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Comment by stale2002 | Hacker News Reader

stale2002

OK, this is describing a 51% attack.

And who would engage in this 51% attack? The miners?

The miners are one of the biggest groups that SUPPORT Bitcoin Cash, so I find it unlikely that they would spend millions attacking it.

Anyway. It matters not. The people that want Bitcoin to be a settlement layer are free to spend 50$ per transaction to use Bitcoin, and those of us who want to use it as an actual peer to peer electronic currency will use Bitcoin Cash.

Everyone wins. It doesn't really matter what is the "real" Bitcoin.

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Anyone who's mining Bitcoin could switch to Bitcoin Cash and work to perform a 51% attack.

> BCash shares hashing algorithm with Bitcoin. That means any hashing power on the Bitcoin network can work on BCash network. And there is typically 10 times more miners mining on BTC, than on BCH because of the difference in the price and minning fees.

And which miner SPECIFICALLY would do that? There are only like 7 major mining pools. Which of those 7 do you think would do an attack?

The miners were the ones who helped create Bitcoin Cash. Why would they attack it?

The miners are the largest supporters of big blocks, so it make no sense that they would attack the thing that they helped launch.

Also, people don't seem to realize that it is already possible to do a ~20 percent selfish mining attack. And yet we don't see THAT happening...

These attacks aren't realistic in practice because it would be immediately obvious that something is happening, and the miners would lose all their money as Bitcoin crashes.

Let me count some scenarios:

* a miner losing its share in the competitive game could make a one last money grab before its hardware is obsolete

* BCash backing miners losing confidence in success of BCH could just damage the whole space, for revenge or and profit

* complete outsider like an angry government could try to disrupt the space to ban all crypto or at least heavily regulate it / buy some time

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