Bitcoin Cash Miners Undo Attacker's Transactions With '51% Attack'

Two bitcoin cash mining pools recently carried out what is known as a 51 percent attack on the blockchain in an apparent effort to reverse another miner's transactions.

The move is tied to the bitcoin cash network hard fork that occurred on May 15.

In the context of cryptocurrencies like bitcoin cash, a 51 percent attack involves an entity or group controlling a majority of the hash rate which thereby allows them to execute several things they aren't normally allowed to do, such as attempting to rewrite the network's transaction history.

According to stats site Coin.Dance, the two mining pools currently have combined 44% of bitcoin cash hashing power.

The interesting part of this particular attack on bitcoin cash is that it was arguably executed in an attempt to do something ostensibly good for the community, not to reward the attackers or to take the funds for themselves.

Not everyone in the bitcoin cash community agrees.

Once one code change was removed during bitcoin cash's May 15 hard fork, these coins were suddenly spendable "Basically handing the coins to miners," he added.

The unknown miner attacker decided to try to take the coins.

Some bitcoin cash users argue this was the right thing to do.

"This is a very unfortunate situation, but it is also what proof of work actually is. The miners in this case did choose to drop prohashes block and from what I heard, it is because they deemed a transaction within it to have been invalid," responded active bitcoin cash supporter Jonathan Silverblood.