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This article was published on July 24, 2019

Nobody knows when Bitcoin Satoshi Vision’s hard fork for 2GB blocks starts [UPDATED]

Two different start times, so which one is it?


Nobody knows when Bitcoin Satoshi Vision’s hard fork for 2GB blocks starts [UPDATED]

Fledging blockchain Bitcoin Satoshi Vision (BSV) is ready for a “hard fork” upgrade to increase the size limit of its blocks from 128MB to 2GB — but there’s confusion over when it’s actually supposed to occur.

According to BitMEX Research (the analytic arm of cryptocurrency exchange BitMEX), BSV miners and nodes are likely confused over when the upgrade will initiate, as two different start times have been mistakenly provided.

This is a problem. BSV nodes enforce the rules of the protocol, and must reject any BSV blocks that don’t match. If the miners don’t know the rules, they could start submitting invalid blocks, which drains network efficiency and security.

BSV is itself a “hard fork” of a hard fork of Bitcoin, meaning it began as a carbon copy of Bitcoin Cash and has since been tweaked slightly to change certain parameters.

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One of those settings is its block size limit, which determines the maximum amount of data (read: transactions) that can be added to any one block.

Bitcoin’s block size limit is 1MB (which can be stretched to around 4MB), but BSV proponents believe that fitting more transactions into any one block will help keep their network efficient should activity ever increase.

So, it goes that BSV should increase its block size limit from 128MB to 2GB. This belief comes despite evidence showing the BSV network has already repeatedly struggled with large blocks.

Even sillier, the average BSV block is currently just 400KB, a helluva lot less than 2 Gigamegs.

So, what’s happening with BSV?

For now, nobody really knows what’s going on. It’s unclear whether the fork was meant to be initiated at 14:00 UTC or an hour later.

BitMEX Research is currently tracking the status of the network, you can follow them here.

“We are trying to develop automated monitoring, detection and warning systems for consensus related issues, such as splits and invalid blocks,” said BitMEX Research. “[BSV] is a useful training ground for this. All the technology we develop will be applied to Bitcoin.”

Update 08:59 UTC, July 25: A block over 128MB in size has since been added to the longest BSV blockchain, signalling a “successful” hard fork.

Unfortunately, one mining pool mined a BSV block that used the original protocol, which meant it added a block to a chain that’s effectively “dead” — a total waste of resources.

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