Bitcoin SV (BSV) is a cryptocurrency created on 15 November 2018, when the Bitcoin Cash network split in two. "SV" stands for "Satoshi Vision": its backers, led by the Australian computer scientist Craig Wright and the online-gambling entrepreneur Calvin Ayre, said they wanted to restore Bitcoin's original protocol and let blocks grow without a fixed limit, so that one chain could carry very large numbers of payments and data records.
This entry covers the coin. BSV shares its history with Bitcoin (BTC) until August 2017 and with Bitcoin Cash (BCH) until the 2018 split, and it keeps the basic design of the Bitcoin Blockchain. Its network is promoted as the BSV Blockchain by the BSV Association in Zug, Switzerland. The coin is closely tied in public debate to Craig Wright's claim to be Bitcoin's inventor, which a UK court rejected in 2024.
Bitcoin SV in plain terms
Imagine a family shop that has already split once over how to run the business. A few years later one branch fell out again, and each side insisted it alone was keeping the founder's original recipe. Bitcoin SV is the branch that claimed the founder's name most loudly, and its slogan, "Satoshi Vision", says exactly that.
Its central idea is size. Instead of a ceiling on how much can fit into each block, BSV lets miners decide, rather like a motorway with no limit on lanes where the only constraint is how wide a road each builder can afford to lay. Supporters see this as the way to handle huge volumes of tiny payments and records. Critics answer that only a handful of large companies can afford to build and maintain a road that wide.
History
In 2018 the Bitcoin Cash community divided over a planned upgrade. Developers of the Bitcoin ABC software proposed changes such as a new transaction-ordering rule, while Wright's company nChain and Ayre's media group CoinGeek backed rival software called Bitcoin SV. When the upgrade took effect on 15 November 2018 the chain split into a hard fork, followed by a short "hash war" in which both sides pointed mining power at their own chain. Exchanges settled the matter by listing the ABC chain as BCH and the other as BSV.
In April 2019 Binance, Kraken and several other exchanges delisted BSV after Wright threatened legal action against critics who disputed his claim to be Satoshi Nakamoto. The Genesis upgrade, activated at block 620,538 on 4 February 2020, removed the default block size cap and restored script features that early Bitcoin had disabled. Between June and August 2021 the chain suffered several deep reorganisations, including a 51% attack flagged by the analytics firm Coin Metrics on 3 August 2021, and Coinbase later dropped support for the coin.
Supply, mining and fees
BSV keeps Bitcoin's cap of just under 21 million coins, its halving schedule and SHA-256 proof of work. What sets it apart is the absence of a fixed block size limit, which lets miners compete on how cheaply they will carry data. Because fees are charged by the size of a transaction, the cost of a payment can be worked out from the fee rate a miner sets:
- is the transaction fee, in satoshis.
- is the fee rate the miner accepts, in satoshis per byte.
- is the size of the transaction, in bytes.
For example, a simple 250-byte payment at a fee rate of 0.1 satoshi per byte costs satoshis. Since one coin divides into 100 million satoshis, that is 0.00000025 BSV. Low rates of this kind are what supporters mean when they say BSV can carry micro payments and large data records that would be too costly on other chains.
Craig Wright and the courts
Wright's long-running claim to be Satoshi Nakamoto ended in defeat in the High Court in London. In a case brought by the Crypto Open Patent Alliance (COPA), Mr Justice Mellor ruled in March 2024 that Wright was not the author of the Bitcoin white paper and not Satoshi, and his written judgment found that Wright had lied repeatedly and forged documents on a large scale. In December 2024 the same judge found Wright in contempt of court for breaching an order arising from that case, after he filed a claim worth about £900 billion, and gave him a 12-month prison sentence suspended for two years. Earlier, in October 2022, a court in Oslo ruled against Wright in a defamation dispute with the podcaster known as Hodlonaut. The rulings concern Wright personally, not the BSV software, but they damaged the coin's reputation.
Criticism and risks
BSV draws only a tiny fraction of the mining power that secures Bitcoin, so it has proved vulnerable to the 51% attack and to reversed payments; exchanges responded by requiring many more transaction confirmations before crediting deposits. Very large blocks raise the cost of running a full node, which critics say concentrates control among a few operators. Listings on major centralized exchanges are limited, liquidity is thin, and the coin's fortunes remain bound up with a founder whom a court has found to be dishonest.