BSV Bitcoin Satoshi Vision

BitcoinSV will maintain the vision set out by Satoshi Nakamoto’s visionary 2008 white paper titled Bitcoin: A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System which includes:

• Scaling network systems and developing robust mining client software in order to accommodate global demand for ledger space
• Allowing a distributed small world network to form at the center of a Mandala network connecting billions of people through their devices
• Elevating miners into their role as service provider
• Generating on-chain economic activity sufficient to allow transaction fees to supplant block subsidies as their primary funding mechanism
• Driving a culture of using transaction fees to price transactions as a service
• Leveraging economic incentives to build network security
• Allowing the Bitcoin network to become a global infrastructure platform for financial and information exchange processes

Past Ledger Duplications

The Bitcoin ledger has twice been duplicated by miners to implement features that modify the functionality of the node clients used to build the ledger.

Segregated Witness and the change from BTC to BCH

The first duplication took place on August 1st, 2017 when miners opted to create a new version of the protocol including Segregated Witness (SegWit), that modified the usage of digital signatures in transactions on the network.

From block height [478559] miners renamed the network to Bitcoin Cash (BCH).

Miners who elected to support the addition of SegWit cloned the ledger giving all Bitcoin holders a duplicate set of coins thus creating the BTC network. Shortly after, the BTC protocol was modified using a soft-fork to allow users to create and submit transactions using SegWit style scripts to the network for addition to the ledger.

Canonical Transaction Ordering (CTOR) and the change from BCH to BSV

In the second half of 2018, nChain released a new mining client called BitcoinSV node with the goal of scaling the network and locking down protocol rules. Developers of the BitcoinABC node client which was predominantly used by miners on the Bitcoin Cash network released a roadmap that included a modification to the structure of blocks called Canonical Transaction Ordering (CTOR) which enforced a rule that required transactions inserted into the Merkle tree to be ordered by TXID and the addition of new opcodes, OP_CHECKDATASIG and OP_CHECKDATASIGVERIFY. The miners who supported the development of BitcoinSV did not endorse the addition of these changes, and they were not implemented in the node client.

On November 15th 2018, the CTOR update was enabled in nodes following the BitcoinABC rule set. At block 609136 Bitcoin miners using the changed protocol duplicated the ledger and began creating blocks that used CTOR and included the added opcodes into the new blockchain.

Mining on the Bitcoin network with BitcoinSV

Development of the BitcoinSV node client is funded by miners who understand that the future of Bitcoin is through massive global scaling and who have begun works to build new infrastructure and software to improve the transactional capacity of the network. BitcoinSV is currently the predominant mining client used by miners on the Bitcoin network to mine blocks that extend the original Bitcoin ledger.

Bitcoin V1.0 and the return to Genesis

Since the release of the BitcoinSV node client, Bitcoin has undergone a series of upgrades which have removed limits that have impact the network’s throughput and re-enabled features that had been disabled or removed.

In February 2020, the Bitcoin network underwent the Genesis upgrade, which removed all remaining limitations on the Bitcoin protocol in favour of miner-configurable setting allowing boundaries to be determined by economics and technical capability. The removed consensus rules included limits on transaction size, script size, multi-signature usage, block size and more. The full list of changes is available here.

The Bitcoin network is the highest performing public ledger network in the world.