BitPico is back and ready for another attack, this time the target is Bitcoin Cash (BCH), which they want to force to hard-fork in September.

BitPico (BTC Hodler/whale, runs a big mining operation, cybersecurity experts) is a group of Bitcoin maximalists well known to the community after conducting a semi-successful attack to Lightning Network (LN) and being praised by Andreas Antonopoulos for doing that.

https://twitter.com/bitPico/status/975191758073159680

Now they are targeting Bitcoin Cash (BCH) with a 51% attack in mind.

https://twitter.com/bitPico/status/1009924475402539008

BitPico recently had an email interview with Coindesk (not released yet) in which they explained the reasons behind their actions:

“It is a stress test to validate the integrity of the Bitcoin Cash network on behalf of its investors. In the past Bitcoin has been attacked for good and for bad but its integrity remains intact which provides investor confidence. The #1 basic rule to all decentralized computer networks is that if it’s not attacked enough to resolve any problems then it will end badly.”

To the question “What kind of attacks are you executing?” they have answered:

“Everything from low-level TCP/IP stack attacks to high-level bitcoin cash protocol attacks. The combination guarantees several things: 1. The weakest nodes running on VPS’s will crash or run out of bandwidth and become non-responsive. 2. All other nodes will begin to stall out from multiple back-to-back pre-mined 32 Megabyte blocks. Our LevelDB stress testing shows that the Bitcoin Cash UTXO database on a complex 32 Megabyte block can require up to 200 Gigabytes of RAM to fully process and if this RAM is not available the UTXO database will become corrupt and if LevelDB doesn’t release the memory the OS will become unresponsive.”

The good news for Bitcoin Cash and Roger Ver is that if BitPico will fail to damage BCH and its blockchain, that will prove to what extent the network is decentralized.

Bad news is the people of BitPico know their thing.

They have already started:

https://twitter.com/bitPico/status/1010309235459096577

Needless to say that in the case of a successful attack it may well be the end of the BCH network and the leaders of its community, i.e. Roger Ver, Jihan Wu (co-founder of Bitmain) and Craig Wright (also known as Fake Satoshi). The key developers are Peter Rizun (bitcoin unlimited), Amaury Sechet (deadalnix) and Emin Gun Sirer. Let’s wait and see how that’ll play out.

But what is Bcash (BCH, sorry Roger) anyway? And what are the differences between BTC and BCH?

We won’t be discussing the entire years-old history of the scaling debate but we will try to give a short version while providing some authoritative source for the curious readers.

It all started with the Segwit implementation proposed by the Bitcoin Core team of developers. Such proposal has immediately faced the attacks of Jihan Wu and Bitmain because Segwit would marginalize his companies profits by disabling a feature called “ASICBoost”, which is an “improvement” to mining that gave his mining operation significant leverage.

Segwit enabled (from StopAndDecrypt):

• 32 Address Encoding — Built-in error checking making it less likely a mistyped address will be considered valid.

• Transaction Throughput Increase — The theoretical size limit for a block has been increased from 1MB to 4MB (2MB as average).

• Signature Aggregation (Schnorr) — Allows more transaction data (via “compression”) in a block, no matter the size of that block. Can be soft-forked in using SegWit script opcodes.

• Merklized Abstract Syntax Tree (MAST) — Significantly reduces the amount of script data necessary in smart contracts & transactions. Can be soft-forked in using SegWit script opcodes.

• Confidential Transactions — Allows the amount of Bitcoin you send in a transaction to be hidden, but provable if desirable. Can be soft-forked in using SegWit script opcodes.

• Lightning Network

In the meantime BCH proponents signed The New York Agreement with the idea of hard-forking the network to solve the scalability issues (Segwit 2X). This is the moment when a part of the bitcoin community decided to scale through an increase of the blocks size (BCH block today have a 32 MB size) at the expense of blocks propagation and latency (which, in the long run, have a centralizing effect).

With a 32MB block size, BitPico says the Bitcoin Cash network has become highly centralized (85% of nodes and hashing power controlled by a single actor, namely Bitmain) and prone to several kinds of attacks.

The block size debate is all about improving throughput (transactions per second) and just few people seem to be worried about latency, which is the key issue here. The problem with an ever-increasing block size can’t be solved by the progresses made with integrated circuit rates (Moore’s Law) nor by the ones made on bandwidth growth rates (Nielsen’s Law). No. The issue in the medium and long terms is LATENCY. Larger blocks demand better data propagation (latency) to counter node centralization but block size & data propagation speed do not scale at the same rate! (Ethereum faces the same problem, check it out for insights on latency and block propagation).

On the other hand Bitcoin (BTC) sticks to Segwit with a 2 MB block size and doesn’t have any plan to increase the block size further.

In the end, all in all, we believe that an ever-increasing block size in unsustainable and that the centralizing effects are too harmful for the BCH blockchain, which may be disrupted by the BitPico “stress test”.

The author of this article works along with Huobi Pro, the world famous crypto exchange, and everything written here represents only the author’s view.

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