Bitcoin Core (BTC) is a sinking ship. This is the position of Philipp Elhaus, an IT project manager and Scrum Master, who penned a long blog post on the merits of Bitcoin SV (BSV). The article is a good read for anyone in the crypto industry, even those who adamantly (and perhaps a little naively) oppose BSV. As the only blockchain that has proven on-chain scaling is feasible and can be integrated without any complications, BSV continues to show that the original Bitcoin white paper was accurate and that it didn’t need to be manipulated the way it has been by other crypto projects.

Elhaus points out that BTC can only survive if it is attractive to miners, those individuals that maintain the network by verifying transactions. If those miners leave, however, the network becomes unstable. He explains, “As BTC’s block reward reduces over time, continuously more and more miners compete for an ever decreasing slice of that cake. The other income miners gain are transaction fees: Yet these are limited for BTC as the block size is fixed. This means there is a finite maximum amount of transactions ever possible per block. While the block reward shrinks, either transaction fees need to rise or the price of BTC altogether [sic]. It is to be expected that above a certain threshold, even at global adoption, the amount of people who are willing to pay fees that are 50,- USD per transaction or higher diminishes.”

The computer whiz asserts that BTC could be degraded in as few as five years, or as many as 13 years, depending on whether or not it can attract more money. However, “BTC will unlikely grow beyond the age of 25.”

The reason that this is going to happen is because BTC decided that the blockchain couldn’t scale on-chain, which is part of the reason the Lightning Network was created. However, it is more of a “band-aid” fix than a permanent solution—despite having become a permanent attempt at scaling.

Elhaus adds that the Lightning Network will never survive the test of governments, explaining, “Lightning enables Money Laundering, Terror Financing and Tax Evasion. It is a 2nd-layer tech that is based upon TOR’s onion layer principle. It doesn’t keep records and offers not pseudonymity or privacy but complete anonymity” and that running a Lightning Node could ultimately lead to the operator facing jail time.

This is where BSV comes in. In spite of a certain amount of negativity based on uncorroborated stories, it is in a position to deliver. Elhaus states, “As it’s a rather new fork and not established, BSV transaction volume is low and its supporting ecosystem very small… Yet the idea that proposes one global blockchain that sustains miners and itself through an ever increasing [sic] efficiency at confirming [transactions], and therefore making use of economies of scale, seems sound and not like a technological dead end. Therefore it can be stated that BSV’s utility is higher than those of BTC’s with a potential to increase that even more in the future.”

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