Bitcoin Satoshi Vision is a fork of Bitcoin Cash. Like Bitcoin Cash, BSV intends to scale on-chain with large blocks.
The difference between Bitcoin Cash and BSV is ideological. Where the BCH community is distrustful of government, BSV is not.
The leads to a different scaling approach. Since BSV proponents are not worried about government surveillance, the Bitcoin SV chain has no need for decentralization. It can be hosted by as few or as many miners as will compete to build the chain.
The name ‘Satoshi Vision’ is partly indicative of this approach as Satoshi said Bitcoin would eventually be hosted in large data centers.
Fee Market Solutions
Cryptocurrencies are intended to be means of payment. Bitcoin SV recognizes this, but BSV’s scaling approach is different than other cryptocurrencies.
Bitcoin SV is increasing block size to allow a true free market between miners and users via miners’ fees. Instead of payment transactions, BSV will charge fees for storing data at first.
Because centralization is no threat per Bitcoin’s incentives and BSV’s love of transparency, only miners which are able to store large volumes of data will remain on the network.
To promote this data storage fee market, the Bitcoin SV community developers are creating applications that use the SV blockchain as a data storage layer.
Immutable data storage is not in high demand, and currently prohibitively expensive on BSV for traditional storage. Timestamping data to create an immutable record is a valuable application of blockchain, but there’s not enough demand to make it worthwhile.
However, use as a traditional server is a good fit for a centralized blockchain like Bitcoin SV.
Storage on BSV
SV fans are calling this data storage layer Metanet and have started to build on it.
Bitcoin SV is technically capable of being the data storage layer of the internet. The question is can BSV compete with traditional storage providers?
Short of illegal applications which the BSV community is opposed to, there are few use-cases for this immutable storage at fees of 1 satoshi per byte.
However, at a lower fee per byte of data, Bitcoin SV might be able to undercut competitors.
As an example, we’ll use Google Cloud’s price per GB of storage and compare it to BSV miners’ costs. If BSV can undercut Google at any price point, it will slowly steal market share while accruing economies of scale. Economies of scale would afford miners lower costs and enable continual undercutting of competitors with large overhead costs.
Before modeling BSV’s price under these circumstances, we must see if it’s economical for BSV to provide this service.
Bitcoin SV vs. Google
The use case we’re examining is the most basic that Bitcoin SV can provide – cold storage of data.
A quick note: this means infrequent or no retreival of data. Thanks to public block explorers with limited API calls, this is about what we have.
The price of data retrieval is a different issue, but we assume a specialized node could provide the service more cheaply than large data centers like Google or Amazon.
Coldline storage with Google Cloud costs $0.007 per GB with a minimum of three months. To determine whether BSV miners could compete with this, we can approximate the costs incurred by the network.
Most BSV miners are profitable at present, and the cost of including a transaction into a block is negligible, so we assume the only additional costs are storage space in the form of HDD disks.
The cost per GB of storage is $0.016 and halving every 18 months or so according to Moore’s Law. A user deciding between Google Cloud and BSV at-cost would see the Bitcoin SV chain is cheaper than Google at their 3-month minimum.
But we can’t compare the costs of just one miner – since storage is redundant, the cost to the network is at least the cost of required hard drives for each miner.
We’ve included an adjustable assumption for the number of miners in the model which you can follow along with.
At scale it would be quite costly and likely unprofitable for smaller miners which would keep this number down. Consensus seems to be that about three miners would maintain the network.
This would be sufficient for the decentralization required by redundant data storage, or transparent cash transactions.
The cost of storage would also increase as more miners entered the network if they tried to pass these costs on, which limits the viability of the network for storage in the first place.
Assuming three miners providing data storage at or close to cost, the price of data storage on BSV would be a one time fee of 4.8 cents per GB.
A user comparing prices with Google would see a breakeven at 7 months.
Global Data Storage
The internet is growing at 70 TB per second.
We’re using gigabytes (GB) as a common denominator – 70 TB is 70,000 GB.
10% of that would allow everyone on Earth to upload a few photos to Facebook per day and create some short videos to upload as well.
In the model, we also include an assumption that this user-generated content suitable for immutable storage doubles in size every year.
With our default assumptions, the cost of storing all this data would be $10.6 billion in 2019, and around $135 billion in 2030.
All of this would be paid in BSV.
Using the circulating supply of BSV and the equation of exchange, we can calculate what each BSV would be worth in this system.
Simplified, the equation of exchange shows that the circulating supply of a currency is worth what that currency is used to purchase, divided by the velocity of that currency – the average number of times each unit circulates.
In the model, we estimate the circulating amount of BSV based on bitcoin issued, the number of lost coins and an adjustable ‘hodl’ percentage.
We estimate velocity at 12 to simulate users refilling their balances once per month.
Combining all of our factors into the equation of exchange yields a value of $84 for 2019, and $869 in 2030 with our default assumptions.
At the time of writing, the price is $83.18 – this is purely coincidental, as our assumptions are simulating massive amounts of on-chain storage when in reality there is very little.
Feel free to make a copy of the model and change these assumptions.
BSV as a medium of exchange
If you do adjust the assumptions of the model, you’ll find that that no matter what constraints you include, BSV simply isn’t that valuable as a medium of exchange for just data storage.
However, if the Bitcoin SV blockchain actually became the data storage layer of the internet, it would likely be used for other things.
First on that list would likely be payments for data retrieval i.e. internet service – this would add some value to BSV.
It’s the BSV community’s hope that as the currency native to the internet, BSV would be adopted for all payments.
It’s possible, but because BSV is highly traceable and lacks anonymity, it’s not a given. Some private citizens care about their privacy, but more than this, governments and politicians value the ability to transact anonymously.
The dystopian median between governments’ conflicting interest in surveillance and politicians’ desire for anonymity of transactions would be a mandate that private citizens use BSV for payments while governments and politicians use some other anonymous currency like Monero (XMR).
Short of a government mandate, though, it seems unlikely BSV will be adopted for all payments, but not impossible.
With the way the BSV community is ingratiating themselves to governments by proactively designing legally compliant applications, a bet on BSV is a bet on government endorsement. It’s not necessarily a misplaced bet, but seems likely to lead to dystopian outcomes.
BSV proponents imagine citizens keeping politicians accountable using this system. This seems unlikely – surveillance doesn’t tend to work two ways. Beyond that, this could also legitimize redistribution schemes and create mob rule.
In conclusion, if miners lower the satoshi per byte fee, BSV can become the data storage layer of the internet. It could also be adopted for payments in the future, but not a future we’d support.