No, YOU Can’t Break Bitcoin.
Recently in a private chatroom with “blockchain insiders” someone posted this screenshot from a slack chat where CSW appears to claim he’s going to do a chainstall attack on Bitcoin shortly before the 2020 halvening.
The chat image appears to be from early-mid 2019. I figured by now, critical thinkers who follow Bitcoin news would understand that CSW is a fraudster conman, but let me just lay out the case for why I don’t think it’s possible for CSW/Coingeek to perform this complicated chainstall attack on Bitcoin in 2020.
Since this post 8+ months ago, they’ve shown their cards on hashpower.
In late 2018 during the “fork wars” they barely had enough hashpower to take over BCH, and now they are claiming they can take over BTC hashpower?
Total SHA256 hashpower is around 150 exahash currently. There’s fluctuating hashpower on the SHA256 altcoins, usually around 5–7 on BCH and 2–4 on BSV.
The BCH camp tried this chainstall attack already during the Segwit2X debacle & it almost worked.
There were 2 points where BCH hashpower surpassed BTC hashpower — at test in Aug 2017 shortly after the fork, then the real attack Nov 2017 right before S2X was supposed to happen.
They combined this hashpower attack with a co-ordinated dump of BTC (Roger Ver announced he was going to do this on a podcast) and an ahead-of-schedule early listing of BCH on Coinbase, along with a price pump on Korean exchanges.
Side note: (When asked about the Coinbase insider trading accusations on live TV, Roger Ver said he thinks insider trading is a non-crime.
The for of chainstall attack that CSW is describing was almost successful in Nov 2017 as there was a difficulty adjustment coming up right around the date of the Segwit2X fork, and had the S2X fork not been called off, I think they would have successfully done a lot more damage to Bitcoin.
However, the #NO2X movement prevailed, the users applied enough pressure for the corporate entities behind Segwit2X like Bitmain tto back down on their takeover attempt, yet camp Ver went ahead with the plan to try to flip the price & hashpower of Bitcoin anyway.
As with everything CSW does, his slack post seems to be plagiarized from the failed attack playbook the forkers already tried.
No BCH / BSV miner controls enough hashpower to threaten bitcoin at the moment, it’s highly unlikely that BCH/BSV miners will ever be able to get enough hashpower to try again. Their one window of opportunity has likely passed, and the only entity that Bitcoin has to worry about now is government level hashpower attacks.
Why should we be so confident not to worry about CSW’s threats?
Coingeek was trying to do a reverse merger on the Canadian stock market with Squire Mining. In the docs it was disclosed that Coingeek has ~1 exahash and squire had ~2–3 exahash.
During the BCHABC /BCHSV fork war when CSW & Calvin wanted to take control of the project, we saw them expose their cards again.
Coingeek & CSW told other BCH miners that they would use their ‘significant hashpower’ to re-org the chain and take control of BCH so that BCHSV would be “The real Bitcoin Cash”.
Roger Ver, like a true voluntaryist, used his power and took totalitarian control of his pool users’ hashpower, redirecting from mining BTC to mining BCH to prevent BSV miners from taking over the chain.
In Nov 2017 BCH briefly had greater than 50% of all SHA256 hashpower, however in 2019, BCH/BSV hashpower could only muster up to 24% of all SHA256 hashpower.
Total hash Nov 2018: 52 exahash
Total BCHABC + BCHSV: 12–12.5 exahash.
During the bear market in 2018, Bitcoin’s hashpower grew exponentially.
There was a period of consolidation Nov/Dec 2018 where hashpower was slowly dropping that the nocoiner media fetishized as the “Bitcoin Death Spiral.”
In the 12 months since the “unrelenting death spiral” bitcoin’s hashrate has made new ATHs every month.
It’s estimated that pro-BCH/BSV entities still control the same amount of hashpower but instead of that being 24% of sha256 now its only about 5% of total sha256 hashpower.
It’s unlikely that CSW / Calvin Ayre have access to more than 12.5 exahash, even if they rented hashpower. For instance nicehash only has 0.5 exahash available to rent at the moment.
They would need about 60 exahash to pull that attack off described in the original slack post, and even that amount of hashpower would be challenging for a government level entity to successfully pull off.
There is a small chance that the growth in BTC hashpower over the last 2 years is actually owned by pro-BCH/BSV miners, but that seems highly unlikely.
No, CSW can’t break bitcoin…but the CPC or the US Government still could.
