ABC’s Strategic Withdrawal
If Hannibal and Carthage are coming to pillage Rome and the Roman soldiers sail to Athens, at the end of the war who holds Rome? The purpose of the war is to win, not survive. That’s why I was incredibly disappointed by the actions of ABC. In a hash-war you prove the legitimacy of your chain through Proof-of-Work in order to prove in an objective manner the dominance of your protocol. The way it works is simple, in Bitcoin it is most profitable to mine on the honest chain, so if there is confusion as to which chain is honest if miners duel to the death, only the most profitable chain can survive. Quite brutal, yes, but this particular hash-war was for the name of the chain and for the name of the chain alone.
ABC could have added replay protection, but to do so implies they are the minority chain and they would need to change their ticker so ABC decided against replay protection. Some may argue that CSW was going to copy their replay protection, but if CSW would have copied the replay protection a legal case could be made against him and he could have potentially been bankrupted through lawsuits. As I’ve stated for months, during a hash-war, you put pressure on your opponent to try and get them to make criminal missteps so if ABC was good at hash-wars they would have used the marketplace (in this case the legal marketplace) to achieve dominance. But, ABC decided against market based hash-war to determine the Bitcoin (BCH) ticker and instead relied on social engineering.
When I say that ABC used social engineering for this attack, I mean that in the run-up to the attack they stated that they were confident they would win the hash-war, and after they implemented checkpoints they stated that the hash-war was won. But all they did was stamp their own chain. SV can put a checkpoint into their chain, but would that make them the legitimate chain? If SV put in two checkpoints in their chain then in terms of “checkpointweight” SV would be ahead, but is that how a hash-war is determined, by stamps of approval by the developer groups and exchanges backing that particular chain? Since this was the first hash-war the question confuses many but you would think that hashpower would be a defining characteristic of a hash-war. Instead we got a checkpoint. If ABC decided the hash-war was not going to be decided by hashpower didn’t they retreat? As stated above, ABC could have taken steps to do a clean split without a hash-war, but they did not because they wanted to keep the Bitcoin (BCH) ticker. So under what circumstances can they say they entered into the hashwar involuntarily and were forced to checkpoint? It seems that they knew they would lose the hash-war so they tried to trick the public that a short burst of hashpower followed by their stamp of approval was winning a hash-war. But in fact ABC retreated. Yet they have still claimed the victory and the ticker. But how?
ABC claimed the ticker through NChain’s mistake. When CSW implied that he would implement a “lottery” system into SV he incited fears of what would appear to be theft. For this reason it can be argued that something must be done to split the coins, however since the coins could have split cleanly to avoid this problem this defense by ABC is only partially valid. Zero attempts were made by the developers to add protection to save the users funds. Instead the developers advocated splitting your coins on both chains through OP_Codes, which is not a safe thing to do in a hash-war because it puts merchants and exchanges at risk of re-org double spends. This was one of many of the underhanded tactics by the ABC developers. By putting the most powerful players in terms of defining the ticker directly in the crossfire ABC ensured their obedience. Rather than doing something more logical and less risky like delaying the fork until replay protection or some other protective measure was in place in order to protect exchanges and merchants ABC specifically put funds at risk to make the situation seem dire if they were to lose. It’s similar to how terrorists try to put weapons caches in hospitals and the like. It works, but it is quite disgusting. But it most be noted that if NChain hadn’t given them a reason to believe their funds were going to be stolen then the ABC devs wouldn’t have been able to stir up so much fear.
Because of this fear, they were able to trick the community into thinking that a few trusted parties representing a particular development team and the exchanges and merchants allied with this development team could define Bitcoin (BCH). If the purpose of Bitcoin was to create “A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System” as per the whitepaper then doesn’t using trusted peers break the system? If you think about it, how are we different from any Central Bank where certain high-ranking members decide what is the U.S. dollar and what is not through executive fiat. Instead of Jerome Powell and Janet Yellen, we have Roger Ver and Jihan Wu.
What’s worse is the depth of the deception. In one of the livestreams leading up to the hash-war Roger very confidently responded to Ryan Charles that he didn’t expect any threat of a re-organization in the hash-war, in fact Roger and company almost laughed at Ryan for the thought. After the fact, it is obvious that Roger and company knew of the checkpoints, but once again a hash-war is when two miners enter into the use of offensive hashpower to bankrupt each other. If the hash-war was to be determined by hashpower the checkpoint was irrelevant. Roger and his developers know this, they were intentionally being deceitful because they knew they couldn’t win the hash-war, but they could win the battle of social engineering.
