Connor Murray

Calvin - you've overseen the preservation of the original Bitcoin protocol fully restored in April of this year, and you've helped show the world that this protocol can scale globally to the world. As someone who just wanted to see this network scale, I am so thankful for all you've done for the BSV ecosystem.

For years, the people who backed the original design kept building while the rest of the industry went another way. Teranode and the builders now producing amazing new solutions on BSV are what that patience produced.

I am so proud of the work being done at BSV Association, and I am deeply grateful for your trust in our mission and the work ahead.

This is a great visualization. Look at the shape: a ring of well-connected nodes in the middle, with work fanning out and aggregating through layers until the core only has to handle a single result.

That’s a mandala.

I’ve spent years on this question. In 2018 I wrote a piece that was eventually reposted on CoinGeek, “Bitcoin: A (decentralized) complex social network,” that started from the claim that Bitcoin’s miners form “a small-world near-complete network.” I wanted to know if it held up, so I turned to network theory, specifically Fernando Vega-Redondo’s Complex Social Networks.

What I found changed how I think about decentralization.

In network analysis, “the edges, or links, are more important than the number of nodes in a network.” What gives a network reach and resilience is how its nodes are connected, not how many there are.

Now apply that to Bitcoin. A miner only gets paid if the rest of the network builds on their block, so as a miner, you have a clear incentive to be highly-connected to the other miners in the network. Every miner is pushed toward connecting directly to every other miner. Merchants are pushed the same way: to stop double-spends, they broadcast to the best-connected nodes. Nobody designs the topology. The incentives produce it.

The result is a core that’s close to fully connected, where any miner is about one hop from any other, with everyone else arranged in layers around it. That’s a small-world network, and it’s what makes the design so innovative. Raising capacity doesn’t make the core more fragile, because the economics keep it tightly connected. Every other layer only has to verify what it touches.

So Ethereum’s new thesis, “scalability increases with decentralization,” is right, provided you measure decentralization by connectivity rather than node count. That’s the insight Bitcoin’s design was built on.

None of this is new. Satoshi wrote it down, again and again, before most of today’s crypto industry existed.

November 2008, before Bitcoin had even launched:

“Visa processed 37 billion transactions in FY2008, or an average of 100 million transactions per day. That many transactions would take 100GB of bandwidth.”

Running nodes, he said, “would be left more and more to specialists with server farms of specialized hardware.”

2009, in an email to Martti Malmi:

“The existing Visa credit card network processes about 15 million Internet purchases per day worldwide. Bitcoin can already scale much larger than that with existing hardware for a fraction of the cost. It never really hits a scale ceiling.”

July 2010, on BitcoinTalk:

“The current system where every user is a network node is not the intended configuration for large scale. That would be like every Usenet user runs their own NNTP server. The design supports letting users just be users. The more burden it is to run a node, the fewer nodes there will be. Those few nodes will be big server farms.”

A well-connected core of specialists, with users at the edge who simply use it. That’s the mandala, described before the first block was mined.

Here’s where things stand 17 years later:

- Visa: about 705 million transactions a day (257.5B in FY2025), or roughly 8,000 per second on average.

- Ethereum L1: a record of 25.9 transactions per second in Q2 2026, about 2.2 million a day.

Ethereum’s base layer still hasn’t reached the 15 million daily online purchases Satoshi used as his benchmark in 2009. Visa as a whole handles about 300 times more.

Meanwhile, in 2018 Vitalik called 128MB blocks “an insanely stupid idea.” Since then, BSV has mined a block of nearly 4GB, and Teranode averaged over 1 million transactions per second across a two-week test. That’s more than 100 times Visa’s average.

Think about how much time, money and talent the industry spent trying to solve a problem whose answer was already in the original design. Much of that effort went into avoiding the plan rather than building it.

But we’re not here to dunk. Seeing the brightest people in crypto arrive back at the same shape is a good sign. Good engineering converges.

BSV has spent years running this architecture in production: Teranode at the core, overlays in the middle, SPV wallets at the edge. We’ve already paid for the hard lessons about what breaks at scale, and we're happy to compare notes.

The answer was there in 2009. All any of us had to do was build it.

🔗 My 2020 deep dive: coingeek.com/bitcoin-a-dece…

Cool!

I'm going to use Joel's post here as an opportunity to explain why we're doing what we're doing at BSVA and the BRC process (which was started in large part thanks to @ProjectBabbage)

Backwards compatibility is a virtue, until what you’re staying compatible with is the bottleneck.

