To cut it short, there’s never been a “51% attack” on the Bitcoin Cash network and this should be enough to explain why price didn’t drop after this news spread out. Instead, it rose. Crypto media have rushed in screaming about a defeat of Bitcoin Cash due to its blockchain reorg, but they failed to understand what really happened. There was a bug exploited by an attacker who tried to make the network unusable. The only way the miners had to defend themselves was to:
- act manually by producing empty blocks (the alternative was not to produce them);
- warn devs of the problem, who immediately understood it and in record time provided them with a fixed client that would allow them to reprocess correctly the TXs in the network
Team showed a very high ability to react to attacks (on the code, exploiting bug) by attackers, thus the attack was not a 51% one (it has nothing to do with it), but it was an attempt to render inoperative the Bitcoin Cash network.
Decentralization is not an on/off state. It’s a continuum. At first Satoshi spoke of a “gentleman’s agreement”, in times when there was still little competition and a single player could take everything because of the new technology. In fact in 2009 he proposed a so called “gentleman’s agreement” to avoid (or delay) GPU mining:
We should have a gentleman’s agreement to postpone the GPU arms race as long as we can for the good of the network. It’s nice how anyone with just a CPU can compete fairly equally right now.
But now the problem no longer arises: anyone can buy ASICs, or make them at home with the necessary knowledge. Altcoins that have used a more complex ASIC-resistant algorithm (which however will never be ASIC-resistant), are attackable by botnets and therefore less secure, because they can use generic hardware. Instead Bitcoin needs specialized hardware, so if you attack the network then you can’t re-use the hardware — or better, you can’t rent it just the time of the attack. It’s a very costly investment and thus making the operation less viable.
“OK”, you can ask, “but how is the current state of the[de]centralization of BCH mining”? That is, how decentralized is BCH mining?
Less than other crypto without SHA-256, but in our opinion compared to that of BTC there is no substantial difference in centralization. (Note: looking at the pie charts of the last N blocks is not significant, because it takes little to cheat, and to mark your own blocks so that they appear — for example — to be two of two different miners.)
Instead, there is a difference in solidity, because the BCH hash rate is about one tenth of that of BTC, so any miner that has 10% of BTC’s hash could make a 51% attack. It would, of course, mine at a loss and waste about $1–2 million. But it is feasible: $ 1–2 million is the cost of a 51% attack (then of course it should be seen what the incentive would be to do it, but that’s another story). However, miners tend to be economically rational and move enough between the two networks. Almost all the big miners mine on both networks, so it follows that centralization is similar.
There are miners that only mine blocks on BTC, but as it happens BCH has a huge chunk of “other” — which we think includes miners who say “We only mine BTC blocks on principle”, but then without declaring it they also mine blocks on BCH. In essence: the centralization of BCH mining doesn’t worry us more than the one on BTC.
For what concerns decentralization of development, BCH is much more decentralized than BTC, and we would say also of any other cryptocurrency. Those who talk about the overwhelming power of ABC don’t know of what they are talking about, or are malicious.
On BTC, core has almost completely slowed down any development. It is more decentralized in the development of the client, of protocol expansions, of other stuff that is done on-chain. In BCH you can breathe the air you breathed years ago on BTC: ideas that are born, devs enthusiasm, etc.
Also on the roadmap, no other cryptocurrency has so much discussion to define the roadmap than BCH. There is no benevolent dictator — as on Ethereum —who decides practically everything (see DAO story).
Of course we can hope for something better, but at the moment we don’t see better alternatives. Still, there is room to do better. When people built the highways, few people had a car, and one could even say, “Why did you build the highway? We’re still riding horses!” Growth is certainly not determined by the protocol, there are two parts here that must sing in duet for the melody to take shape and sound, the alchemy isn’t one sided: on the one hand designers (of urban planning or protocols), on the other users.
Of course, building an infrastructure has its disadvantages, and perhaps the advantages aren’t so immediate. But if the roads get saturated every summer, one begins to say “Let’s take that risk and build the highways.” Over time this kind of mindset helped to have a faster society, to the benefit of all.
A design choice cannot determine the use that will be made of a certain product, but at least the design must respond to user feedback. It takes time for a mass adoption, but we think Bitcoin usability needs to be improved. Apple teaches us that if the user doesn’t go to technology, the technology goes to the user. There is no reason why a person should want a computer at home once used to say IBM. Yet they managed to bring the PC into every houses, taking care of the usability first of all: accompanying the user in a simplified world and within his reach.
So who expects “Adoption tomorrow!” is destined to remain disappointed. It is not important where we stand, but what the prospects are. A lot of new projects, a lot of new use cases, a lot of people to work on them. Bitcoin is 10 years old, and it took us 10 years to get where we are now. Another bunch of years are needed to improve.
