Rogue Bitcoin Cash developer adds contentious code attempting to syphon $8m per year

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Avatar for ZakMcRofl
4 years ago

TL;DR

If you are using Bitcoin ABC, you should migrate to BCHN (or others) before November because Bitcoin ABC will stop following the BCH blockchain if not every block contains a forced payment towards Bitcoin ABC.

Recent events

On August 15th 2020, Amaury Séchet, the lead developer of one of the Bitcoin Cash node implementations (Bitcoin ABC), has introduced code that will syphon 8% of miner's block rewards into ABC's pockets beginning November 15th 2020. Starting with version 0.22.0, Bitcoin ABC will reject and attempt to orphan all blocks that do not contain this forced Bitcoin ABC fee payment (let's call it AFP from here on out).

This selfish behaviour by a single node will likely lead to a soft fork because the rest of the Bitcoin Cash community interprets this as a unilateral attempt to change the consensus rules, effectively resulting in an attack on the network for personal gain. This is especially painful because for many years, Bitcoin ABC was considered a strong cornerstone for BCH's development and improvements.

However in the last few months Bitcoin ABC's lead developer Amaury Séchet has made many similar unilateral moves and made it clear that he does not care about the interests or opinions of the BCH community. A good write-up on these concerns was written by BCH developer Jonathan Toomim and many of its sentiments echoed by George Donnelly, who worked closely with Bitcoin ABC lead developer Amaury Séchet and has since left the organization: "Amaury is not an effective leader, period, full stop."

Drop-In replacement and other alternatives

Luckily, people who still use Bitcoin ABC have many migration options because Bitcoin Cash is one of the few cryptocurrencies with node implementation diversity and real decentralization. The easiest migration is using the drop-in replacement Bitcoin Cash Node. It was derived from Bitcoin ABC and had its first release on February 27th 2020. It contains various improvements over Bitcoin ABC, most notably it does not contain the code enforcing the AFP. It is written and maintained by the team that spearheaded the development of the new difficulty adjustment algorithm ASERT which is the only change to make it into the scheduled BCH Update for November.

Other BCH software alternatives are BCHD, Bitcoin Unlimited, Bitcoin Verde, Flowee The Hub and knuth.

Miner position and risk to miners

As with any soft fork, it is relevant what the position of the miners is, so let's look at the early indications:

A similar funding proposal was universally rejected by miners in May, where no miners voted for the "Infrastructure Funding Plan". That plan at least pretended to include a chance of other parties being funded through it but was troubled with the same concerns (chance of corruption, kickbacks, centralized whitelist approval, lack of auditing, lack of accountability). It seems likely that the arguably worse ABC fee payment will be equally rejected.

Following the pre-announcement of the AFP, a group of notable BCH miners issued a statement that the majority of the BCH hash rate will not adopt the forced Bitcoin ABC fee payment.

Another major player in the BCH-BSV hash war, Roger Ver's bitcoin.com, has released the following statement:

Bitcoin.com is one such miner and for the record, we will not be mining with any Bitcoin Cash software that implements the IFP feature in the November 2020 network upgrade.  At this time we also have reason to believe that most other miners have come to the same decision.

It is not clear yet if non-ABC node implementations will accept or reject blocks containing the AFP. But given this strong opposition, at least a manual rejection of such blocks through miners seems likely. In any case, if the majority of blocks is mined without payments to Bitcoin ABC, all other node implementations will follow that longer chain instead of the Bitcoin ABC chain that enforces AFP in every block.

This forces the companies and individuals mining Bitcoin Cash to act now. If they keep mining using Bitcoin ABC and thus paying the AFP, they risk that their block rewards will end up on the shorter chain. Since they cannot spend their block rewards for ~16 hours (100 blocks), chances are that the ABC chain will have already died out or lost all its value by the time they would be able to sell. Another indication of the value of the ABC coin is the futures market, that shows the Bitcoin ABC coins being worth only around $30, around 1/10th of the value of the BCH side .

In comparison, migrating to BCHN is a safe no-regret move because as it stands, BCHN will follow the longest chain (=BCH) no matter what happens.

Company positions and risks to companies

Various companies already have voiced their disagreement to the Bitcoin ABC fee payment scheme:

On the day of the AFP pre-announcement, the Token Exchange cryptophyl.com has stated on Twitter:

"Today's announcement by Bitcoin ABC was not a proposal, it was an announcement. Their actions are not representative core values we and others expect and uphold within Bitcoin Cash."

The SLP foundation issued the following statement:

"We will support SLP infrastructure development on Bitcoin Cash, not on a fork of Bitcoin Cash by ABC."

