Bitcoin SV Splits Into Three Chains Following 210 MB Block

Published at: Aug. 5, 2019

Following a recent hard fork of Bitcoin SV (BSV), the network saw a three-chain split after a massive 210 megabytes (MB) block was mined.

As reported by BitMEX Research on Aug. 3, Bitcoin SV nodes divided into three groups on Saturday, making the network to split into three separate chains. According to the report, 65% of nodes were located on the current tip, while 17% were stuck on the 210 MB  block and 19% had not even upgraded and were on the old pre-hard fork chain.

Bitcoin SV node chart. Source: Twitter

According to data from Coin Dance, the 210 MB block was mined on Aug. 3 by CoinGeek miner and involved 808,633 transactions.

Bitcoin SV, a hard fork of Bitcoin Cash (BCH), which is in turn a fork of the major cryptocurrency Bitcoin (BTC), successfully ran its own scheduled hard fork on July 24 as part of plans to increase its block size from the previously set limit of 128 MB up to 2 gigabytes.

Bitcoin SV nodes are getting expensive

Prior to the three-chain split, Ryan X. Charles, a BSV supporter and CEO of BSV-powered payment system MoneyButton, published a post on the Money Button blog about his issues running a BSV node. Specifically, Charles stated that Money Button went down for three hours because their Bitcoin SV node ran out of memory and crashed during a stress test. He wrote:

“Running a node is expensive. Our new instance will cost thousands of dollars per month to operate. As blocks continue to get larger and we have to upgrade the instance many times, this cost will balloon. Since we do not earn money from transaction fees like miners, it will be too expensive for us to run a node.”

According to tech news outlet TrustNodes, Coin Dance service is now on the new Bitcoin SV chain, while the older chain will likely be discarded. According to the report, this could mean that miners who got stuck on the old chain may have lost some money as those blocks could now be discarded. The report notes that, while the recent split appears to be the first of its kind, giga-sized blocks may generate splits with more than three forks. 

Bitcoin SV has previously experienced problems due to what some consider to be an unwieldy blockchain size. In April, the coin’s blockchain underwent a series of block reorganizations — a situation in which two miners discover a block simultaneously in a blockchain, which causes a temporary forking in the network. In general, block reorganization happens when a network is too slow to reproduce blocks efficiently.

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