Craig Wright Affiliated Pools Have Gained 51% of Bitcoin Cash’s Hashrate?

The amount of new hashpower in bitcoin cash has jumped today as some unknown miner suddenly gains nearly 30% in the past 24 hours and 25% for the past seven days.

The Craig Wright affiliated Coingeek has maintained its hashrate at 28% for the past 24 hours, 26.6% for the past seven days, but all other pools have seen a sharp drop in their share.

The new miner, or miners, sign their blocks with whopper or whale. nChain’s BMG pool likewise signs some of their block with whale.

BTC.com seems to allocate much of this new hashrate to Coingeek. Their pool distribution stats are usually somewhat more correct as they tend to allocate unknown hashrate more thoroughly than some other stats providers, but whether their allocation is indeed correct, is unclear.

There is currently no confirmation of who exactly owns this stupendous new amount of hashrate, but some politicking has been going on in BCH for some time, with it publicly erupting in the past few days.

Ostensibly there is disagreement over highly technical and in many ways pretty boring matters, but Andrew Stone of Bitcoin Unlimited says:

“I can only sadly conclude that this is again about power and ego not about technical merit and end user adoption.”

Craig Wright’s Slack channel banned Amaury Sechét, lead dev of BitcoinABC, recently. BitcoinABC, in turn, seemingly banned nChain affiliated individuals.

Miners’ attempts to discuss the matter between themselves led to Jihan Wu of Bitmain calling Craig Wright “fake Satoshi.”

Roger Ver has stayed out of all this. Asked of his views, his reply was: “Not much of opinion yet.”

A chain-split fork is on the table in Bitcoin Cash after Coingeek said they refuse to accept canonical ordering of transactions, also called lexical ordering or pre-consensus. They further refuse to accept a new op_code that allows transactions to “communicate” with data feeds oracles.

ABC says canonical ordering would allow for greater scalability, with another matter here somehow being the blocksize which nChain wants to raise to 128MB while the rest are puzzled as to how they’d address the 32MB message limit which requires quite a bit of work to change.

That’s the background. On the front-end they have begun a campaign of sorts focused primarily on r/btc but also other social media where the strategy appears to be a simple one. First, smear the opponents. Second, big up your side.

Even Vitalik Buterin is not spared by what might be paid PR firms, let alone anyone else, with Sechét a preferred reeeing figure of Craig Wright supporters.

The other, more clever strategy, is to use the big blockers’ arguments against them. A crude example of it is their calling of those that raise concerns regarding a jump to 128MB as small blockers. A smarter one is their line of hashpower decides.

A line they argue presumably because they think they have the hashpower with it now perhaps being publicly shown.

Bitcoin Unlimited here seems to be implicitly, although perhaps unintentionally, on the side of Wright. They are arguing canonical ordering might have “unknown unknowns,” with it potentially having merit or with it being sour grapes after the refusal to include op_group.

Making this pastiche a mess indeed which some hope might be untangled in an August 30th meeting of miners organized by Coingeek where they might present their new BitcoinSV client.

Not to be left out, Cobra the snake has announced his own client, the change nothing client. A joke, presumably, because the change nothing client is the current version, so you just don’t upgrade.

Fun and games maybe, or big dangers ahead for BCH. Lest they all forget, Craig Wright entered the scene on what was expected to be the big day for big blockers where a miner’s meeting was to be held where it appeared they might agree to change the limit.

Instead, Craig Wright disgraced Gavin Andresen by fooling him with a fake signature of a fake signed transaction that is widely held to have been made by Satoshi Nakamoto.

Clever Wright, however, was able to hang around BCH, and even found welcome among some of them under a mistaken belief that although he may be faketoshi, as some call him, his parroting of the real Satoshi might be useful in the now ended blocksize debate.

Then, Bitcoin Unlimited in particular justified their collaboration with nChain on the basis that the money might be useful for BCH. Eventually they seemingly found some integrity, but it’s unclear just how much of it.

So bringing BCH to where it is now in the mids of pointless arguments over pointless matters about which no one could care even a tiny bit.

Yet with potentially just one entity now controlling 51% of the hashrate, perhaps they might have underestimated the chances of a checkmate.

If a split does occur, then it would probably be exchanges which decide just what chain is BCH. Coinbase siding with Wright is as likely as hell freezing over. Same for BitPay. Same really for any exchange except maybe some small irrelevant one.

Yet with 51% of the hashrate one can’t exclude the question of whether exchanges might drop BCH completely. Which means Roger Ver perhaps needs to calm the waters as this distraction is the last thing BCH needs.

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