Blockstream Hash Rate Enough to Concurrently Attack Bitcoin Cash and SV
The Canadian startup, Blockstream, has launched a service named “Blockstream Mining.” The service is a mining equipment colocation provider, powered by the company’s 300MW, energy capacity. Because of this, Blockstream will command about 6 EH of the BTC mining power when working at full capacity. This, according to crypto pundits, is enough hash power to drown both Roger Ver’s and Calvin Eyre’s versions of Bitcoin.
CryptoPanda, for instance, writes:
“Blockstream now controls more than enough hash rate to attack both BCH and BSV at the same time. Can’t wait for more conspiracy theories!”
Another crypto fan btg_Joseph adds:
“They could destroy bch and bsv if they wanted, only thing is they aren’t run by Roger Ver and Calvin Ayre so they aren’t trying to destroy things.”
Bitcoin SV and Bitcoin Cash use Bitcoin’s hashing algorithm. The same type of mining hardware can be used to generate hash power on all three cryptos. This feature fueled the BCH and BSV hash war. Craig’s plan was to bury “destroy” Bitcoin Cash and emerge as the only survivor of their hard fork.
Bitcoin Cash and SV Hash Rate on the Decline
The hash war left BSV standing thanks to nChain’s SVPool and Calvin Ayre’s CoinGeek mining pool. The miners on both sides however did pay a hefty price for that war. BCH nonetheless did attract more hash power the first few days post the split, but at times BSV’s hash power would exceed BCHs. Since then, the hash rates on both blockchains has fallen significantly.
Bitcoin Cash has had as low as 978 PH/s per second on it, while it had 7.8 EH/s before the fork. The bigger blocks proposed to boost the network’s transaction times and lower fees on both blockchain’s haven’t been fully exploited too. Many crypto analysts say that larger blocks such as Bitcoin SV’s 128MB could introduce security issues to the blockchain.
While both BCH and BSV have bigger blocks than BTC, both forks still have low transaction volumes when compared to Bitcoin. The irony is that these networks are faster and cheaper than their mother chain. Months after the fork, the combined market cap of both BCH and BSV has dropped significantly as has their hash power.
As an illustration, Calvin Ayre’s CoinGeek is BSV’s main mining pool controls 27 percent of the network’s computing power. However, CoinGeek’s hash rates have exceeded 51 percent on a few occasions. Other noteworthy mining pools are SVPool and BMG Pool with 10.42 percent and 22.22 percent of the total hash rate.
Blockstream Stands Accused Of Mining Centralization
In May 2019, two Bitcoin Cash mining pools had to carry out a 51 percent attack on the blockchain to reverse a miner’s transactions. BTC.com and BTC.top acted to stop an unknown miner from accessing BCH after taking advantage of a bug during a BCH upgrade. BTC.top has, at one point controlled over 50 percent of the BCH hash power. Both BTC.com and BTC.top run over 44 percent of the cryptocurrencies hashing power.
Blockstream’s massive BTC mining data centers in Georgia and Canada are as per the company meant to support small scale miners. Crypto fans have however noted that the firm’s 6 EH/s of Bitcoin mining power could have exceeded 10 percent of the BT network hash rate a month ago. Lucky for Bitcoin, its hash rate is skyrocketing.
Blocksteam’s BetterHash protocol is meant to ensure that “large pools no longer centrally determine which transactions to include into blocks.” Some crypto fans have called this a fallacy however since, the development of their massive BTC mining farm looks more like a move towards centralization in mining.
