Bitcoin Cash Miners Were Unable to Discover a Block for More Than 5 Hours

An anomaly was noticed on the Bitcoin Cash network last night — no blocks were added to it for 5 hours and 19 minutes.

According to Blockchair, the Bitcoin Cash network returned to regular block production as of 8:00 UTC on Thursday, with more than five-hour gap in block production. After that, the blocks continued to be produced at normal speed.

What exactly happened on the blockchain of the fourth-largest cryptocurrency by market cap is not completely clear. According to some versions, miners could specifically turn off their equipment in order to outwit the mechanism of urgent adjustment of complexity used in Bitcoin Cash in order to increase the efficiency of block mining in the future.

Another fact of interest is that after 5 hours of downtime in the Bitcoin Cash network, congestion from the transactions did not have time to form. In fact, 2.3 MB of data accumulated at this point was added along with the first block via the ViaBTC pool.

The average daily volume of Bitcoin Cash transactions is currently 50,000, which is 6 times less than Bitcoin. Critics will probably use this incident in order to show that it will not be soon for BCH to take advantage of the increased block size.

Author: Marko Vidrih

Featured image credit: Pixabay