Bitcoin Cash 51% attack – is it game over for BCH?

As if the controversy surrounding Dr Craig Wright, the one original head of Bitcoin Cash (along with Roger Ver) couldn’t get much worse, now his coin has been subject to a 51% attack - by his own mining pool. The past months have seen Dr Wright spend loads of time and money claiming to be Satoshi Nakamoto, the founder of Bitcoin, as well as the publisher of the original Bitcoin white paper and code. Roger Ver somehow became known as Bitcoin Jesus too. Dr Wright has also been in court suing many of his detractors, of which there are numerous. And now this attack. Can it get any worse for the two BCHs?

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Bitcoin Cash SV or BSV is a fork of BCH which is a fork of the original Bitcoin core BTC. And the founder, Dr Wright, has been raving on now for years that he is the real Satoshi and he runs the real Bitcoin and it’s his fork BSV that’s the real deal. Nobody believes him, yet just last week he filed an attempt to copyright the Bitcoin white paper, the open source document released under the pseudonym of Satoshi Nakamoto. Well it was during his first upheaval and hard fork that a reserve wallet of BCH tokens was created called “anyone can spend” although this was not the case. Rather the tokens were unspendable and just remained dormant in a wallet.

However, during an upgrade just under two weeks ago, an attacker exploited a vulnerability in the code and was able to access the neutral unspendable tokens for himself. The attack crippled the BCH network for half an hour and the majority of miners were unable to participate or confirm blocks. The hash rate on BCH had dropped to a dangerously low point of around 12% that of Bitcoin’s hash rate, making it vulnerable to attack. On seeing that an anonymous miner had accessed the unspendable BCH for himself, the main two miners of the token, BTC.top and BTC.com pooled resources and executed a “non-consensus reorg”. They made what some have called a friendly attack on their own blockchain so as to reverse the unknown miner’s attempt to steal the neutral tokens.

In one sense the motive appears to be benign, although the mining pool continued mining empty blocks during the obstruction just to receive mining rewards. But worse than that., by reversing the blockchain without any voting or consensus, BCH miners have broken the immutable and unchangeable code of the blockchain, the law of the land. They have censored what is supposed to be uncensorable. Regardless of their motive, they have shown that the Bitcoin Cash blockchain is vulnerable to attack, can be attacked and has been attacked. Therefore the entire blockchain is now in question, it’s tarnished and has lost credibility. It is broken.

By broken I mean that it has proven to us that it is not decentralized, and is therefore not strong enough code to be considered functional any more. Dr Wright’s attempt at usurping the mantle of Bitcoin and Satoshi is ruined and finished after this. Who in their right mind will ever take BCH seriously, particularly with their own personal money. The price has not shown too much of a reaction to the news yet, but those in the know, those who understand the ethics and principles of cryptocurrency have called BCH and BSV out as weak and vulnerable to attack and simply not robust enough, despite the fast transactions rate and scalability. This is useless if there is no security.

Of course, that being said, EOS has done the same thing in the past, when some insiders took executive decisions to also reverse a malicious hack a few months ago, and nobody seemed to worry too much about that. It does bring to light though the vulnerabilities in certain supposedly quality tokens and blockchains. Feathercoin was also once a fork of Litecoin that was destroyed a few years ago by just such a 51% attack. Will the reputation of BCH crumble in the same way now, bringing justice – as some say – to those who have behaved antisocially in the crypto community?

How can anyone ever take seriously again a blockchain where the two main mining pools are able to hijack it and reverse transactions whenever they feel like it, regardless of the intentions.? It simply makes no sense. Real crypto-enthusiasts have already written off Wright and Ver and their imitation Bitcoins, so this is just further evidence of their uselessness.

Tainted goods, as they say, a damaged or compromised blockchain where at any further time in the future the same to mining pools could join up again and rewrite the blockchain or reverse as they feel fit. This is not what bitcoin was built for. In fact the opposite is more the case. It was built to be tamper-proof and censorship-resistant. BCH has failed to provide this, despite the good intentions, as some followers claim. The principle still holds true that an attack was perpetrated and can be again. Well not with my money, so you can keep your BCH, both visions.

The risk of the same thing happening to the original Bitcoin blockchain is not a small one either. At present with the low hash rate, three mining pools could probably join up to orchestrate a 51% attack on Bitcoin too, according to blockchain.com and that would be disastrous. But so far it hasn’t ever happened, and so we continue... for now.

One thing is for sure though, and that is that the trouble causers BCHABC and BSV and particularly their contentious leaders Ver and Wright, are the lower point of the Bitcoin community, the wannabes and posers who seem to have more money than integrity, modesty, decency and etiquette. As a result their broken token can fall into the token trash heap with the likes of Feathercoin and others, while Bitcoin core and the rest march on.

Ref: https://www.coindesk.com/bitcoin-cash-miners-undo-attackers-transactions-with-51-attack