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Bitcoin Cash miners perform 51% attack to undo malicious transactions

  • BTC.com and BTC.top performed 51% attack to reverse malicious transactions.
  • Several members of the community are not happy with their actions.

Two bitcoin cash mining pools BTC.com and BTC.top combined their hash rates to perform a 51 percent attack on the blockchain to reverse a malicious miner’s transactions. While their intentions were not “evil,” their actions have been criticized widely in the community. As one bitcoin cash developer, going by “Kiarahpromises,” wrote:

“To coordinate a reorg to revert unknown’s transactions. This is a 51% attack. The absolutely worst attack possible. It’s there in the whitepaper. What about (miner and developer) decentralized and uncensorable cash? Only when convenient?”

Some, like BCH supporter Jonathan Silverblood, have supported the actions. As Silverblood puts it:

“This is a very unfortunate situation, but it is also what proof of work actually is. The miners in this case did choose to drop prohashes block and from what I heard, it is because they deemed a transaction within it to have been invalid.”

The attack

Bitcoin podcast host, Guy Swann, explained the inner workings of the original attack that prompted this action. He Tweeted:

“Since the original split in 2017, there has been a significant number of coins accidentally sent to ‘anyone can spend’ addresses (due to [transaction] compatibility of sigs, but no #SegWit on #BCH), or possibly they’ve been replayed from #Bitcoin onto the #BCH network.

When the unknown miner tried to take the coins themselves, [BTC.top and BTC.com] saw & immediately decided to re-organize and remove these [transactions], in favor of their own [transactions], spending the same P2SH coins, [and] many others.”

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