QUADRIGA INITIATIVE
CRYPTO WATCHDOG & FRAUD RECOVERY PLATFORM
A COMMUNITY-BASED, NOT-FOR-PROFIT
$0 USD
AUGUST 2021
GLOBAL
BITCOIN ASSOCIATION
DESCRIPTION OF EVENTS
"At around 11:45 pm (UTC+8) on Aug. 3, the BSV network suffered a malicious 51% attack as predicted, resulting in three versions of the Bitcoin SV blockchain being mined simultaneously and the reorganization of 14 blocks." ""Bitcoin SV (BSV), a version of an early Bitcoin fork called Bitcoin Cash (BCH), suffered a massive 51% attack on Tuesday that was still underway as of 7:30 am UTC on Wednesday, according to experts." "The attack caused chaos in mining pools and the blocks were generated on three forks at the same time."
"While many crypto exchanges were not prepared for the attack, Huobi detected the risk more than a month ago thanks to its advanced risk control systems. As a result, Huobi took preemptive measures to guard its users’ assets and remained the only exchange unaffected by the attack." "Huobi was the first exchange trading platform to discover the potential of a BSV-related risk and took control measures a month earlier than any other platform, including Coinbase, thanks to its top risk control team and capabilities. During its eight years of operation, Huobi is the only exchange that has operated safely without any security incidents for nearly a decade."
"According to [Kim] Nilsson, the first reorg on Tuesday was about 100 blocks deep. Nikita Zhavoronkov, the lead developer at Blockchain analytics platform Blockchair, agreed in a tweet, adding that it wiped 570,000 transactions."
"The Bitcoin Association recommended that node operators invalidate the fraudulent chain." "To invalidate the fraudulent chain, node operators should run the following command on their #BitcoinSV node: bitcoin-cli invalidateblock 000000000000000003B67AEC95E9B5DA897EB5EBF3227D5A6A67835104367840 Please reach out on Twitter with any questions for the BA team."
"This mitigation strategy has “further split the network as different nodes now disagree on the current chain tip,” Nilsson said." "Coin Metrics said late on Tuesday that the attack had ended, but that there was still confusion between mining pools. Pools are mining on "completely different" block heights at the moment, Nuzzi told CoinDesk in a message late on Tuesday."
"There is no "clear indication" of the attacker's identity, and Coin Metrics is still looking into the attacker's chain for "traces of double spends targeting exchanges," Nuzzi said."
“There is so much hatred” in the competitive world involving Bitcoin, Bitcoin Cash and Bitcoin SV, said Konstantin Richter, chief executive officer and founder of Blockdaemon, a blockchain infrastructure provider. “It’s a simple ploy to get BSV kicked off exchanges in my eyes.”
"At the time of writing, data from Coin Dance shows the miner Taal has 47.6% of the BSV hashrate and 27% belongs to unknown stealth miners. Taal is considered an honest and protective mining operator within the BSV community."
"The mining operator Taal has been able to capture 15 blocks in a row while this article was written. According to the blog post written by Speirs which also contains developing updates: “In the last 12 hours, two illegal chains created by the attacker have been successfully repelled.”"
"Bitcoin Association and the Bitcoin SV Infrastructure Team continue to monitor the situation around the clock; however, it remains critically important that infrastructure providers and ecosystem partners continue to invalidate illegal forked chains to protect the network and its users."
"We believe that exchanges should implement these measures as best practice whenever fraudulent chains with attempted double-spend transactions are detected; these actions are illegal on any blockchain and with any digital currency, not just on BSV."
"The third attempted attack on the network has been successfully repelled. The attacker again created an illegal fraudulent chain. As of the time of posting, there have been no further attempted attacks on the network."
The bitcoin SV blockchain underwent a reorganization, when a hacker was able to gain more computational power than the rest of the network. The Bitcoin Association acted by requesting all node operators to discard the longer chain, which created a period of confusion where different nodes were mining different chains. Those who did not hear and obey the Bitcoin Association continued to mine the longer chain.
In the end, the attack was "repelled" successfully. Anyone who mined on the longest chain lost their mining rewards and transaction history was rewritten, but the double spend was prevented.
BSV attack averted by Huobi’s proprietary risk control systems (Aug 22)
BSV Suffers 51% Attack: Report (Aug 22)
CoinDesk: Bitcoin, Ethereum, Crypto News and Price Data (Sep 20)
@BitcoinAssn Twitter (Aug 29)
Bloomberg - Are you a robot? (Sep 20)
@coinmetrics Twitter (Sep 20)
Bitcoinsv Chain Suffers 51% Attack: Analyst Claims BSV Network Experienced a 100-Block Reorg – Bitcoin News (Sep 20)
@nikzh Twitter (Sep 20)
Updated: Statement on August 2021 block re-organisation attack on the Bitcoin SV network - Bitcoin Association (Sep 20)
