Bitcoin SV (BSV) performed a scheduled upgrade named Genesis on Feb. three. As about nodes have not yet updated, this resulted in a pocket-sized chain split where two versions of BSV be.

As reported by BitMEX Enquiry, the upgrade occurred at block height 620,538, or almost 8:30 PM EST. The subsequent block was considered invalid by quondam rules, signaling the hard fork.

Nigh i quarter of all blockchain nodes are even so on the old version, pregnant that these cannot synchronize to the main chain.

Furthermore, a concatenation dissever occurred several hours later. The old chain was extended by i cake, significant that some miners have as well failed to upgrade to the new rules.

This does not appear to exist a premeditated attempt at creating a new concatenation. With only ane block added in more than 10 hours, merely a very small-scale minority of miners are left behind the old chain.

What is Genesis?

Genesis changes many of the consensus rules for Bitcoin SV to remove all remaining limitations. The block size is now effectively unlimited. Instead of being hard-coded in the node software, block size is now a parameter that miners tin reduce manually.

This could potentially lead to issues down the line if not all miners agree to a item value. A block bigger than the maximum immune size for a certain grouping of users would exist considered invalid past them. By default this setting is unlimited.

Many other limits were raised likewise, such as the maximum size of a transaction or the number of owners for a multisig wallet.

The Bitcoin Script language at present has a formalized grammer that will be checked past consensus participants. The upgrade has as well restored OP_RETURN, an instruction for storing custom data on the blockchain.

While the changes are seemingly minor, any modification to consensus rules always requires a hard fork.