The promising adoption and ease-of-development initiative mainnet.cash has stated on reddit that they will not support an ABC side if a fork happens.

General protocols , the company behind AnyHedge had already positioned against ABC's unilateral Grasberg announcement, today Company President John Nieri confirmed to me that his statement towards CoinFugazi was also representative of the company as a whole:

"The Bitcoin Cash (BCH) ecosystem has made it clear that it requires rational, well evidenced, well reviewed proposals. The only change that has met that bar for November 2020 is the aserti3-2d DAA algorithm. No other proposals have enough time to be considered. Pools and Exchanges are advised that the entire infrastructure of BCH will only support one chain in November, and that chain will have aserti3-2d DAA algorithm with no other major changes."

Roger Ver's company bitcoin.com similarly elaborated in their statement what they recommend other companies building on BCH to do:

The reason Bitcoin.com is choosing to run software that does not implement IFP is that we do not observe that this feature is supported by what we see as a prerequisite governance model necessary to ensure that funding raised via its use is spent in furtherance of the vision of Bitcoin Cash that we freely associate with.  Thus, we can neither risk our vision of peer-to-peer electronic cash nor the future value of our customers’ Bitcoin Cash by implementing IFP at this time.  Furthermore, we encourage all network participants who share our perspective to run only Bitcoin Cash software without IFP specifically during the November 2020 network upgrade.

If you find further company statements (no matter what side they favor), please reply in the comments and I will add them here.

In conclusion:

If you are a company using Bitcoin ABC, you should migrate to BCHN or other BCH implementations as soon as possible. As it stands, they will follow the longest chain and will still be compatible to blocks built by Bitcoin ABC. If you stay with Bitcoin ABC, there is a very high risk of getting stranded on an outdated chain due to ABC rejecting every block that does not include the ABC fee payment.

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4 years ago
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Comments

👉If you are a company using Bitcoin ABC, you should migrate to BCHN or other BCH implementations as soon as possible.

This line could you suggest a highly recommended from your idea sir?

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4 years ago

Nice article You have so many points💖 great work 😊...

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4 years ago

Im am a Filipino anyone help me donate. Its okay if small amount. But for me its bigger. Thank you.

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4 years ago

Great article

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4 years ago

nice article

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4 years ago

Nice

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4 years ago

very nice

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4 years ago

Great title! Truth hurts

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4 years ago

Please sir donate some money. i am poor but i try to earn some money. Please donate some money😭

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4 years ago

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$ 0.00
4 years ago

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4 years ago

Thank you so much for your generous donation, I just re-logged in and saw it (shocked!). I would do it without the finanical incentives too, I write these articles because I believe in the version of Bitcoin that follow the original ideology. But your generosity is greatly appreciated.

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4 years ago

Wow, Such an informative article, hope BCH runs more smoothly

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4 years ago

Very informative article sir.

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4 years ago

Wow

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4 years ago

I'm subscribe your channel

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4 years ago

That is so nice. and you have so many points. wowwwww

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4 years ago

You have so many points💖 great work 😊

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4 years ago

I just hope that after the upgrades all our hardwork would not be gone..or neither not abused by once that are so greedy to share his Knowledge about whats happening in between..thank u for giving us the chance to think and consider ..

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4 years ago

I see...

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4 years ago

Thats alarming. Hope they will fix it.

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4 years ago

Omg you got so many points idol. Would you mind to share something ☺..

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4 years ago

Very good article

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4 years ago

I will choose to share this article

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4 years ago

Please subscribe me

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4 years ago

good morning

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4 years ago

Very nice article.

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4 years ago

Another Super exciting article being written by ZakMcRof1 regarding giving detailed input about" Rogue Bitcoin Cash developer adds contentious code attempting to Syphon $8M per year.

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4 years ago

Tibia is great news,please those involved should endeavor to do as instructed

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4 years ago

Poetic justice would be shitlord ramming in a checkpoint right at the fork and castrating all your rebellious efforts just as they did against majority hash in nov 2018.

yall loved it back then 🍿🍿😘

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User's avatar TOG
4 years ago

That title is right to the point...

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4 years ago

Dishonest claims and massive wall of text used to fool people into falling for the dishonesty. This person appears to be a professional anti BCH social engineering agent out to hurt BCH while claiming to care about it. He/she/they are very good at their job.

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4 years ago

Well, the claims aren't exactly dishonest, and one could just as easily call you a professional anti BCH social engineer agent out to hurt BCH while claiming to care about it. Although maybe you're not so good at your job considering that you provide no evidence.

Perhaps it's important to note that this "rogue" developer was arguably a cornerstone of the fork from BTC when it was apparent BTC had been taken over by entities with interests against than those of its origins. However, that doesn't make the developer's behavior any less rogue. When this change was publicly voted on by miners, it received no support. Forcing a worse version of the change despite that is clearly going rogue.

