Editorial note: Holy *#^&! Thank you a lot Marc for the tip! It means a lot to me to see that as I woke up.
In my short time within the BCH community, I've noticed a certain sentiment within some: that the BCH/BSV fork took a lot of great developers with it, and that it had done a lot of damage by doing so.
And I, want to disagree.
Some consider that part of history to be "behind" and I agree. But I want to take an outsider look, and explain why BSV ultimately is the opposite of the BCH vision, and how this fork would have happened later either way. So, let's get started.
Of course, hindsight is key.
But, even looking as an outsider at the stories, screenshots from the "war", it can be seen that Craig "Faketoshi" Wright was offering a wildly different vision to BCH development. A more... immediate vision, without much thinking. And this is what split the entire community. Craig, and his followers, wanted "big block bitcoin" that has enormous blocks without consideration about how the network will handle it. Or how it could affect miners.
Further more: BSV has done... stupid to say the least decisions, such as removing P2SH or allowing pretty much unlimited OP_RETURNs. The entire supposed reason why BSV split in the first place was a disagreement between Amaury and Craig over... CTOR (Canonical Transaction Ordering) and OP_CHECKDATASIG/OP_CHECKDATASIGVERIFY. 2 things which were really useful in the mission of BCH (with the latter allowing for oracles to exist on BCH). And why the disagreement even happened? Craig was spewing bullshit that it's bad. Why? Because he's supposedly Satoshi (while never showing concrete proof of that) and it was against his "vision" for Bitcoin. And his followers within BCH bought that.
But that was only an excuse.
Craig wanted full control over development of the protocol, and of the products on it. For example, BSV node (the only node software available for BSV) is licensed under the "Open BSV license", a non-open source license. nChain (Technically not Craig's but practically his corporation) also has patents related to BSV. Yes, patents.
Now that he had control, he has done stupid decisions within development of BSV.
Some of the key decisions were: not implementing CTOR and OP_CDS/CDSV, removal of P2SH (which has caused issues due to having to do multi-sig in different ways, one of them causing a loss of funds), removal of BIP39 (Mnemonics), Unbounding OP_RETURN to be pretty much infinite...
So, why did I list and talk about all of that?
I want to make a single point: BSV development is an anti-thesis to BCH development. And the split would have happened either way. The vision Craig wanted to impose upon BCH development was simply too different compared to what Amaury and other devs wanted. If Craig got his way, more disagreements would have came up and the split would have happened later.
And it's good that the fork happened the first time Craig disagreed and got his followers to disagree with him.
Because BCH has no masters. BSV has a master, and that is Craig.