Joel’s point is fair in general. New software usually should respect what came before. But the way Bitcoin wallets have always worked is not how Bitcoin was designed to work. It’s a workaround that stopped working the moment BSV got busy.

We’ve already tested it at scale. BSV has mined blocks of nearly 4GB. When application traffic peaked, the network kept producing blocks. What fell over was everything around it: indexers, exchanges, explorers, ElectrumX servers, and services that tried to keep up by scanning the whole chain for every address they cared about. Mining scaled. The application layer didn’t.

That’s the core problem with the ElectrumX model. A wallet asks a server, “What happened to my addresses?” To answer, that server has to index everyone’s history. Its cost grows with the whole network, not with its users. At 4GB blocks, that design isn’t old-fashioned. It’s broken.

Satoshi’s design was different. Payments go directly between the people involved. The original client even let you pay straight to an IP address. The whitepaper describes Simplified Payment Verification (SPV): you keep block headers and check a Merkle proof for the transactions that matter to you. Nobody has to watch the entire chain on your behalf.

That’s what the BRC-100 stack is built on. Transactions travel peer-to-peer with their own proofs attached (BEEF), and wallets verify them against headers. Your wallet’s workload grows with your own activity, not the world’s.

Does that make us right about everything? No. People raised real criticisms of MessageBox, and that’s directly why work is now underway (Thank you @deggen !) on WebRTC-based peer-to-peer connections. Keep the criticism coming. Better still, contribute. We want this to be the most scalable, usable stack ever built, and that takes people breaking it.

But “it’s not compatible with how we’ve always done things” isn’t a reason to stop. How we’ve always done things is what failed under real load. The miners are ready for terabyte blocks. Wallets and apps have to be designed to keep up now, not after the next wave of traffic takes them down again.

I think Joel, Cryptorebel, and others are raising good points that require us all to communicate in good faith. I hope to be a part of facilitating that conversation moving forward!

I want to address some of the common responses to this I've seen.

The biggest misconception about Bitcoin: “It isn’t real until it’s confirmed.”

Yesterday someone sent a transaction over a handheld radio with no internet and no phone signal. The pushback came straight away: “It doesn’t count until it settles on the blockchain.”

That objection gets something basic wrong about how commerce works, and about how Bitcoin was designed.

Accepting a payment and settling it were never the same thing.

When a shop takes a cheque, the money hasn’t moved yet. Card payments settle days later and can be reversed months later. Merchants accept them anyway, because commerce has never run on certainty. It runs on managed risk. The whitepaper says so in its first paragraph: under the existing system, “a certain percentage of fraud is accepted as unavoidable.”

Satoshi answered this in 2010.

In the “Bitcoin snack machine (fast transaction problem)” thread, he described accepting payments in seconds with “good-enough” checking. When someone pushed back, he wrote: “I didn’t say impermeable, I said good-enough,” and said the loss in practice would be “far lower than with credit cards.” He wasn’t selling a technical utopia. He was describing how real businesses work.

What the merchant actually knows offline

With Bitcoin (BSV), the customer presents the transaction along with Merkle proofs for its inputs. The merchant checks those against block headers stored on their own device. No internet is needed. In seconds they know the coins exist, they’re in the chain, and the signatures are valid.

The only remaining risk is a double-spend. Think about what that means in a physical shop. The customer is standing at your counter, on your cameras, buying something in person. Double-spending you there isn’t a clever attack on the protocol. It’s fraud, it’s a crime, and you know who did it. That’s exactly the same protection that kept cheques working for a century.

Confirmations are a dial the merchant sets, not a rule the network imposes.

Section 11 of the whitepaper works out double-spend probability as a function of how many blocks you wait. That only makes sense if the recipient chooses how long to wait. So:

- A coffee or a bus fare: accept it instantly.
- A laptop: maybe wait for the network to see it.
- A car: wait for confirmations before you hand over the keys.

Same protocol, different decisions, because the economics are different.

Where the misconception came from

Many people believe “Bitcoin needs confirmations” because BTC changed its relay policy so that unconfirmed transactions can be replaced (Replace-By-Fee). Once replacement became the norm, zero-confirmation payments stopped being trustworthy there, and a generation of users learned that waiting for blocks was the only safe option. That was a policy choice, not part of Bitcoin’s design. BSV kept the original first-seen rule, so the payment that reaches the network first is the one that counts.

The bottom line

Bitcoin was built for the real world, where there are laws, identities, cameras, reputations and courts. It was never meant to replace all of that with block confirmations. It was meant to make payments cheap, instant and final enough for the risk involved.

Offline payments on BSV aren’t a workaround. They’re the system working as Satoshi described it.