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Bitcoin SV’s scalability means it will one day be capable of hosting billions of people on a daily basis, claims the project’s lead engineer.

Daniel Connolly, a member of the SV development team, told Crypto Briefing that billions of people should be able to use the payments protocol. As the block size gradually increases, hopefully to 2 GB by the end of next year, more people will be able to use Bitcoin SV without putting too much strain on the network.

“We aim to have 5 billion people [using BSV] daily”, said Connolly, at a CoinGeek conference in London. “It’s still a long way away, but it will become possible so far as we scale.”

Bitcoin SV (‘Satoshi Vision’) was a proposed protocol implementation for the Bitcoin Cash (BCH) network upgrade, which took place earlier this month. BSV increased the block size from 64 MB to 128 MB. Supporters, including Calvin Ayre, the founder of CoinGeek, and Craig Wright from nChain, said it was the only solution for creating scalable payments that remain on the network – ‘on-chain’.

Originally a proposal for Bitcoin Cash, not everyone agreed with SV. Most notably, Roger Ver, from Bitcoin.com, and Bitmain’s Jihan Wu, proposed their own rival implementation, known as Bitcoin ABC. When the hard fork happened, ABC, which had a larger share of the hashing power, became the preferred implementation.

Within a week, most exchanges and data aggregators had accepted ABC as Bitcoin Cash. But followers of SV stayed on their own network. Bitcoin SV became its own independent blockchain network, currently valued at over $1.7bn.

Will there be Bitcoin SV users?

The main priority for Bitcoin SV is scalability. Connolly says that the plan is currently for the block size to increase to 512 MB in May and then to 2 GB by next November. Within 18 months they want to remove a limit on block sizes and allow miners to decide for themselves the size of blocks they wish to mine.

Scalability is the main aim. SV was able to handle 1.6m transactions during a four hour stress test, conducted the week before the fork. But as the name – Satoshi Vision – implies, the project wants to remain truthful to what they see as the only fully decentralized and viable blockchain. This, they say, is encapsulated by Satoshi Nakamoto’s Bitcoin whitepaper.

Simit Naik, nChain’s Director of Business Services, explained that SV was a way to restore Bitcoin back to what was originally imagined. “Satoshi outlined a perfectly usable peer-to-peer transaction system from day one”, he said. “Others entered the space later and wanted to fundamentally change Bitcoin into a technological tool. But the whole point of Bitcoin is it’s an economic model, why does it need to change?”

Naik believed onboarding 5bn people is a realistic ambition for Bitcoin SV. It wants to be a decentralized alternative to Visa or Mastercard but it needs to convince its target market. He argues that creating a scalable network, one with faster payments and smaller transaction fees, is the answer. Targeting parts of the world that still lack access to modern financial services will improve mass-adoption.

But is it? The CoinGeek Conference this week highlighted wounds were still fresh from the hash war. Craig Wright said yesterday he would use ABC to fertilize his garden.

The animosity was palpable. Naik, for instance, didn’t think ABC could ever join back with SV. The dispute was irreconcilable for him. “[A chain merge] would make a mockery of the SV project,” he said. “They made their decisions, they need to stick with it. Even if it kills them.”

Scalability is important. But users also want professionalism from their payments providers. Infighting and personal insults won’t help, and serious individuals and businesses will go elsewhere.

It’s ironic that, while trying to entice businesses and users, Satoshi Vision remains blind to its own scarred features.

Disclaimer: The author is not invested in any cryptocurrency or token mentioned in this article, but holds investments in other digital assets.