Viewpoint | BCH's unknown hashrate has skyrocketed to nearly 70%. Will sharing algorithms with BTC become a security risk?

According to a report by Trustnodes on December 30, the unknown hash rate (computing power) of Bitcoin Cash (BCH) suddenly increased sharply in the past two days, reaching an astonishing 68.75%.

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In the past 7 days, the unknown computing power of BCH accounted for only 39%, but the value has been greatly improved, and this development may cause a series of worrying issues.

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Unknown hashrate chart for BCH in December 2019

From these hashrate coinbase texts, it can be seen that most of the computing power seems to come from the same unknown entity, which seems to see some clues, but it is a bit puzzling.

Some unknown hashes do have different coinbases, which indicates that they come from different entities, but the blocks mined by the above entities occupy an absolute advantage, indicating that a miner may occupy the vast majority of the unknown computing power.

Their current mining is relatively at a loss, because the profit of mining the Bitcoin chain is 2.9% higher than BCH, but the intention of this individual or entity is unclear.

It may just be a miner who only wants to get BCH, because the hash rate of BCH is only 1.2% of Bitcoin's hash rate.

Data chart of Bitcoin and its fork chain in December 2019

Therefore, it is also possible that only some miners have transferred their computing power from Bitcoin to BCH, and 1% of Bitcoin's computing power is sufficient to change the computing power balance of BCH.

This means that there is no need to worry too much, but BCH's inflation is quite fast, sometimes 14 blocks are mined in one hour instead of 6.

Technically, this makes the BCH network very insecure because it shares the same algorithm with a larger network and is therefore vulnerable to a 51% hashrate attack in the short term.

If a hash attack occurs on BCH, you may want some miners to transfer some hash power from Bitcoin, but this may destabilize Bitcoin, because Bitcoin brings miners far more returns than BCH, so they may not Will defend it.

This makes the game a bit complicated, but from a technical point of view, it seems common sense to change the algorithm, otherwise the BCH network cannot reasonably carry too much value. Although this is a chicken-and-egg problem, if it carries more value, it will attract more computing power to participate and thus achieve higher security.

From a community point of view, changing the algorithm is another matter, because in some way it will drive away some of the biggest supporters of BCH. However, they can still choose the Bitcoin network, and they can also develop specialized equipment for BCH.

Therefore, this may be an issue to consider, because at the technical level, the network does not seem to be very stable.

On the other hand, it did have some repercussions. When Bitcoin or Ethereum was in the same development stage as BCH, some mining pools also gained more than 50% of the computing power, which caused a stir in the industry and even a DDoS attack.

Therefore, this may be a sign of the rapid growth of miners' interest in BCH. Although this increase in computing power may only be temporary, for BCH, sharing algorithms with Bitcoin will undoubtedly make it a vulnerable target.

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