The Bitcoin Cash (BCH) community is preparing itself for another hash war as an unknown miner with Satoshi’s name in the block’s coin base accounts for 44% of current BCH hash rate. A Reddit user posted these findings on April 29, 2019.
Siren goes off for Hash War
As BCH prepares itself for a scheduled non-contentious hard fork in May 2019, an unknown miner bearing Satoshi’s name has gained 44% of the chains hash rate. The community suspects this is an attempt by the Bitcoin Satoshi’s Vision (BSV) faction to stir up a second hash war after BSV forked off the BCH blockchain.
BSV miners have been mining at a tremendous loss since the split from BCH and so, it wouldn’t be too outlandish to think that a handful of BSV miners are trying to recoup a portion of their losses with the added benefit of causing disarray in the BCH chain.
Cash Coin Dance statistics show that over the week, the unknown miner gained 35% of the hash rate and this increased to 44% over the last day. In light of this, Bitcoin Cash may rally hash power to stave off a 51% attack on their blockchain. None of the developers or well-known community members have addressed this yet, but it does not seem like something to take lightly.
How This Can Pan Out
In the event this is indeed a rogue miner looking to wreak havoc on the blockchain, they would accumulate coins through sustained mining and dump them in the market. This will put downward pressure on BCH price and potentially cause it to dump.
The rogue miner would finally leave the network after the cost of mining BCH is higher than the proceeds from the sale of mined BCH. For this scenario to unfold, the price would have to witness a massive drawdown. Stalwarts of BCH like Roger Ver and Jihan Wu have significant cash to burn. BSV is not the only chain run by an extremely wealthy person, so it seems likely that Roger will rally a large amount of hash power to stave off this unknown miner.
The probability of this being a plan to sabotage the May 15 hard fork is high. It has caused alarms to go off within BCH as they suspect both BTC and BSV proponents. At this point in time, there is far too little evidence of any sabotage. The best thing to do is keep up with events as evidence shows up. BTC Manager will be covering future updates that unravel in this potential ‘second hashwar’.
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