CSW's face was swollen! Miner-friendly? BSV mining profit is only 64% of ABC

When Craig Wright teamed up with CoinGeek founder Calvin Ayre to try to take over the Bitcoin Cash (BCH) network, the two predicted that their Bitcoin Cash client, Bitcoin SV (BSV), would soon gain widespread support among miners because they claimed it was a miner-friendly protocol specification. They boasted that widespread miner support would soon make the other BCH (i.e. ABC) no longer exist. However, the reality was reversed. Not long after the fork, many BSV supporters gave up the pursuit of "Satoshi's original vision" (CSW's definition of BSV).

Now that the fork war seems to have settled, Bitcoin ABC and Bitcoin SV have similar hashrates, but since the fork, ABC has accumulated 28.9% more proof of work than SV. It is worth noting that there is a stark contrast in the economics of mining the two networks.

Taking into account cryptocurrency prices, network difficulty and block rewards and using Bitcoin (BTC) as a benchmark, Coin Dance estimates that mining BTC is 50.6% more profitable than mining SV , which means that BSV miners are actually giving up a lot of profits when mining SV. This situation seems a bit ironic considering that BSV is supposed to be a miner-friendly implementation of Bitcoin Cash, and Bitcoin Cash itself claims to be a miner-friendly alternative to Bitcoin.

Speaking of BCH (ABC), despite its price collapse after the fork, it still has the highest mining profit rate among Bitcoin and Bitcoin forks. Currently, BCH (ABC) mining profitability is 3.90% higher than BTC and 56% higher than SV.

Of the three networks, Bitcoin is not only the most secure, but also has the most decentralized hashrate . BTC’s largest mining pool, BTC.com, accounted for 16.5% of the blocks mined in the past week (BTC.com is owned by Bitmain, which also owns AntPool. Together, these pools account for about 30% of the hashrate). In contrast, Bitcoin Cash has two Bitmain-related mining pools — ViaBTC and BTC.com — that control about 56% of BCH’s hashrate. BSV’s hashrate distribution is also very concentrated, with CoinGeek’s pool accounting for 36.1% of the total hashrate, while SVPool, operated by Craig Wright’s company nChain, owns another 20.8%.

As for on-chain scaling, BCH and BSV continue to process much smaller blocks than BTC. As of the time of writing, most BTC blocks are large blocks of over 1 MB. BCH has a 32 MB block size limit, with an average block of around 50 KB, while BSV (Craig Wright claims to increase the block size limit to 1 TB within two years) has an average block size of less than 13 KB.