BSV is a caricature of onchain scaling

BSV has made it painfully clear to anybody observing that a naive and unbalanced approach to increasing the blocksizelimit leads to the very problems technical people warned it would.

BSVs raison d'être

What has come to define BSV for many is that they increased their blocksizelimit at the day of the fork from 32MB to 128MB. Those who followed the situation closely back then know it was just one of a list of technical excuses that happened to stick in the popular consciousness. Because of the frequent changes in narrative it was clear to many in the BCH community that Nchain or more to the point, Craig and Calvin, were not even acting in good faith or concerned about any of the technical details. It was simply about control and power over the network, hence the threats of 51% attacks. Since, they have removed any limit on the blocksize altogether with their "genesis upgrade" in Feb 2020.

The warnings were prescient

In the first days BSV was created they experienced a 2block reorg which was directly due to huge blocks which cause propagation issues. Different technical people in the BCH community commented on the situation in this coindesk article with what amounts to "we told you so". Yes you can have natural 2 block reorgs when two blocks are found at roughly the same time twice in a row, but this was not that. This was more like an accidental 51% attack. "The best part: they reorged themselves (both chains are Coingeek) during a friggin stress test when they're busy shotgunning themselves." as was pointed out back then by imaginary_username. In april 2019 BSV experienced a 6 block deep reorg- which is significant given that it is commonly assumed transactions and blocks can never be reversed after that depth. This huge increase in orphan risk matters because it leads directly to miner centralization and opens up selfish mining attack vectors. As expected this incident was defended by BSVers as the system "working as intended". There were also many stories about crashing nodes in the following months, including from Moneybutton, then perhaps the most well known BSV project. If even the businesses building on the blockchain can't afford to run nodes, who will keep the miners in check?

Vitalik called the project a "pure dumpster fire" and Craig, its figurehead, a fraud. Within cryptocurrency many sub communities have harsh disagreement but one of the only things there's unanimous agreement on is that Craig Wright is a well documented conman.

Contrasting different approaches

Jonathan Toomim put it best: "BCH will not allow block sizes that are large enough to wreak havoc. We do our capacity engineering before lifting the capacity limits. BCH's limit is 32 MB, which the network can handle. BSV does not share this approach, and raises limits before improving actual capacity."

People in BCH see the 1MB (or 1.4 vMB or whatever) forever policy is obviously ridiculous and prevents the project from achieving the necessary scale. The limit which was introduced in 2010 has not been changed to account at least for the improvements in computer technology since. Within BCH it's not a "solved" discussion what an an acceptable cost for running a node is or what node count we should strive for. Undoubtedly these issues will come up again when BCH increases a lot in popularity very quickly. The crucial difference is that the community is committed to on-chain scaling in a responsible and sustainable way. The talk from Andreas Antonopoulos on failing to scale gracefully actually applies much more to BCH than to BTC, which has just given up altogether.

As different developers have pointed out recently the architecture of Bitcoin and hence Bitcoin Cash is much more scalable than something like Ethereum. Unlike what BTC proponents will tell you there is no fundamental reason it can't scale, but on the other hand, unlike what BSV proponents will tell you, scaling is not just a matter of increasing a single parameter and calling it a day.

Expertise has its place

It's all too logical when one sees the blatant pact between much of the intellectual class and the state to become wary of "experts". Expertise was also claimed by the some of the core developers and blockstream associates, whoever found their way to BCH dared to question their authority. Of course everybody should remain vigilant and critical , as I have no doubt they will, but sometimes just shutting up and listening to what some actual experts say is the only way to prevent a conman from gaining ranks and technobabble from being spread. Some people are very confident a feemarket will never develop on BCH or that the limit can always be orders of magnitude higher than current usage, I am more skeptical. For me BCH represents the attempt to scale bitcoin while retaining its desirable properties. If BCH ever were to fail to scale that'd be incredibly bullish and I'm sure everyone would be working their butts off to fix one bottleneck after the next, I think that is the spirit captured in failing to scale gracefully.

webarchive copy of Chris Pacias writing on the now disappeared honest.cash: "BSV is NOT the Original Bitcoin" https://web.archive.org/web/20190516140210/https://honest.cash/cpacia/bsv-is-not-the-original-bitcoin-4327

interesting to reread is also "Bitcoin ABC and the Block Size Limit" an article which many in spirit will still agree with - despite that the team ended up creating its own coin.