Few controversies in the cryptocurrency space have equaled those from the hardfork between the original, real, Bitcoin Core and Bitcoin Cash, which then further forked to BCH and BSV.
Bitcoin, Satoshi's Vision, or BSV, is the willful return to the original plot for course of the original Bitcoin code and design, according to it's creator Dr. Craig Wright.
Debates center around block size, plans for scale, best distribution through the network and a number of picky technical ideologies that matter to the programmers.
The debate picked up with hostility and great division in some of the most important originators of the first days of crypto. It didn't help that Wright's assertions for his coin being the best coin, dug so deep he began ranting of being the original, singular Satoshi Nakamoto, and a chain of lawsuits ensued. Thankfully, the actual coins and blockchain technology are more reliable than the creators.
All that said, I offer this brief summary for a point. According to Beincrypto (source below), BSV underwent an important, and successful hardfork, and it matters for three reasons in my opinion.
It appears that making Bitcoin SV as close to the original Bitcoin protocol as possible is the main goal, according to the official statement. Specific changes include removing block size limits, while also ‘restoring full original functionality’ of the Bitcoin Script and the Pay to Script hash that was standardized in Bitcoin Improvement Protocol 16 (BIP 16). BitMEX’s Research team has stated it has not detected a chainsplit.
Genesis and the Original Bitcoin Protocol
The project’s lead and technical developers, Daniel Connolly and Steve Shadders, have categorized the intentions of the hard fork into three main goals: restoring the original protocol, improving scaling, and ‘stabilizing the protocol.’
Besides the aforementioned actions taken to ostensibly return Bitcoin SV to Bitcoin’s original vision, the network’s developers also want to work on solving scalability problems by removing the block size limits entirely. Miners will be in charge of deciding block size limits based on network activity.
The overall agenda of this change appears to be so that Bitcoin SV can attempt to handle an “array of data, tokens, smart contracts, content delivery, enterprise applications, the Internet of Things, and other uses.”
I promised three important points, so here they are (followed by a fourth for good measure):
First, the fight between BCH and BSV was vicious, with verbal promises from Dr. Wright to "burn all of the others to the F%^&ing ground" in order to win hash rate battles. He cared quite deeply about restoring <his> original vision for Bitcoin, and that BSV was the real, better, original concept design from which others have so carelessly strayed. If BSV was the better of the two, how was it managing to be so, when none of the things that make it the original vision, were in place, until this most recent upgrade? Essentially, BSV has been hanging around the exchanges at billions of dollars of daily trading, as an incomplete fork.
Second, restoring and stabilizing the original protocol, again, a second major point to the fork, means by definition, it was not following either of the two when forked and launched, and vigorously tested against it's BCH rival. If it did maintain any of the original qualities in this time, it has been in use successfully without any of the benefits of scale or stability!
And Third, the MB buffer size for blocks was among the most deeply-felt of controversies over the split, and what others were so terribly wrong about, according to Wright.
This upgrade, however, leaves the block size to be determined by the miners and the network activity. WHAT?
Okay, I understand the original vision of Bitcoin was to allow the flexibility to determine what was the correct solution to scale, but the insistence was that either a larger, or smaller, block was the correct answer. The biggest rift, and therefore a battle of the blocks, ensued from the certainty that either larger or smaller blocks of data would handle bulk transactions the best.
I don't think the original vision of an upgrade to Bitcoin's source path resolution was a big fat "ah, whatever you choose". It's silly, insulting, but ironically, also, it's probably gonna work just fine. Can you imagine other arguments taking the form of "my way is right, your way is wrong, and just to prove it, I'm willing to set the world ablaze, and now that I have said my peace, ah, whatever you want is fine." Insanity. And, all with no hiccups.
I promised three points, but perhaps the fourth is the most important, so here it is, a final thought:
Most people accept a new chain because it is safe and resolved, and the old chain never has to be abandoned, but everyone just simply migrates to the new path once it is shown secure. A vast majority of the network is choosing to stay with the old install, making one question, once again, what exactly WAS Satoshi's Vision? 10 years have gone rather smoothly, controversy included, and yet inside a year we have two Bitcoin Cash's, both pretending to the be real Bitcoin, one with someone claiming they flat out ARE Satoshi, and a Genesis block accepted by a very small few. And yet, crypto marches forward with hardly a hiccup. It is a great time to be alive!
With Bitcoin Core being the original digital gold as a store of value, this article proves a little fool's gold also goes a long way.