This social engineering battle was apparent during the hash-war, and it revolved around the ABC/BU developers, Roger Ver, Jihan Wu, all spreading false and misleading information. As soon as the so-called hash-war began everyone started comparing the lead in block length of the two public chains, but a hash-war involves warring private chains. The developers on both sides know this, yet the ABC/BU side kept pushing the narrative that the hash-war was determined by the length of the public chains because they weren’t mining a private SV chain. Instead they rented temporary hash and put it all on their public chain while changing the narrative around hash-wars that it was length of the public chains that mattered. I noticed this very early on and it struck me as odd.
It was estimated the cost of the miners that Roger used during the first few hours of the “hash-war” was $300 million. Roger rented the hash, so his costs were not nearly that high, but if you are to imagine that a government were to attempt to gain majority hashrate of Bitcoin (BCH) at the time of the fork they would have needed to spend at least $300 million in dedicated mining rigs to stand a chance. Yes the government can try and rent hash to do this, but its hard for a government to convince the owner of mining equipment to ruin the value of his investment. So even in these early stages, the simple costs of amassing the hardware for a hash-war are massive.
Beyond the simple hardware costs are the electrical costs, NChain showed they were willing to hash-war for years. ABC showed they were willing to hash-war for a few hours. So in terms of which chain has more security against a state actor the answer was clear. Bitcoin SV could have brought Bitcoin (BCH) to a stage where the electrical costs alone of attacking Bitcoin (BCH) would have been high enough to make any state actor reconsider. Think of what an accomplishment that would have been. But instead Roger Ver and company decided all you needed was a little social engineering and a stamp of approval from the right people. But because state actors are far better at social engineering ABC has just opened a new vulnerability and method for destruction of their blockchain that exponentially lowers the cost of attack. All a state actor must do is rent a few hours of hashpower, checkpoint a chain with enough allied “scientists” and voila, Bitcoin is state-controlled.
But the deception gets even deeper. What were the complaints of ABC? Again the legitimate worry on side ABC was the so-called “lottery”, but if ABC implemented replay protection or some other measure to split their chains cleanly they had nothing to worry about. The other main objections were that the miners for SV were centralized and controlled only be a few people (mainly Calvin and Craig and their associates). But up to 2/3 of the hashrate for ABC in the first few hours of the fork came from one source, Roger Ver’s rented hashrate. So if having a few miners with a super-majority of your hashrate is bad, isn’t having one miner with a super-majority even worse. Furthermore, since the hashpower is rented, isn’t there a further worry that the owner of the hashpower will not follow through with their end of the contract? Haven’t you introduced trust into the system? In the future, what happens if someone says they will rent hashpower to Roger, but then simply fail to live up to their end of the bargain? Would that mean the individual who controls the rented hash for those few hours could decide the fate of the chain? It would appear so.
I want to add that in my initial article on this topic I argued that SV and ABC should agree to some sort of peace. My proposition was that ABC keep the Bitcoin (BCH) ticker and implement some sort of replay protection to show they are the chain that forked and let SV keep the title of the original version created by Satoshi but have a name change to Bitcoin Classic with SV as the leading implementation. Because ABC is defining itself by checkpoint and not POW they did what I proposed in terms of showing objectively they are not the chain defined by longest POW, so at this point what I want to see happen hasn’t changed. Let ABC keep the ticker and have SV change to Bitcoin Classic but keep the title of the original version of Bitcoin. The one thing that I won’t get from my initial proposal is a version of ABC that I would ever use.
Chris Pacia, continuously lambasted SV as a centralized shitcoin, but ABC had more centralization of miners, centralized their blockchain through a new genesis block in the checkpoint, and centralized the defining characteristic of their blockchain as an agreement between a monetary elite who it would appear will now settle all further disputes with the legitimacy of the chain. At least Bitcoin (BTC) chose something to defend when they threatened miners with hash algorithm changes. The Bitcoin (BTC) users rallied around the idea that all users would run nodes. The idea of users running their own nodes is something I completely disagree with, but at least it’s a position they can try and defend. Team ABC threatened all the same things to the miners the Bitcoin (BTC) crowd did, but instead of having a rallying cry about what Bitcoin was meant to be, their rallying cry is “We hate Craig!” Don’t get me wrong, I understand hating Craig, but saying you are censoring him from the competition because you don’t like him is the most anti-Bitcoin act I have ever witnessed in my life. It boggles my mind that hatred of Craig has allowed a new monetary elite to form that closely resembles Central Banking.
