Anonymous group of miners carried out a 51% attack on Bitcoin Cash ABC

The Bitcoin Cash ABC (BCHA) network, left in the minority after the recent hard fork, was subjected to an attack by unknown miners who for a time seized a majority of its hashrate.

The first message from the anonymous miners’ group named voluntarism.dev was published on Wednesday, 25 November, stating that “Good ideas do not require force.” The attack aimed to direct 100% of mining rewards to the Bitcoin Cash development fund.

On 15 November the Bitcoin Cash took place a scheduled hard fork. However, the largest until recently client for Bitcoin Cash ABC did not secure community support, and the blockchain split into two mutually incompatible chains.

The key innovation was the Coinbase Rule, which rejects blocks that do not allocate any portion of the rewards to the Bitcoin Cash development fund. This aspect sparked the main controversy — a large portion of the community did not agree with the proposal, releasing in response the BCHN client without support for this option.

ABC violated the NAP with 9 months of civil war. freeriders must pay 100% of the block reward to ABC. we will orphan all blocks that do not. we will pay 100% as well, once ABC merges this change https://t.co/82rcZPWQ6N

— voluntarism.dev (@DevVoluntarism) November 27, 2020

«ABC нарушила мирный договор, начав гражданскую войну длиной в девять месяцев. Любители халявы должны платить 100% награды за блок. Мы оставим пустыми все блоки, которые не будут этого делать», — заявили представители voluntarism.dev 27 ноября.

Ещё через день они написали, что «объем ценности, украденной ABC у BCH, меркнет перед нашими расходами».

«Мы группа майнеров и китов из старой гвардии. Мы можем делать это годами. Когда будете проводить форк в следующий раз, используйте собственный нулевой блок, собственный алгоритм Proof-of-Work и создайте свое сообщество. BCH защищен».

the amount of value that abc stole from bch pales in comparison to our expenditures. we are a group of old-guard miners and whales. we can do this for years. next time you fork: use your own genesis block, your own pow algo, and build your own community. bch is protected.

— voluntarism.dev (@DevVoluntarism) November 28, 2020

На момент публикации атака продолжается, хотя наблюдатели отмечают, что сети BCHA до определенной степени удалось защититься и майнинг монеты снова стал прибыльным.

It has now become profitable to mine ABC blocks and there have been some massive blocks mined by other unknown miners.

The malicious miner is still there trying to wreak havoc, but now it is profitable it is much harder with more miners supporting abc.https://t.co/6JXDWpKZsF

— Michael Nunzio (@kilrcola) November 29, 2020

The price of the BCHA token fell as a result of the latest events, dropping from $22 at the start of the week to around $17 by the morning of Saturday, 28 November. At the time of publication it was trading around $17.5.

Source: CoinGecko.

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