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Craig Wright’s Bitcoin SV is a ‘Total Ghost Town’: Analyst

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P. H. Madore
Last Updated

Citing data that demonstrates that over 86% of all Bitcoin SV volume originated from just 100 transactions, analyst Kevin Rooke told Twitter that Craig Wright’s pet crypto project is a “total ghost town.”

Indeed, the stated purpose of the Bitcoin SV fork is to have the capacity for millions of transactions, making the base layer of the cryptocurrency to be competitive with the likes of Visa or Mastercard. This the reason Bitcoin SV developers want blocks that are potentially gigabytes in size  and argue that big data centers should be able to handle the traffic.

Bitcoin SV: Ghost Town or Underrated Crypto Project?

While it may be true that big data centers can handle the transaction volume, people immediately become concerned about the centralization that comes with such a barrier to entry.

Inevitably, it requires a lot of money to run a mining outfit that has to handle potentially thousands of gigabytes per week. You then have to serve them out, which requires even more bandwidth. Nevermind getting synced up with the network in the first place.

All of this assumes that there is demand for all that block space. In the case of Bitcoin SV, so far there hasn’t been, as Rooke points out. The ultimate failure thus far is for the cryptocurrency to gain any real traction.

Bitcoin Cash and Bitcoin SV proponents are often at odds, but they share similar goals. The difference is that Bitcoin Cash is rather popular at this point. There’s a city in Australia where you can use it virtually everywhere – many places exclusively. This type of adoption eventually leads to real transaction activity, with people finding real value in the underlying technology.

https://twitter.com/haQan_chan/status/1142762793504038914

No Blockchain Popular Enough

Bitcoin Cash isn’t alone in dwarfing Bitcoin SV in popularity. The same, of course, can be said of Bitcoin (BTC), Ethereum, and other currencies. Adoption is rather wide. And when you look at the decentralized online applications built on EOS and Tron, they too are popular.

None, however, are popular enough.

https://twitter.com/Kody_K_Official/status/1142996452718682115

The point of building massively scalable blockchains, like those envisioned by Craig Wright, is that this scalability will be necessary, after all. This is at the heart of the criticism.

Bitcoin and Ethereum are effectively the only blockchains facing scaling limitations at this point. Bitcoin blocks are consistently crowded, and fees are consequentially higher. Lightning Network adoption is far from complete.

Many believe that the Facebook Libra project is going to bring along a massive influx of new users. If this is the case, then whatever currency is both easiest to use and acquire will necessarily see the most demand. The drive to get rich will be overridden by the desire to use cryptocurrency.

This would effectively be the best outcome, and should it happen, billions and billions of retail dollars would be directed at a few popular, usable chains.