I know this topic has been discussed before. However, the conclusions that I found in previous discussions usually ended up with something like “no miner has an economic incentive for that so it won´t happen”.
Let´s just assume for a moment that it will happen.
-What options does our community and the industry around it have in order to respond to that and preserve the vision of global frictionless cash for the world, “unbanking the banked”, “banking the unbanked” and all the other great visions that many of us have brought us here in the first place?
The reason why I am concerned about this is the following:
Even though there is adoption, it is by far no going as fast as I hoped for. Transactions measured by unique in- and out addresses (bitinfocharts.com) is around 0,05 % of the amount on the btc-chain. We are, lamentably, still a small niche within an also rather small niche.
Now while I don´t have any problem of helping to spread adoption and being patient, even if it takes years, this slow adoption could cause various problems:
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Next halvening will most likely take place before btc halvening. Then hashrate might plausibly fall by another 50 % relative to btc. By then a 51 % attack could be relatively cheap for one of the bigger btc miners. A reason for the attack could be douple spend or simply get rid of bch & thereby hoping to increase price of btc and therefore block reward for mining the core-chain.
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If we don´t see significant adoption over the years to come, the block reward will halve every 4 years. Without other economic incentives for miners, the network might get much less hashrate and therefore become increasingly vulnerable for attacks. I don´t see a small hashrate as a problem per se as bitcoin btc has operated stable on a much lower than the current hasrate for most of its existence. I only see it as a problem with regard to opening an attack vector for miners with bad intentions.
Without a possible attack, scaling can take more time, because it´s still decades until the block reward fades out totally and bitcoin cash can work on a much lower hashrate. But the possibility of an attack that might destroy bitcoin cash gives me a headache (apart from the other headache about all the infighting surrounding the November had fork).
I´ll be glad for any input with regard to my initial question on how an attack could be answered. And no, I´m not a “concern troll”. I think these are legit worries, even for a bitcoin cash maximalist.
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source https://www.reddit.com/r/btc/comments/9fzek7/concern_about_51_attack_on_bitcoin_cash/
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