https://news.bitcoin.com/hash-war-a-mystery-miner-is-making-abcs-new-blockchain-barely-functional/
A few days ago I mentioned that Bitcoin Cash forked and created Bitcoin Cash ABC. Now, this new chain ABC is under extreme attack from the old guard BCH miners. What they are doing is using their mining farms to mine 90% of the blocks and they are processing zero transactions in those blocks. Because they control such a high percentage of hash power, when the other 10% of miners win the lottery, the attackers roll back the chain with a higher block height fork and deny that block from being produced.
Matter of perspective.
Obviously standing in the shoes of the ABC network this is a ruthlessly unfair attack. However, the attacker Voluntarism.dev claims that this is a defensive measure. Bitcoin ABC is attempting to siphon off the main chain's user base and seed a new community with it. Clearly, BCH doesn't take kindly to that.
The amount of value that ABC stole from [Bitcoin Cash] 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 [algorithm], and build your own community. [Bitcoin Cash] is protected.
If I'm being honest, this kind of justified old-guard aggression reminds me exactly of the Steem/Hive old-guard who have performed all manner of questionable actions in the name of the "greater good". That being said, I often agree with the old-guard in many of these matters, so again it's all a matter of perspective.
Spawn Camping
My favorite part of this is that big-name players in crypto including Vitalik are calling this "Spawn Camping". Spawn camping is a gamer term that means you kill someone right when they spawn before they can do anything. Pretty apt description for this kind of attack.
On November 28, 2020, the cofounder of Ethereum, Vitalik Buterin tweeted about the mystery mining pool that controls 90% of the ABC chain’s hashpower today. “ [A] mining pool 51% attacks BCHA seemingly with the explicit goal of destroying it. Will this be the first true spawn camp attack on a PoW chain?” Buterin asked his Twitter followers.
https://mobile.twitter.com/VitalikButerin/status/1332554781466845184
Javier González explained that the mining pool’s technique was not an attack. “It is not an attack, it is defensive,” González said. “Bitcoin ABC has fractured the BCH project to capture 8% of the coinbase miners incentive. 90% of the BCH [hashpower] voted against it. And now they are defending their interests. Enforced consensus mechanism,” González insisted.
So basically all the fuss is about devs trying to skim 8% of the inflation for themselves. Sound familiar? Now might be a good time to point this out on Hive:
A proposal for 2000 HBD per day for 631 days ($1.3M total), for a tipping app... It's already got 13M Hive coins worth of support. So the next time you're bickering about author rewards and generic Hive inflation try looking at the proposals instead. After all, they are using the ninjamine to fund these things, not just Hive inflation.
Imagine funding a proposal on Hive, and all the big accounts that voted for it did so because they get backdoor payouts. Yeah, I'm sure that's impossible, right? That's not what's happening here, but it's an obvious attack vector which has been hyperinflated due to pumping the ninjamine into the dev fund when it should have been DESTROYED.
Takeaway
Back to the real issue: Bitcoin Cash. The funny thing about this situation is that no one seems to be stating the obvious. I've already talked about this multiple times, and it's what makes Litecoin a way more legitimate project than BCH or BSV or any other Bitcoin fork.
What happens when Bitcoin Cash gets attacked by Bitcoin miners in exactly the same way that they are attacking the ABC fork? These Bitcoin Cash guys are kinda full of shit calling themselves "The Real Bitcoin" with such a smaller network. They have way less hashpower than the main chain, which makes them permanently vulnerable to attack.
As Bitcoin acquires more and more institutional adoption from vulture capitalists and the cutthroat legacy economy, it makes perfect sense that any other fork that uses hash algorithm SHA-256 becomes more and more vulnerable. Bitcoin isn't going to play nice forever. What happens when the majority of hash power is being pumped out by Corporations, Banks, and Governments? Bye bye Bitcoin Cash, it was nice knowing you.
This is exactly why the Hive fork (and all proof-of-stake forks) are kind of awesome. You can't fork someone's hash power away, but you can fork their stake away, which is exactly what we did to the bad actor that attacked us. Now Hive and Steem are pretty much fully separate entities, while the Bitcoin forks are clearly not separated and are under constant threat of attack.