Unknown Miner Reaches 70% of Bitcoin Cash Hashrate

Unknown Miner Reaches 70% of Bitcoin Cash Hashrate

The unknown hashrate of Bitcoin Cash (BCH) has suddenly reached 68.75% today in a surprising development.

In the past seven days, the unknown hashrate stands at 39%, but it has now jumped considerably in what could be a concerning development.

Much of this hashrate appears to belong to one unknown entity as shown by their coinbase text which seems to be a somewhat orderly randomized gibberish.

Some unknown hash does have a different coinbase which suggests different entities, but the domination of block finding by the above entity suggests one miner likely has the vast majority of this unknown hash.

They are currently mining at a relative loss as it’s 2.9% more profitable to mine the bitcoin chain than BCH, but the intentions of this person or entity are unknown.

It could simply be a new miner that just wants BCH, with Bitcoin Cash’s hashrate standing at just 1.2% of bitcoin’s hashrate.

So it could be someone just moved some hash from bitcoin to BCH, with just 1% of the former enough to tilt the balance of the latter.

Meaning there might not be much reason for concern, but BCH is inflating quite a bit with at times 14 blocks found in an hour, as opposed to six.

That technically makes the network insecure because it is somewhat easy to 51% attack temporarily as it shares the same algo with a far bigger network.

If there is an attack, you’d perhaps expect some miners to move hash from bitcoin, but that then could potentially destabilize bitcoin which rewards miners far more than BCH, so they might not come to its defense.

Making the game play here somewhat complex, but it seems common sense from a technical perspective to just change the algo as otherwise the network can’t reasonably carry much value – although that’s a chicken and egg problem because if it carries more value, it would attract more hash security.

From a social perspective changing the algo is something quite else because it would sort of remove some of BCH’s biggest supporters. But, they can always go to bitcoin and they can always develop gear for BCH specifically.

So it might be something to consider because the network does not appear to be very stable at a technical level.

On the other hand, this does echo a bit. When bitcoin or ethereum was around the same age as BCH, then too some pool gained more than 50% of hash with much hoopla and even DDoSes following.

So it could be a sign of growing interest, and perhaps fast growing, with this hash supremacy likely temporary, but a shared algo is known to be a potential vulnerability.

Copyrights Trustnodes.com

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