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Today I woke up to 3 separate people asking me “WTF is going on with Bitcoin Cash” — mostly from LTC controlled Telegram channels. Let’s have a quick critical look to see if anything is amiss, shall we?

Difficulty, block time and height export — https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1iSHEYER92q1T_8n1aGy1SDfbz3CbJYcfuPqDvNpYQHk/

As you can see from the graph, the 3-hour gap was most likely caused by a large (around 10% of the total hashrate) miner leaving the network.

In the period after that we had 149 blocks in 22 hours, which works out to 6.7 per hour with a target of 6. This is pretty normal, a change in the difficulty of this magnitude is bound to cause oscillations of over and under adjustments.

As I’m writing this, the hashrate is rising again by about 10%, this can easily be explained by people switching on their miners in response to those events.

TLDR; What does it mean?

There is nothing in the current data that even remotely resembles a 50% attack. The hashrate rose barely by 10%. In the same way that people are looking into their morning toast and seeing the face of Jesus ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pareidolia ), others are trying to divine an attack from those semi-random numbers.