Home / Capital & Crypto / Fork Wars: Bitcoin Cash Dev. Warns that CoinGeek Will Attack ABC

Fork Wars: Bitcoin Cash Dev. Warns that CoinGeek Will Attack ABC

Last Updated March 4, 2021 3:10 PM
P. H. Madore
Last Updated March 4, 2021 3:10 PM

During a largely celebratory live stream  regarding the ability of Bitcoin ABC’s upgraded version of Bitcoin Cash to survive and thrive in a post-fork universe, Bitcoin ABC’s self-proclaimed “benevolent dictator,” Amaury Séchet, said that he believes, due to metrics that are publicly available, that BCH mining pool CoinGeek is presently preparing an attack against the ABC chain. He cited the fact that they did not appear to be using anywhere near their normal 2 exahash worth of mining power in the immediate aftermath of the fork.

Bitcoin ABC Dev. Warns of CoinGeek Attack

Several hours into the stream, Séchet joined the chat and said:

“If you think you have a better plan, and I think with BCH we have a better plan than BTC, then you can compete on the open market, and either we’re right, and we end up winning, or we’re wrong and BTC ends up winning, and that’s all good and fine and that’s market competition.

“What we are seeing right now, though – or rather, what we are not seeing right now, is CoinGeek and BMG’s hashrate. Right? It’s completely gone. It’s not winning, mining anywhere that we can see. What that tells me is, you know, they have not thrown like 2 exahash at this, right? So they are preparing some kind of attack.

“And right now we are not in a situation where people compete in an open market. We’re in a situation where we have an adversary that, you know, that is planning an attack. And so we need to consider them an attacker at this point.”

He went on to say that it’s fine if people want to fork, referring to the SV fork. He said he was “super-happy” with that and that he wishes them good luck. But then he said that if they are going to launch an attack against BCHABC, they will have to be treated as such.

Chain Length Unimportant for Safety of ABC Chain

amaury sechet bitcoin cash
Amaury Séchet | Source: CoinSpice/YouTube 

Séchet was then asked by another streamer in the CoinSpice channel how many blocks ahead Bitcoin ABC needed to be before it would be safe.  He said it was not relevant to the question, because at this point the blockchains cannot reorganize back into each other.

The threat, according to the lead developer, is from the hash that exists which can feasibly attack the Bitcoin ABC network. “The hashrate that is missing right now that we’re not seeing anywhere,” he specified.

The question of where CoinGeek’s hash has gone is a good one. Potentially, it is mining regular BTC since it is no longer all required in order to mine Bitcoin SV, or it is mining Bitcoin ABC, which has seen a notable uptick in hashrate, but it is just as possible that it is preparing for a nefarious purpose as Séchet describes.

Featured Image from Shutterstock