Bitcoin SV has now Split into Three Chains after Enormous 210 MB Block

Bitcoin Satoshi Vision (BSV), on the 3^rd of August, has now split into three chains due to a recent hard fork. Reportedly, the split occurred after the mining of a huge 210 megabyte (MB) block. The specifics of the split were disclosed by BitMEX Research in a tweet that highlighted the fact that the nodes on the network were on different chains and also at different heights.

Chain Specifics

The BitMex Research tweet noted that 65% of all the nodes on the network were at the current tip, forming the largest group on one chain. However, 17% were stuck on the announced 210 MB block will the remaining 19% were still on the “old pre-hardfork chain” and are yet to upgrade. The huge block is reportedly made up of 808,633 transactions and was mined by CoinGeek miner.

Problems with Running BSV Nodes

According to a post by BSV proponent and CEO of Money Button – a BSV-focused payment system, Ryan X. Charles, there are significant cost implications to successfully a running a BSV node. The post published on the Money Button blog, explained that the payment system was offline for at least three hours recently, because their node filled up its memory and was eventually crashed by a stress test.

He also mentioned monetary costs to running a node, stressing that it was difficult because there are no transaction charges. According to him,

“Running a node is expensive. Our new instance will cost thousands of dollars per month to operate. As blocks continue to get larger and we have to upgrade the instance many times, this cost will balloon. Since we do not earn money from transaction fees like miners, it will be too expensive for us to run a node.”

Any miners who are stuck on the old chain would very likely lose some money when the chain is disposed.