BSV Genesis Hard Fork: Restoring “Satoshi's Vision”

Bitcoin SV came into existence to bring back the Satoshi’s Vision to the protocol but unwillingly ended up in a convoluting series of claims and controversies. Apart from harsh criticisms, BSV has a cult following and continued to perform well in the market since the derivation. The project once again caught the attention of the community with its upcoming Genesis Hard Fork and the team believes that this major upgrade will take them a bit closer in achieving the Satoshi’s Vision.

In this post, ChangeHero will give you a quick overview of Genesis Hard Fork and things to look out for.

Forked — Testnets

Hard forks are notoriously infamous for giving rise to new cryptocurrencies and BSV was also a descendant of the same club. The young crypto firm scheduled a major hard fork event on February 4, 2020. Contrary to popular beliefs, this is a pre-planned forking event to upgrade the network aiming to restore the original Bitcoin protocol.

BSV team has developed two testnets: Genesis Testnet or GT is already running with the planned features and improvements for the mainnet enabling the users to test their application behaviour prior to the hard fork. On the plus side, Genesis Reset or GR is a unique way of testing application behaviour during the forking process and will have a 48-hour reset cycle to ensure a repeatable and a stable forking. A stable release was deployed recently and a Scaling Test Network (STN) is slated for release on January 21 to enable the users to test the scalability by sending in large transaction volumes and blocks without affecting the mainnet. To put an end, the Genesis hard fork activation on the mainnet will take place at the block height 620538 and expected on February 4, 2020.

Rekindled

Scalability is one of the most concerning issues of blockchain projects and it bars both the developers and users from making the most out of it. Through Genesis hard fork, BSV aims to unleash the complete potential of the network by lifting off the block size limit. Miners will have the option either to configure their own block size limit or none at all to compete and provide the best service. Also, the update eases the limitations on data-carrier size and 25 transaction chain limits.

Furthermore, the fork will bring the original design of OP_RETURN into effect which would be a huge relief to the developers. Also, the team aims to improve the mathematical capabilities of the scripting language by replacing 32-bit numbers with “big numbers”. Besides, nLockTime and nSequence will also be restored to their original state of functionality which offers an opportunity to the users to make a transaction in the blockchain only when a certain time or block height is reached. Non-standard and complex transactions will also be made available to everyone and eliminate the need for negotiations with a miner to push the transactions.

In a surprising move, the BSV team announced that after the forthcoming hard fork, new pay-to-script-hash(P2SH)transactions will not be permitted and asserted that it would lead to better privacy and record-keeping on the chain. On top of all, the Genesis upgrade would bring more features like tokenization, Metanet-based applications, smart contracts, instant confirmations and many more.

Akin to the project, the forking event is also criticized by the crypto community and the sunsetting of P2SH is bashed by influencers. To make things even worse, Bitgo announced that its users would not be able to receive BSV after the Genesis hard fork. On the contrary, none of them appears to impede BSV and the team is busy cracking the code and delivering updates. BSV team also insists on upgrading and testing the software only on testnets and not on the mainnet. Check out their support page for more technical details.

An attempt worth taking a look at

Genesis Hard Fork appears to be an adamant attempt to revive the Bitcoin protocol and looks promising in some aspects. Despite the panning, BSV has a proven record in the market and stands comfortably among the most valuable cryptocurrencies. Though things are gloomy around this project, it is worth mentioning that BSV is trying to do bring back Satoshi’s vision and it definitely deserves the benefit of the doubt.

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