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downloadA 51% attack was carried out against Bitcoin SV (BSV) yesterday.
FARUM has identified a 51% attack today on the BSV network at around 11:45AM EDT.https://t.co/Oy19UDw53t https://t.co/T3MMRHqPe8
— CoinMetrics.io (@coinmetrics) August 3, 2021
Bitcoin Satoshi’s Vision (BSV) is a fork of Bitcoin Cash (BCH), itself a fork of Bitcoin (BTC), but has nothing to do with either Bitcoin or BCH.
It was born in November 2018, but the project never really got off the ground.
In particular, its mining is not particularly decentralized, so that it is not that difficult to carry out a 51% attack.
To date, a 51% attack on Bitcoin would cost over $1.7 million per hour, according to Crypto51.app, and one on BCH would cost over $23,000 per hour, whereas one on BSV is much cheaper.
The attack that began yesterday generated up to three different versions of the BSV blockchain, and it appears that for over three hours, the attackers managed to take control of the chain.
It was “a deep reorg with a max depth of 14 blocks”, and conflicts are reportedly still ongoing between the main mining pools.
According to the Bitcoin Association, which supports BSV and not BTC, nodes would have to execute a specific command to invalidate the fraudulent chains:
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.
2/2
— Bitcoin Association (@BitcoinAssn) August 3, 2021
However, the situation now seems to be back under control, and the price of BSV on the markets has not suffered a major fall.
The consequences of the 51% attack on the price of Bitcoin SV
In fact, the current value of around $135 is only 4% lower than it was yesterday, although compared to yesterday’s peak of $147 it is down 8%.
In cases such as these, if the attacks do indeed have serious consequences, there are usually real price collapses, whereas an 8% loss is hardly exceptional.
However, although the all-time high was reached in April this year at $490, the current BSV price is 41% lower than last year.
This is not due to yesterday’s attempted attack, but to the real collapse that took place in May, when the price dropped from $423 to $150 in less than twenty days, a loss of 64% in about two weeks. The price then fell again to the current $135.