What’s the difference between Bitcoin Cash and BSV?
Similar to how Bitcoin Cash and BTC had a shared history up to a point, Bitcoin Cash and Bitcoin SV (BSV) also had shared history. BSV forked off from Bitcoin Cash in November 2018. BSV direction and development is centered around Craig Wright, who has controversially claimed numerous times to be Satoshi Nakamoto, the creator of Bitcoin. So far Wright has failed to offer any proof for this claim.
The split between Bitcoin Cash and BSV was due to the latter's supporters wanting to remove or avoid some of the upgrades implemented on Bitcoin Cash such as canonical transaction ordering (CTOR) and various opcodes in the Bitcoin Script virtual machine. Bitcoin SV developers also implemented extremely large blocks very quickly. BSV currently has blocks up to 4 GB in size. However, a lack of optimizations in other areas of the ecosystem has made node syncing problematic. Additionally, most of the BSV blockchain is full of arbitrary non-economic data such as weather data.
In recent years BSV has focused on being a government regulation-friendly blockchain. As a consequence of that ethos, BSV has implemented UTXO freezing and UTXO confiscation to be able to carry out court-ordered asset seizures. These are extremely odd features compared to other cryptocurrencies since the birth of cryptocurrency was tightly linked to a rejection of the centralized world of fiat currencies and government regulation.
As a result of issues with node synchronization, the bloat of arbitrary data on the blockchain, and controversial leadership; many block explorers and cryptocurrency exchanges have dropped support for BSV.
In contrast to BSV, Bitcoin Cash has worked continually to reenable or introduce opcodes in the virtual machine to improve the protocol's functionality. Bitcoin Cash has also carefully increased the block size while taking care to optimize the rest of the ecosystem for increased throughput. This more thought-out approach has led to very stable upgrades, solid network performance, and continued support in block explorers and exchanges.
Another distinction from BSV is that Bitcoin Cash development is highly decentralized. No person or group controls the direction of the protocol. Any individual is free to propose changes and try to gain feedback and consensus. Node teams, miners, businesses, and other stakeholders must cooperate to find the best solutions to problems and improvements to Bitcoin Cash.