On April 18th , BitcoinSV blockchain has suffered a series of “block re-oganizations,” putting the integrity of its network in question.
According to BitMEX Research, the analysis wing of cryptocurrency exchange BitMEX, their “Bitcoin Cash SV [sic] node experienced two block re-organizations. First, a three-block re-organization, followed by a six-block re-organization.”
The company announced it on its Twitter account, raising questions about the series of block organizations that the blockchain is suffering from.
Block re-organizations occur when cryptocurrency miners are forced to “orphan” blocks after they’ve been mined. This can happen when the network is too slow to “propagate” blocks effectively, and bigger blocks (like the ones featured by BitcoinSV) are especially susceptible to orphaning.
Blockchain reorgs occur when miners are forced to orphan blocks after mining them. This usually happens when the size of a block is too large or when the network is too slow to propagate these new blocks. BSV has an especially large maximum block size of 128 MB, which was one of the major points of contentions of its fork. Note that a few months ago, Bitcoin Cash blockchain forked to create two parallel chains- Bitcoin Cash ABC and Bitcoin Satoshi Vision.
While BitMEX detected two block reorgs, the trouble runs deeper. The last time this occurred was in November 2018, when two blocks – one 16MB and another 13MB in size – were orphaned for being too large. At the time, BitMEX researchers also blamed bad network connectivity. This means that the chain has undergone three reorgs in just six months.
BitcoinSV is a fork of Bitcoin Cash (which is a fork of Bitcoin). It raised Bitcoin Cash‘s block size limit from 32MB to 128MB. Bitcoin‘s block size limit is still 1MB.