Bitcoin SV (BSV) – a currency that emerged a few years ago through a hard fork of bitcoin cash – has been subjected to a 51 percent attack. Analysts claim that the attack may have been an attempt to fully destroy the asset. Bitcoin SV has now dropped by more than five percent.
BSV Is Under Attack
A 51 percent attack usually occurs through the hands of a miner or miners that are looking to somehow profit from a particular asset’s blockchain. The persons involved try to overwhelm the currency’s network and reorganize the transaction record, which can typically lead to coins being double spent. This leads to the value of the units becoming null and void.
Lucas Nuzzi – network data product manager at Coin Metrics – was one of the first to announce the attack on social media, writing in a recent tweet:
BSV is going through a massive 51 percent attack. After an attempted attack yesterday, some serious hashing power was unleashed today at 11:46AM and attackers are succeeding. There was plenty of confusion across mining pools after the attack, but only one (successful) 14-block [reorganization] since the attack began.
51 percent attacks are not particularly common, though they do occur on some of the world’s most well-known cryptocurrency networks. Bitcoin itself was the victim of one such attack in the year 2014. This time around, bitcoin SV wound up being divided into three separate entities, all of which were being mined at the same time.
Steve Shadders – the chief technology officer of nChain – discussed the specific details of the event:
This latest attack did, as reported, create three malicious forks containing substantial double-spend attempts. The first two have been successfully repelled by honest miners choosing to reject fraudulent double spends in accordance with the bitcoin whitepaper. The third chain is much smaller, just 13 blocks, which miners are in the process of reversing as it is much more recent. While the motive isn’t entirely clear at present, it seems likely it is little more than theft and profiteering, and the fact that we can now repel such actions is very encouraging. It has kept the exchanges, who were targets of these fraud attempts, safe and is completely in line with the whitepaper.
Getting Rid of the False Node
The Bitcoin Association has put out a statement which reads:
In response to the ongoing reorganization attack on the BSV network, Bitcoin Association recommends that node operators mark the fraudulent chain as invalid. This will immediately return your node to the chain supported by honest miners and lock the attacker’s chain out… BSV is a threat to other so-called cryptocurrencies because it is doing what bitcoin was always meant to do.
Bitcoin SV came about in the year 2018. Governed by Craig Wright, the currency has worked to establish itself as a global payment network rather than a currency.
