BitPico, an anonymous group of pro-bitcoin developers, whales and miners is trying to initiate a 51 percent attack on bitcoin cash (BCH). Renowned for its stress tests on the Lightning Network (LN), the group said its intention is to analyze how well the BCH network can handle stress. According to their claims, the BCH network is not decentralized enough as it is only run by a handful of miners and datacenters. They have set up a dedicated GitHub repository for this sole purpose.

As such, over the coming months, they plan to gradually amplify their attack by carrying out a progressive stress test. In a period of six weeks, they expect to have at least 5000 attack nodes and once that is done, they intend to “multi-fork the chain.” The whole idea behind the project is to show the world how simple it is to take down the BCH network. BitPico first made a name in the crypto community last year as staunch supporters of SegWit 2x, a proposed bitcoin scaling solution. After an extended break, they resurfaced in March 2018 to test the integrity of Lightning Network using a coordinated attack.

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The Difference between BTC and BCH

Supremacy wars have always been the order of the day between bitcoin and BCH. Since the inception of bitcoin, there have been concerns regarding its capacity to scale in proportion to rising demand. Consequently, in July 2017, the BTC community decided to implement a scalability solution known as Segregated Witness, SegWit2x in short. SegWit2x aims to compress transaction data so as to allow more transactions to fit in a single block. But not everyone agreed with the approach, with some developers feeling that it did not address the fundamental issue of scalability adequately. Additionally, they felt that it was a deviation from the roadmap Satoshi Nakamoto outlined in the original whitepaper. Therefore, they initiated a hard fork to create BCH.

The key difference between bitcoin and bitcoin cash is the fact that block sizes on BCH are 8MB, compared to BTC’s 1MB. Subsequently, the network’s transaction’s verification process is much faster. Moreover, the cost of transacting on the BCH network tends to be significantly lower when both have a high transaction load. Another major difference between bitcoin and bitcoin cash is that the former boasts much higher stability and security. The reason behind this is the fact that there is a lot more support for network miners and a time-tested infrastructure for the ecosystem. Compared to the BCH network, BTC currently has at least 4.5 times more full nodes than BCH. Essentially, this means that BTC’s network is more distributed, but when activity is high, fees increase and transactions take longer.

In spite of the fact that BCH was created to address the scalability problems in BTC, bitcoin will always hold the early riser advantage. Being the oldest cryptocurrency in the market, it has over time gained immeasurable investor confidence. And this single fact makes all the difference between the two networks. By virtue of its high market penetration and adoption rate, BTC price is much higher than that of BCH, whose value oscillates between 10 and 15% of the former. However, mining costs for the two networks are the same, making it a lot less profitable to mine BCH. With fewer miners to support its network, its level of decentralization is not as high as that of its predecessor.

Both coins are however in the top five cryptocurrencies according to market capitalization making them appealing choices for crypto traders. Bitcoin and BCH can be bought and traded on Huobi Pro. And if you have not already done so, you can create your own Huobi Pro account by clicking here.