A brief history
As with Bitcoin Cash, the creation of Bitcoin SV was largely linked to the debate on scaling the Bitcoin blockchain. In 2018 a hard fork of Bitcoin Cash created the Bitcoin SV blockchain. The main goal of Bitcoin SV, led by the team of nChain, was to increase the block size- and thus the number of transactions that can be confirmed in a single block- to 128 MB. There are also plans to increase the size further to 2 GB. This is significantly larger than Bitcoin Cash’s goal of an eventual 32 MB. Bitcoin SV reports that it conducts 300 transactions per second on average, with a peak capacity of 2,800 transactions per second on its mainnet (as of July 2020). When BSV was listed on 15 November 2018, its price was $200. The price rose and fell quickly after its launch but stabilized at the end of the year at around $90.

BSV in practice
Similar to the Bitcoin blockchain, Bitcoin SV uses a proof-of-work consensus system. In this system, cryptocurrency miners compete to discover new blocks by using specialized computing equipment and are rewarded with BSV for validating these blocks. According to a September 2021 press release from the Bitcoin Association, the Bitcoin SV network demonstrated a throughput of 50,000 transactions per second- all at a predictably low cost. The median fee on the Bitcoin SV network in 2020 was 1/50th of a U.S. cent. Despite the focus on “peer-to-peer” electronic cash, there are indications that Bitcoin SV is being used for a variety of use cases beyond money. For example, one BSV-powered application, WeatherSV, uses the blockchain to record large amounts of weather and climate data, while Memo and Twetch act as blockchain-based social networks.