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4 years ago

Definitely dishonest. The trolls often call me a troll. This change was not voted on by the miners. The anti-BCH troll army just keeps pretending this is the same thing. Real voting will happen in November.

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4 years ago

If by dishonest, you mean missing facts, you seem to be a pot calling a kettle black. While it is true that THIS change was not voted on (which is a problem in and of itself), my understanding is that the previously proposed IFP was voted on (and by voted on I mean available for a miner majority to signal for) and did not pass.

Suggesting that a single developer throwing code that makes a controversial change by default into what is presumed to be the most commonly used node software constitutes voting when that change is enforced by any set of miners who might very will be oblivious to the change discounts any names you might call anyone afaic.

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4 years ago

Making the BCH centralized for real

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4 years ago

That is great news

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User's avatar Mrm
4 years ago

Well that's the cycle Bitcoin (ABC) is full of twists and turns, the struggle for prestige is very classy, ​​we'll see who will come forward in the future.

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4 years ago

🤩 wow great article. 👏

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4 years ago

This is really a great articl. 😌 You have pointed the right things ❤❤❤

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4 years ago

nice one wow

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4 years ago

Really good

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4 years ago

Support our Team and we will be able to provide our basic needs.

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4 years ago

Wow

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4 years ago

Great article man! :D

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4 years ago

Great article! Hits the truth about ecosystem of bitcoin cash.

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4 years ago

It was really a selfish decision to syphon such amount

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4 years ago

Woaaa that donation...

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4 years ago

great infos to that

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4 years ago

Another informative article,keep it up!

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4 years ago

BCH more simple than BTC i feel

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4 years ago

This is outrageous

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4 years ago

Please someone should enlighten me on how one can get paid from readcash. Is it only by writing articles? Or there are other means....

Your article is impressive, I look forward for more of your article.

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4 years ago

Wow

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4 years ago

Incoming many many $.

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4 years ago

Your article is impressive, I look forward for more of your article. Thank you for sharing.

Please someone should enlighten me on how one can get paid from readcash. Is it only by writing articles? Or there are other means...

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4 years ago

There are other means, but that means you shouldn't spam or sub for sub or like for like and just be friendly.

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4 years ago

I really doubt that miners are going to ditch the implementation and team they have been relying since the start of Bitcoin Cash for a team that has just been created a few months ago, has an anonymous leader, and no roadmap. 8% cut is well worth the guarantee of business continuity and roadmap execution.

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4 years ago

So you're saying that miners are sheep that need a leader because they aren't capable of determining what is in their best interest on their own?

I'm guessing you already know this, but in case you don't (in spite of the fact that the article implies it), there are other node implementations out there with teams who weren't created a few months ago and don't "have an anonymous leader."

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4 years ago

The lead maintainer of BHCN, freetrader, is definitely anon. I haven't heard anyone from BCHN detailing their vision for BCH. They don't even have a roadmap. Seems like an easy choice to make for serious miners.

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4 years ago

It's interesting how you're sticking to bashing BCHN like there are no other options.

It's also neat how you imply that the published ABC roadmap is somehow proprietary and the other open source implementations couldn't possibly continue forward with it.

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4 years ago

I like Bitcoin Cash & also Bitcoin SV!

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4 years ago

Alright, who's been downvoting the comment section? I want names!

Anyhow, we need more people learning of the truth, and show this to the affected, which means everyone. The most important are the miners. We need everyone on the side of no-IFP, because we have automated rolling checkpoints on ABC and BCHN and 10 blocks on both sides will constitute a split.

Also, @MarcDeMesel is going to bring news, since you're supporting the good fight! Keep it up!

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4 years ago

Thank you for sharing this to us!

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4 years ago

Hope we are secured?

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4 years ago

We don't get the money we earn from Bitcoin directly. We have to sell it to someone and take money from bKash. But now there are many fraudsters inside bKash. And stand up to these deceivers, we are deceived. Thank you for informing us of such an important issue through your article.

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4 years ago

This article is very nice, thank you for sharing.

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4 years ago

Hmm. Wow you haveany point.. Great job.

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4 years ago

done

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4 years ago

thanks ,,,,

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4 years ago

nice article .Well that's the cycle Bitcoin (ABC) is full of twists and turns, the struggle for prestige is very classy, ​​we'll see who will come forward in the future.Dishonest claims and massive wall of text used to fool people into falling for the dishonesty. This person appears to be a professional anti BCH social engineering agent out to hurt BCH while claiming to care about it. He/she/they are very good at their job.

$ 0.00
4 years ago