[image credit : Flickr]
Unknown miners have managed to capture most of the hashrate on the Bitcoin SV (BSV) network, and have been mining nearly empty blocks after managing to do so.
According to Coin.Dance data, unknown miners have managed to capture 54.5% of the blocks mined on the cryptocurrency’s blockchain over the last seven days, controlling more hashrate than major BSV mining pools like CoinGeek, Mempool, and ViaBTC.
The miners who are now mining most blocks on the cryptocurrency’s network have started dropping transactions from some of its most popular applications, which include a Twitter-like application called Twetch and a weather platform that records weather data.
Last year it was estimated by Coin Metrics that 96% of BSV transactions came from the blockchain’s weather application. As a result, blocks mined by these miners include a few dozen transactions at most.
[image credit : Coin.Dance]
The unknown miners appear to be working together in not processing these transactions. As most cryptocurrency enthusiasts know, if a single mining entity manages to control more than 51% of the hashrate on a network, it’s possible to execute double spends and chain reorganization.
The miners’ control comes as BSV approaches its block reward halving. Bitcoin SV was created through a hard fork of Bitcoin Cash (BCH), which is itself a fork of the Bitcoin (BTC) blockchain. Just like BTC, its block rewards halve every 210,000 blocks. In little over two weeks, Bitcoin SV is expected to see its block rewards drop from 12.5 BSV per block to 6.25, while BTC’s halving is expected to occur in May.
It’s worth noting that Bitcoin SV and Bitcoin Cash have the same SHJA256 hashing algorithm BTC does, which means that the unknown miners blocking transactions on the BSV blockchain could be miners who left BTC or BCH mining pools to take advantage of BSV’s halving.
While the Bitcoin blockchain has a hashrate of over 84 PH/s, BCH’s network has a hashrate of 2.9 PH/s, and BSV has 3.4 PH/s at press time.
