Bitcoin SV Shatters 1GB Block Size in Testnet

LONDON, May 23, 2019 /PRNewswire/ -- For Bitcoin to have any chance of replacing existing payment options, it needs to scale to the point where it can handle as many or more transactions than those methods offer. Bitcoin SV (BSV) is proving it's capable of that massive scaling, with the nChain BSV Node Team, with the help of the Satoshi Shotgun team, showing on the Bitcoin SV Scaling Test Network (STN) that they can now achieve 1.42GB blocks.

The team conducted the tests on May 21, and had the plan of testing bigger block sizes in 200MB increments, until they hit either 1GB or started encountering a natural limit in the software. These increased block size tests were made possible by the recent upgrade to BSV 0.2.0, which now allows block sizes of up to 10GB on the testnet.

They quickly saw the success they were looking for, surpassing previous records and mining five 1GB+ blocks in total, with two at 1.42GB. They encountered two small issues, with block explorers experiencing degraded services and bandwidth restrictions in China affecting a node, but they didn't cause any major issues. Brad Kristensen, STN operations manager, wrote that they ended the test because the "Stresstest team and the nChain team both needed some sleep."

Discovering those two issues were a productive step though. As Kristensen notes, the reason for testing higher block sizes was to "identify those breaking points well in advance," so they could be addressed before the mainnet gets bigger blocks.

The biggest block handled 359,793 transactions, which is quite a feat when compared to the narrow capacity of Bitcoin Core (BTC). Kristensen notes in the test plan that transaction counts are more of a constraint than block sizes now, and this test was a way to help analyze that.

These new 1GB+ block sizes are being rightly celebrated in the BSV community. Dr. Craig Wright, the man behind the pseudonymous name Satoshi Nakamoto and creator of the Bitcoin whitepaper, said of the news:

"When I started developing bitcoin, the existing Visa network could process 15 million Internet purchases a day. It is now closer to 25 million a day but with the results from my team we have shown that bitcoin will shortly be able to exceed this level. With Moore's law bitcoin is capable now of scaling faster than Visa or MasterCard combined."