Overview

How BSV nodes exchange data over the network (non-consensus)

This section is not part of the protocol. Everything here describes how nodes transport transactions, blocks, and control data between each other — it does not affect whether a transaction or block is valid. Two nodes that speak completely different network protocols can still agree perfectly on the contents of the blockchain, because validity is defined by the Specification, not by how bytes reach a peer.

This material is included here only to keep the networking documentation in one place alongside the rest of the reference. An independent implementation may use any transport it likes and remain fully interoperable, provided it enforces the same consensus rules.

Nodes discover each other and exchange transactions, blocks, and headers over a peer-to-peer network. There is no single mandated transport: different node implementations use different networking stacks, and none of them changes the validity of the data being carried.

The reference node software bitcoin-sv/bitcoin-sv speaks a message-based wire protocol derived from the original Bitcoin protocol, extended by the BSV Association to support unbounded block sizes and higher throughput. That protocol is documented here.

Pages

• SV Node Wire Protocol — the message framing, connection handshake, message-type catalogue, and the BSV-specific extensions (extended/large messages, multi-streams, protoconf, and the extended mempool message) as implemented by the reference node.

Documentation for the Teranode libp2p-based networking layer will be added to this section.

Relationship to the specification

Nothing in this section feeds into consensus. In particular:

• The serialization of a transaction or block on the wire is the same consensus serialization specified in Transactions and Blocks; the wire protocol only wraps that serialization in a network envelope for transport.
• Message-size limits, stream policies, and protocol-version negotiation are transport concerns. A node may reject, ban, or disconnect a peer for violating them without that having any bearing on whether the underlying transactions or blocks are valid.