Canadian chartered professional accountancy and business consulting firm MNP, the fifth largest in the country, published their independent review entitled “The Original Bitcoin Protocol: What is it and why does it matter?” on August 25.
“This report reviewed Satoshi’s writings for the implementations of the Bitcoin network, the associated software, and code, and the Bitcoin protocol. Source material for our review included Satoshi’s whitepaper, emails, forum posts, and original code, which are all publicly available. These source materials were used to determine Satoshi’s original purpose for Bitcoin,” the MNP report stated.
After four months of an intensive and extensive investigation into the original Bitcoin protocol and two of its implementations—Bitcoin Core (BTC) and Bitcoin SV (BSV)—the report has concluded that BSV is the better implementation of the Bitcoin white paper and its author, Satoshi Nakamoto’s, original vision.
“Based on our review, Bitcoin was intended to be a transaction network for digital cash to compete as a global payment system. Current implementations (BSV and BTC) were compared against that original vision. Our findings indicate that BSV is most representative of Satoshi’s original intention for Bitcoin. We used an assessment framework and resulting criteria—including OpCodes, Bitcoin scripting, and protocol elements—to assess the protocols described in this paper,” the report stated.
Comparing BSV and BTC
There were many criteria used when evaluating BTC and BSV against the white paper and Satoshi’s original design and vision for Bitcoin. Below are some of the major differences that led to the conclusion that “BSV is the implementation that currently best represents what Satoshi originally intended.”
- Block size and throughput – BTC currently maintains its 1MB block size caps and throughput of just seven transactions per second (tps). In contrast, a record-breaking 2GB block has been recently mined on the BSV blockchain and once the Teranode project is released this year, throughput will increase to over 50,000 tps. BSV has also declared that this is just the beginning, its ultimate goal is to be able to mine terabyte-sized blocks and process millions of tps. Because of this, transaction fees will remain low, making it an efficient and practical solution for global enterprises.
- Energy efficiency – BTC’s energy consumption is high considering it only processes a maximum of seven tps. With BSV’s increasing throughput, energy consumed for every block added to the blockchain is spread out into tens of thousands of transactions. And because the network continues to scale, it would not be impossible to accommodate millions of transactions in a single block in the future.
- Processing free transactions – “The network should always be available and process all valid transactions including free ones as there is still Bitcoin to be mined.” While BTC may allow for free transactions to be ignored by miners and be left in the mempool, free transactions often occur on the BSV network due to its ability to scale.
- Smart contracts – Bitcoin’s original scripting language and opcodes have been altered or disabled by BTC, making it difficult for developers to create more detailed and intricate contracts. BSV, on the other hand, has restored the original Bitcoin protocol, enabling historic opcodes in the process that make possible the creation of stateful smart contracts and complex scripting.
- Scalability – BTC refuses to scale, which actually resulted in the first fork within the Bitcoin community. BSV, on the other hand, has enabled unbounded scalability and continues to scale and improve its throughput, allowing it to be capable enough to meet increasing market demands. This makes the BSV blockchain able to handle mass adoption in the future not limited to the function of payments, which is more aligned to the original design of Bitcoin.
“The original design was intended for Bitcoin to be used for other functions (beyond mere payments) such as vending machines, paid emails, SaaS products, website activations, etc. It is clear from the forum posts, writings, and community discussions that the Bitcoin protocol was intended to scale to allow for many forms of payments. This includes micro-payments (i.e., settling an account at the end of the day) and micropayment (i.e., sending a very small fee to access a service or send a text message),” the report stated.
Furthermore, Bitcoin mining is meant to endure even after there are no more coins to be minted. And because the fixed coin subsidy for every block added to the blockchain is halved every four years—the current one at only 6.25 coins—it is not sustainable for miners to rely on it for profit, which is what BTC miners are doing due to its high price at over $50,000 per coin.
But when the fixed block subsidy is halved in 2024 and then again in 2028, one block will only earn miners 3.125 and 1.5625 coins, respectively. The 2GB block recently mined on the BSV blockchain has earned the miner 10.01 in coins on top of the 6.25 subsidy. As each block grows in size, it will contain more transactions that translate to higher profit. This makes it more sustainable for miners to rely on profit from transaction fees rather than the fixed coin subsidy that keeps getting smaller.
These are the most glaring differences between BTC and BSV, which are both implementations of Bitcoin. It can be seen that even though BTC is the more popular digital currency, it has gone so far from the original vision of Bitcoin. While the BSV blockchain is developing an increasing utility for global enterprises across many different industries, BTC has stagnated and become merely a speculative investment.
