Mining pools reorg BCH with 51% attack to stop another miner's malicious transactions


Two large BCH miners (BTC.com and BTC.top) recently join forces to carry out a 51% attack (they had a combined hashrate of ~54%) in order to stop an anonymous miner from walking away with BCH that he/she should not have access to.


The batch of BCH in question is a result of the recent scheduled hard fork that eventually caused the Bitcoin Cash network to split.


According to Guy Swann,

Since the original split in 2017, there has been a significant number of coins accidentally sent to "anyone can spend" addresses (due to tx compatibility of sigs, but no #SegWit on #BCH), or possibly they've been replayed from #Bitcoin onto the #BCH network.
Because of this, tons of coins (#BCH) would essentially be "up for grabs." However, devs implemented a protocol rule called CLEANSTACK, making P2SH coins unspendable. This was to be removed with May 15 fork, basically handing the coins to miners.


During this time, the anonymous miner was able to grab probably a significant enough amount of P2SH/Segwit coins which then prompted the two large miners to do a reorg. Transactions belonging to the anonymous miner was reversed and only transactions made by BTC.com and BTC.top were accepted.


However, in doing so, it raises valid concerns about how "decentralized" the BCH blockchain really is when two large miners were able to action a change in the blockchain at will. Whatever happened to it being immutable and censorship resistant cash that's supposedly better than Bitcoin?


Interestingly, the price of BCH did not seem to be affected by this news at all.

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