Bitcoin SV is one of the most controversial projects in the crypto space, and it recently became even more controversial with its Quasar upgrade. The Quasar upgrade bumped up the block cap to a whopping 2GB, giving miners the power to add more transactions to each block and become more profitable. Within minutes of the upgrade going live, Bitcoin SV saw a 148MB block, and it has now seen that record smashed with a 210MB block. As the network grows, those running nodes are struggling to keep up. Money Button – one of the leading Bitcoin SV services – after launching its node ran out of memory due to the block size.
Running a BSV Node is Expensive
As soon as the Money Button BSV node ran out of memory, its service went down, causing chaos in the BSV community. Money Button admitted that the mistake was its own and that it was running an underpowered instance. It has now upgraded its instance to be able to cope with the largest block size available, but come the next Bitcoin SV upgrade in 2020, Money Button will have to upgrade yet again.
According to a Money Button blog post, it’s now costing thousands of dollars every month to run its BSV node – fees that it simply can’t cover. Money Button doesn’t take any fees from transactions, all it does is initiate the transfer of money between two parties. Once the block cap is removed and miners are left to decide the size of blocks, Money Button fears the cost of running a node will balloon out of control.
There is a Scalable Solution
Money Button highlights a solution that would fix this issue and save it potentially millions over its lifetime – wallets manually adopting new standards. If Wallets manually adopt Paymail, BIP 270, and Miner ID, no wallets will require their own node and this will help to bring the cost down of running its service. Unfortunately, wallets need to manually implement these changes, meaning Money Button could suffer more outages following the next block cap update.
A Truly Massive Block
On August 3rd, Bitcoin SV saw a huge 210MB block. This mammoth block contained over 800,000 transactions and gave miners an additional $1,849 in transaction fees. At the time of press, this is the biggest block so far to hit the BSV blockchain. If we see more blocks this size being generated, we can expect more services like Money Button to crash as they slowly upgrade their nodes.
Bitcoin SV is causing a headache for people and companies running nodes as the larger blocks require more storage space. Eventually, this will remove hobby nodes from the Bitcoin SV network and force companies to make a significant investment into running nodes on the network.
