Common misconceptions

Everybody has heard of bitcoin, and most people have a picture of it. A lot of that picture is wrong, and the parts that are wrong tend to be the parts a BSV product contradicts: that it is slow, expensive, anonymous, lawless or only for saving.

This page takes the common ones in turn. Each says what is actually true, where that comes from, and what it changes for the person designing the product. Your users will arrive believing some of these, so it helps to know which.

Economics

"Bitcoin gets more expensive as more people use it"

Only if capacity is held fixed. Fees rise when transactions compete for a limited amount of space in each block. Remove the limit and they do not have to compete: each block carries more, and the fee per transaction can stay a fraction of a cent.

That was Satoshi's plan from the start. Two days after the paper was posted, he worked out that carrying Visa's entire daily volume would take about 100GB of bandwidth a day, "about $18 worth of bandwidth at current prices", and expected that to seem small by the time it was needed. BSV has no fixed protocol limit on block size; miners raise capacity as demand grows. See Satoshi had a Vision.

For a design: never show fee pickers or "network busy" warnings. See Why BSV is different.

"Bitcoin is a store of value, not money"

It was designed as money. The whitepaper's title is "A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System", and its first sentence is about commerce on the internet. Something you can spend can also be kept, but the reverse does not follow: a coin that is too expensive to move is only good for keeping.

For a design: the everyday surface of a BSV product is a payment, not a portfolio. See Visual language.

"Layer two networks are part of bitcoin"

They are separate systems built on top of it. A layer two network keeps its payments off the chain, with its own operators, its own rules and its own ways of failing, and settles to the chain only occasionally. Whatever its merits, a payment made on it is not a bitcoin transaction until it settles, and the guarantees in the whitepaper do not cover it in the meantime.

For a design: on BSV the payment is the transaction, recorded on the chain itself, so there is no second network for the user to understand, fund or recover from.

People and society

"Bitcoin is anonymous"

It is pseudonymous. Every transaction is public and permanent. What is not public is who controls which key, and that link can often be made by anybody who analyses the chain or knows one party. The whitepaper describes privacy as "keeping public keys anonymous", not as transactions being hidden.

Satoshi did not want it sold as anonymous either. Of a draft announcement for the 2010 release, he wrote: "We don't want to lead with 'anonymous'."

"Anonymity is the point"

Accountability is closer to the point. A public, permanent record of every transfer is what lets anybody check ownership without trusting a bank, and it is also what lets a court follow stolen money. Privacy comes from keeping identities off the chain, not from making the chain unreadable.

"Bitcoin replaces banks"

It replaces one thing banks do. Bitcoin removes the need for a trusted middleman to move and record money. It does not lend, so it does not replace mortgages, business loans or the rest of what a bank is for. Satoshi's complaint about banks was their cost and the trust they require to move money, and that is the part bitcoin answers.

For a design: compete on what a payment costs and how fast it settles, not on ending banking.

"Proof of work wastes energy on every transaction"

The energy is spent on blocks, not transactions. Miners compete to find each block, and the difficulty adjusts to how much computing power is competing, not to how many transactions the block holds. A block with a million transactions takes no more work to find than a block with ten. Capping block size therefore raises the energy spent per transaction, and letting blocks grow lowers it. Where that energy comes from is a separate question, and a real one.

How it works

"Bitcoin transactions are encrypted"

They are signed, not encrypted. A transaction is a public message, readable by anybody, with a digital signature proving the owner of the coins authorised it. Nothing on the chain is secret unless an application encrypts it before writing it there.

"Bitcoin Script is too limited to build real applications"

BSV's position is that it is a complete programming system. Script is deliberately simple inside one transaction: it has no loops. BSV's view is that it is nevertheless Turing complete in practice, because a computation can carry its state from one transaction to the next across as many transactions as it needs, with no limit on script size. Satoshi designed it for far more than simple payments:

The design supports a tremendous variety of possible transaction types that I designed years ago. Escrow transactions, bonded contracts, third party arbitration, multi-party signature, etc.

The Chronicle upgrade restored the remaining original opcodes in 2026. Whether Script counts as Turing complete is argued over; what it can do on BSV is not, and it is a great deal more than its reputation.

"More hash rate means more security"

Hash rate is only part of it. It sets what an attack costs. What makes an attack pointless is the incentive Satoshi built in: a miner with enough power to cheat "ought to find it more profitable to play by the rules", because honest mining pays and an attack destroys the value of what it wins.

History and law

"Bitcoin was announced on the Cypherpunks mailing list"

It was announced on the Cryptography mailing list. Satoshi posted the paper on 31 October 2008 to the Cryptography list hosted at metzdowd.com, a moderated list for working cryptographers, not to the Cypherpunks list it is often credited to. See Satoshi had a Vision.

"The genesis block is a protest against banks"

It points at bailouts, not at banking. The first block carries one line of text: "The Times 03/Jan/2009 Chancellor on brink of second bailout for banks". That was the front page of The Times in London that morning. The article is a news report, and what it reports is the government preparing to put more public money into the banks because "the £37 billion part-nationalisation last year has failed to keep credit flowing".

Read as a comment, the headline is aimed at the state taking over banks and taxpayers carrying their losses, not at banks taking deposits and making loans. It is also a timestamp: proof the block was made no earlier than that day.

"We know who Satoshi is"

Nobody has proved it. What the record shows is how he wrote: British spellings such as "optimisation" on the mailing list, and British turns of phrase such as "Writing a description for this thing for general audiences is bloody hard" on the forum. Whether Satoshi was one person or several is not known either.

"The 1 MB block limit was part of the original design"

It was added in 2010, and meant to be raised. Satoshi committed the 1 MB limit on 15 July 2010, without announcement, and it took effect that September. A developer who reviewed the early code, Ray Dillinger, later recalled it as Hal Finney's suggestion, a guard against spam while the network was small. That October, Satoshi wrote "We can phase in a change later if we get closer to needing it", and described how. BSV removed the limit.

"Bitcoin is outside the law"

It is not. Courts treat bitcoin as property. They freeze stolen coins, order them returned, and decide who owns them when that is disputed; in England, the High Court held crypto assets to be property in AA v Persons Unknown (2019). Satoshi refused to describe bitcoin as "outside the reach of any government".

"Whoever holds the keys owns the coins"

Holding the keys is control, not ownership. Somebody who takes your car keys can drive your car away, and somebody with a copy of your house keys can let themselves in, but neither the car nor the house becomes theirs. Bitcoin keys work the same way. A thief who copies them can move your coins, but does not own them, and a court can order them returned.

How much that protection is worth depends on the amount. For small sums, bitcoin behaves like cash: lose a few pounds' worth, or have it taken, and nobody will chase it for you. For larger sums, the law can and does step in. Courts in England have frozen stolen bitcoin and ordered its return since AA v Persons Unknown (2019), and the Property (Digital Assets etc) Act 2025 confirmed in law that digital assets can be personal property. The public record helps here: because every transfer is permanent and visible, stolen coins can be followed. On BSV a court order can also be carried out on the chain itself, freezing the coins and returning them; see The alert key.

Property rights are a long-standing libertarian position, and bitcoin honours them in its design: coins move only with their owner's signature. But a right is only as strong as the courts, laws and shared rules that enforce it, and those belong to everybody. Bitcoin succeeds as money only if it is money for everyone: people of any politics, any income and any level of interest in technology. A product that treats it as the badge of one camp shrinks its own market. See Build for people who do not care about bitcoin.

Explain what holding keys lets someone do, and what a backup protects. See Private key management.

Related

• Satoshi had a Vision
• Why BSV is different
• Talking about BSV
• Glossary