We have reached a time when the vast majority of people around the world know what Bitcoin is, despite not having to familiarize themselves with the work that goes beneath it, how it’s mined or how it struggles to retain its value. However, what we know as Bitcoin is not an accurate depiction of what Satoshi Nakamoto proposed in their whitepaper back in 2008.
This is where Bitcoin SV steps in. A project focused on properly implementing Satoshi’s original vision (“SV” stands for “Satoshi’s Vision”), materializing it with limitless scalability and unmeasurable economic potential.
Tortuous Beginnings
Bitcoin SV comes from a hard fork taking place in November 2018: The team of Bitcoin Cash split in two because of differences in what exactly they wanted to implement, much like Bitcoin Cash came to be back in August 2017. And to understand the intention behind the creation of Bitcoin SV, we must first take a look at the origin of its mother coin.
Bitcoin Cash was created after splitting from Bitcoin due to pressure from the community arguing that Bitcoin was drifting too much apart from the original intention of developing efficient, truly peer-to-peer digital cash.
Unfortunately, many media groups claimed that Bitcoin Cash implemented way too many changes to the protocol, so it also became estranged from the whitepaper proposal. The main difference between these two seemingly identical processes is that those who went to conform Bitcoin SV were trying to forcefully roll back those changes in Bitcoin Cash before they left, and, after they left, they also made aggressive attempts to take control of BCHs hash power.
This turf war between the two “children” of Bitcoin came to an end when BSV and BCH implemented replay protection technologies, permanently cutting any relationship between them. And so, the story of Bitcoin SV began, and it has not been clear of controversy.
Walking Among Giants
To enter in a landscape where your predecessor holds more than half of the entire market capitalization it’s a monumental challenge, and to rise up in that same market to occupy one of the top 10 spots by market capitalization is a great feat. But, how exactly did Bitcoin SV rose to its position? And how did it manage to keep it?
BSV’s path has not been the cleanest one. Craig Wright, creator of Bitcoin SV, has been in the middle of many controversies because of his constant claims to be the Satoshi Nakamoto, original visionary of Bitcoin. The first big event of this kind occurred in March, where Wright got fed up of his critics calling him a liar and took legal actions against many of them. This set off a chain of events that ended up in big exchanges like Binance, Kraken and Shapeshift completely delisting the token.
However, an unexpected climb came when Wright made a claim back in May for copyright over the original whitepaper, which implied he was Satoshi Nakamoto. This quickly translated into a huge climb, up to 214% and reaching $195 per unit, as he also promised to revert this copyright to Bitcoin Association, who owns the Bitcoin SV client software and openly supports BSV.
Another episode in Craig Wright’s legal saga was written when Wright lost a case against the estate of David Kleiman, claiming he had allegedly fabricated code and documents to gain control over a certain amount of BTC. All of this resulted in the courts demanding, in August 26th, for Wright to give Kleiman’s estate half of the IP rights over Bitcoin’s software and half of all the BTC mined by him up to December 31st, 2013.
But this might not have been too hurtful for BSV, as the court’s decision indirectly proved that Kleiman and Wright did work together in the early stages of Bitcoin, making BSV users and enthusiasts more confident in the claims of it trying to return to the roots and main ideals of cryptocurrency. And it seemed to have worked. At the time of writing, BSV trades for $118.75 (#9 on the list), with a total market cap of $2.13 billion (#9) and reaching trading volumes of $15.79 million (#14).
Whether Bitcoin SV will truly reach the ideal vision that went viral back in 2008 or fail in the process, or whether it will remain a viable trade option among other great names or fall down if another controversy is related to it or its creator, that’s for time to tell. For now, the spread sentiment is that BSV is more than just Craig Wright, which gives the token additional strength, and we have to keep an eye both on the token itself and the landscape that surrounds it.