Tuesday, 14 August 2018

[Serious] Can BTC and BCH coexist from a SHA-256 perspective?

Not posting this to r/Bitcoin because I wanted to have a technical discussion and not get slammed with a bunch of bots. Also not interested in what happens to coins once they're mined. Lightning network, colored coins, memo.cash - all potentially interesting debate fodder once they get into the hands of the users, but that's not the topic of my inquiry.

Both Bitcoin (BTC) and Bitcoin Cash (BCH) use the same mining algorithm, SHA-256. Can multiple [mined] coins really occupy the same hardware requirements? If the discrepancy gets too large, can't the other be flooded with a 51%+ attack with an ever smaller portion of the other coin's mining ecosystem?

Let's take an example. Here's the current BTC hash contribution. Antpool is 14% of the total, which as of today is 52 EH/s, so a total of 7.28 Exahash from Antpool. The Bitcoin Cash hash rate is 4.1 EH/s. Assuming there's no overlap, if Antpool suddenly decided to mine a few blocks on the BCH chain, they would be almost 2x the existing total and therefore 66%+ of the network.

Perhaps these numbers are too close together, but if there is a clear winner this discrepancy only gets larger. Is there some sort of proof that outlines this runaway effect? Has this happened to other coins that borrowed a common hash rate algorithm? If there was something else to be mined with X11(dash) or Blake2b (siacoin), I suspect it would be more pronounced than BTC/BCH.

submitted by /u/Lazilox
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source https://www.reddit.com/r/btc/comments/971jfs/serious_can_btc_and_bch_coexist_from_a_sha256/

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