Bitcoin SV Seeing Consistent Transaction Growth, but Who’s Really Using It?

According to data taken from Coin.Dance, Bitcoin SV is now processing a greater number of transactions per block than Bitcoin (BTC). Despite seeing apparently more usage than the top cryptocurrency by market capitalization, the price of the digital currency championed by Craig Wright has still not caught up to that of BTC.

BSV Price Increase

As BeInCrypto reported Friday, the price of Bitcoin SV has been increasing over the last 24-hours or so. However, this seems much more likely to be related to developments in the Wright vs Kleiman case. Overall, BSV price has trended downwards faster than BTC, despite what its biggest fans call its superior “utility.” Bitcoin SV proponents are currently celebrating the revelation that BSV is processing more transactions than BTC. Twitter-based Bitcoin SV mouthpiece BSV (@BitcoinSV) tweeted the following Friday: https://twitter.com/BitcoinSV/status/1215668637035646977 Those who believe in the Bitcoin SV project champion the above statistic as clear evidence of the project’s utility. However, a closer look at the nature of this bumper transaction volume reveals that the number of transactions alone doesn’t tell the complete story. Data from BitInfoCharts shows the average value of transactions on each network. The average Bitcoin transaction is around 2.57 BTC, or about $20,500 at the time of writing. This compares to 1.67 BSV or just $248.54. Clearly, Bitcoin (BTC) is facilitating the transfer of a lot more value than BSV. Perhaps accounting for the much lower average transaction values is the fact that a huge number of Bitcoin SV transactions are still the result of an application called Weather SV. BeInCrypto reported on the original revelation during last summer. Rather than containing data relating to actual financial transactions, the additions to the blockchain caused by Weather SV instead contain arbitrary data about the weather.

Invalid “Transactions?”

Interestingly, another service is now also adding a huge number of transactions to the Bitcoin SV blockchain, Preev, which allows users to view BSV exchange rates that are uploaded to the blockchain. Like Weather SV, it adds “transactions” to the blockchain even if no cryptocurrency has actually been transacted.

weather svの影響ですかね pic.twitter.com/zoSOqQUAmb

— 損@Ash 仲基 (@HappyStopLoss) January 9, 2020

Although Bitcoin SV fans are celebrating the fact that transaction numbers on their favorite cryptocurrency network have surpassed those on BTC, with so few being actually related to the exchanging of monetary value, the figures can be deemed misleading. Even if it is possible to interpret the figures as a growing utility of the network, that apparent utility is yet to see any great increase in demand for the digital asset.