BSV’s rapid rise in price and surge into the top 5 cryptocurrencies by market cap has been met by an unsurprising onslaught of irrational noise from the naysayers. Although these naysayers all seem to have differing favorite coins and pet projects, they all agree on one thing: BSV is a scam! This likely has something to do with BSV’s vision of the inevitability of a one-blockchain future with no room for unregistered security tokens de jour. Either way, much of the consensus cryptocurrency media is routinely either misinformed or dishonest in their attempts to critique BSV.
Yesterday’s BSV noise came in the form of “concern trolling” from BitMEX Research.
BitMEX, one of the largest KYC/AML non-compliant exchanges in the cryptocurrency industry, alerted its Twitter followers that BSV had hard forked via a “non-consensus chainsplit”. The implication being that the once-unified BSV blockchain had split into two, and transactions on one would no longer be reflected on the other. Much like a BTC transaction being distinct from a BSV transaction. This framing is nonsense.
What the tweet described is called an orphaned block. Orphaned blocks are not only nothing to be worried about, they are the explicit design of bitcoin and a key part of bitcoin’s incentives and thus economic security. For a more technical understanding of orphaned blocks, read Bitstock’s explanation here.
End users who broadcast transactions and simply want them included in the next block need not worry about which miner earns the right to mine that block, either way, their transaction will be included in the blockchain. Thus, an orphaned block is a complete non-event for end users. However, what end users do need to worry about, is that miners continue to be properly incentivized to create this type of network. If miner incentives to continually innovate are removed, then miners will no longer provide bitcoin’s exclusive user experience that includes highly secure, nearly instant, and nearly free transactions. Without the risk of orphaned blocks which miners account for by reinvesting profits into the best hardware and software possible, this strong incentive would not exist. The removal of these types of hyper-competitive miner incentives is why neutered blockchains like BTC cannot offer what BSV offers.
As BSV entrepreneur Attila Aros noted in a Tweet exchange with BitMEX Research, the framing of this tweet ignored the most important aspect of user impact.
Without a proper explanation of the orphaned block’s non-existent user impact, it’s hard to imagine BitMEX was not intentionally trying to cause alarm. This type of misinformation is reminiscent of last week’s “pump and dump” concern trolling. It’s not surprising that parties with business models and legally non-compliant ethos antithetical to the BSV vision of bitcoin would engage in these dishonest tactics.