Following the Bitcoin Cash halving which occured on April 8th, crypto fake news publishers went into overdrive; once again promoting the false claims of BTC maximalists that Bitcoin Cash is “so easy” to 51% attack, leading to chain reorgs and double spends. Despite this never happening on Bitcoin Cash, it’s enemies have spoken about it as if it has happened because they want it to happen. This cultish group think has been repeated on numerous occasions over the last 3 years, where followers are warned the Bcash 51% is “just around the corner”, but that has not stopped them from trying to spin the successful Bitcoin Cash halving with this blatant lie once more. I mean, when you’ve managed to make BTC followers believe that a technology described as an electronic cash system in its whitepaper is not meant to be used as electronic cash, you’d probably succeed in making them believe the sky is not blue.
A 51% attack on Bitcoin Cash is highly improbable for a number of reasons which are conveniently overlooked by those peddling the lies. The most obvious is that much of the total SHA-256 hashrate on BTC is actually pro Bitcoin Cash. Pools like BTC.com, AntPool, ViaBTC, BTC.TOP and Bitcoin.com are operated by people and companies who are supportive of Bitcoin Cash. Their hashrate cumulatively accounts for over 40% of BTC’s mined blocks in the last year.
These pool operators are able to immediately switch their BTC hash rate over to Bitcoin Cash, aiding any existing Bitcoin Cash hash rate they all have, if they detect an attack. This has already occured on 2 occasions where attacking forces were defeated by superior hash defending the blockchain. The first incident was in November 2018 when Calvin Ayre and Craig Wright attempted to ossify Bitcoin Cash and prevent us further upgrading and improving the protocol.
They had managed to amass nearly 70% of the total Bitcoin Cash hash rate prior to the upgrade block height, which they were not afraid to flex as they made threats. Come the actual upgrade however, 4 Exahash suddenly appeared on Bitcoin.com’s pool to defend the blockchain.
Wright and Ayre did not stand a chance and were subsequently defeated. The second time we saw miners defend Bitcoin Cash was on May 15 2019, during the hard fork upgrade which introduced the ability to retrieve Bitcoin Cash sent to BTC SegWit addresses. After the upgrade, an unknown miner attempted to claim over 3000 BCH which were previously stuck in the SegWit addresses. In response, honest miners BTC.Top and BTC.com were able to orphan the unknown miners blocks and returned the Bitcoin Cash to their intended recipients.
Miners have a natural incentive to protect what they’re invested in; as long as the value of Bitcoin Cash continues to grow, miners will continue to protect it.
On top of that, Bitcoin Cash has trick up its sleeve known as Deep Reorg Protection. This is a rule first introduced by the Bitcoin ABC implementation of Bitcoin Cash, the software miners run, that will cause blocks to be orphaned if built upon a chain whose fork origin lies back further than 10 blocks.
In Bitcoin if an attacker amasses a large amount of hashrate, they can secretly build a longer chain than the one that is publicly known and upon broadcasting their blocks the shorter chain will be orphaned. This can go back for however long the attacker secretly mined, whether that’s days, weeks, months or years, but the deep reorg protection makes any attempt at secretly mining a longer chain futile.
The final and most important point on why Bitcoin Cash won’t be 51% attacked comes down to incentives, something that many do not fully understand. Bitcoin is a system that relies heavily upon incentives and there is simply no incentive for profit seeking miners to 51% attack the Bitcoin Cash blockchain. Any attacker will be challenged by honest miners defending the chain, and the 10 block reorg protection neuters any attempt to secretly mine a longer chain. The risk of losing money far outweighs any potential reward, which ultimately makes any attempt to 51% attack Bitcoin Cash unviable for miners who are profit seeking
There are however people who are incentivized to attack Bitcoin Cash through other means, as it poses an existential threat to the BTC Maximalist agenda. They do this through generating fake news to mislead noobs and the 51% attack narrative is one of their favourite talking points, despite nothing ever eventuating.
Most authors in crypto media have no understanding of the technology and will knowingly parrot the talking points of BTC maximalist cult leaders without a second thought. This is what they are paid to do, and most crypto news publishers have been set up in order to help maintain narrative control; by promoting disinfo and suppressing real news that goes against their overarching agenda. Leading publishers of crypto fake news will never mention positive Bitcoin Cash news, else the wider crypto community would discover our advanced privacy enabling protocols like Cash Shuffle and Cash Fusion; or the fact that Bitcoin Cash is consistently accounting for over 97% of Australia’s cryptocurrency retail spending in an adoption boom that Lightning loyalists could only ever dream of.
if only the miners would start using the BMP to signal their BTC/BCH preference, that would put this issue at rest forever