread criticism from the wider crypto community.
• Centralization concerns: Bitcoin SV’s mining and development have remained concentrated among a small number of closely aligned entities, a structure critics argue undermines its claim to represent decentralized “original Bitcoin” values.