Bitcoin SV
About Bitcoin SV
The price of Bitcoin SV (BSV) is $48.53 today, as of Sep 19 03:26 p.m., with a 24-hour trading volume of $23.12M. Over the last 24 hours, the price has increased by 6.98%. Bitcoin SV currently has a circulating supply of 19.76M and a market cap of $958.89M.
BSV is the native cryptocurrency of Bitcoin Satoshi’s Vision (BSV), sometimes called Bitcoin SV: a blockchain created in 2018 after a hard fork from the Bitcoin Cash blockchain, which in turn was a hard fork of the original Bitcoin blockchain.
Hard forks can occur when conflict arises among the developers of a particular blockchain. If the developers cannot reach an agreement, it’s common to see them enact a hard fork, which essentially splits the blockchain into two separate chains. One continues being the original project, while the other becomes an entirely new blockchain.
Within the Bitcoin Cash project, tensions rose among developers over whether the protocol should be upgraded to accommodate smart contracts, larger block sizes (from 32 megabytes to 128 megabytes) and several other features. Those differences led to the creation of Bitcoin SV.
The name comes from supporters’ belief that cheaper fees align with Bitcoin inventor Satoshi Nakamoto’s original vision for the blockchain network. According to the project’s website, the blockchain was “created to restore the original Satoshi protocol, keep it stable and enable it to massively scale,” making it “unlike other bitcoin projects.”
A key backer of the project, Craig Wright, has publicly claimed to be Satoshi Nakamoto, though he has never provided conclusive evidence.
The BSV token is the native cryptocurrency of the Bitcoin SV blockchain. Some 17.5 million BSV tokens were distributed to Bitcoin Cash holders in 2018 at a ratio of 1:1, after the hard fork was initiated.
As much as the project’s backers insist that Bitcoin SV embodies the original goals of Nakamoto’s white paper, digital-asset markets have long since shown that investors judged the original Bitcoin network, anchored by the cryptocurrency BTC, to be the winner of the blockchain wars of the late 2010s.
BSV’s price has roughly doubled since late 2018, for a market capitalization of $3.1 billion as of November 2021. During the same time frame, BTC jumped 15-fold for a market capitalization of about $1.2 trillion.
Over the course of its short history, BSV price has been particularly affected by sharp price increases and decreases. During its first six days, BSV rose 383% to $260, but then fell by 84% over the following nine days. The crypto asset then pushed sideways for about six months until a brief jump pushed BSV price back to $260. Between January 2020 and May 2021, the price continued to trade sideways with just two brief periods when the price sharply rose above $400 and then quickly fell again.
It hasn’t helped that the Bitcoin SV has been hit by a series of attacks that eroded confidence in the network’s security. In August 2021, the Bitcoin SV network suffered a “51% attack” in which malicious miners took control of a majority of the blockchain’s hash power. One analyst concluded that the attack wiped 570,000 transactions, sowing further confusion.