Bitcoin Cash Hard Fork Sees Miners 'Waste' Money on 14 Invalid Blocks

Bitcoin Cash miners appear to have wasted money mining 14 blocks on the wrong chain after the altcoin underwent a hard fork.

According to data from monitoring resource Fork Monitor on Nov. 15, Bitcoin Cash, which itself forked off from Bitcoin in 2017, successfully split in two once again on Friday.

Despite being broadly cleaner than its previous hard fork attempts, it soon became apparent that a large section of miners had not upgraded to the new chain.

In total, miners spent resources mining 14 empty blocks on a chain that the majority of the Bitcoin Cash network already considered invalid and rejected.

"The original rules chain has no transactions due to the transaction replay protection measure Non upgraded Bitcoin Cash miners appear to be wasting resources."

At press time, just 77% of Bitcoin Cash nodes were compatible and using the latest consensus rules, statistics from Coin Dance show.

Theoretically, those miners could have missed out on block rewards worth 12.5 BCH per block or a total of 175 BCH. In reality it is almost mathematically impossible that the same miner would unlock the block reward for so many blocks in a row.

Nodes can be left behind during hard forks for various reasons, often due to accidentally forgetting to upgrade before the block set to trigger the hard fork.

The inefficiency nonetheless piled publicity on Bitcoin Cash and major proponent Roger Ver.

The hard fork meanwhile failed to lift the poor performance of BCH/USD, which has shed around 3.2% in the 24 hours since the hard fork.