First published 16 November 2020. The split was 15 November 2018. Expanded in October 2026 so the ticker is not described as bitcoin, and so a court finding about a person is not described as a finding about the coins. Bitcoin SV is a proof-of-work chain that split from Bitcoin Cash. The last block the two chains share is 556,766. What is Bitcoin Cash (BCH)? is the chain that kept the BCH ticker. What is Bitcoin, in plain language? is the chain that had already split away in 2017. Bitcoin Cash and Bitcoin SV split. Tickers are not the same asset. is that week, written as news. This page is the coin that did not keep the BCH name.
The argument was about the rules of that upgrade. One side wanted canonical transaction ordering and new script operations. The SV software, promoted by Craig Wright and nChain, rejected that set and raised the block-size cap toward 128 megabytes, against Bitcoin Cash’s 32. The cap has been raised again since. A larger block is a capacity claim. It is not a second bitcoin. Both camps pointed miners at the fork. Both chains kept producing blocks. Exchanges then chose which ticker meant which coins. This page will not describe that contest.
Same shape of address. Not the same coins
If you held BCH in your own keys at block 556,766, you had a claim on both tapes. If an exchange held them, the exchange decided whether to credit BSV, and when. The split did not ship a clean separation of signatures. A transaction built for one chain could be valid on the other until wallets added a distinction. That is why a 2018 screenshot is a bad instruction. This page will not describe the copy. A BSV address can be a string of the same shape as a Bitcoin address. The ledger is not Bitcoin’s. The wrong network is still the wrong city.
The supply cap is 21 million, and the subsidy steps down on the four-year clock the chain inherited. Those numbers are a family resemblance. They are not a claim that the coins are bitcoin, or that they are BCH. Miners can point machines at more than one of these chains. They do not merge the ledgers by doing so.
Craig Wright, who promoted the fork, has long claimed to be Satoshi Nakamoto. In March 2024 a judge of the High Court in London, in a case brought by the Crypto Open Patent Alliance, found that he is not. A ticker that says Satoshi’s Vision is a name. It is not that finding, and it is not bitcoin. Nothing here is an instruction to mine, to split a wallet, or to buy BSV.
