Altcoin News: A Mistake During Bitcoin Cash Hard Fork Led to Double Spending of $1.3 Million+

May 27, 2019, by Marko Vidrih on ALTCOIN MAGAZINE

After the hard fork, which took place on May 15, the Bitcoin Cash network apparently underwent a reorganization, which resulted in double spending in the amount of 3,392 BCH (about $1.3 million at the current exchange rate).

This was reported in a report published by the research department of the BitMEX exchange. According to the statement, the recent BCH hard fork led to the emergence of interrelated issues.

First, an error occurred, which the attackers obviously took advantage of right after hard forks. This error made it possible to “broadcast transactions which met the mempool validity conditions but failed the consensus checks.”

Second, as a result, miners could not create blocks with these transactions. The empty blocks created instead of them caused concern among the miners, who may have tried to mine blocks in the original chain, which led to network separation.

The third problem was that the branching of the network did not allow the system to return funds randomly sent to SegWit addresses to function. According to BitMEX, this error could lead to a deliberate and coordinated reorganization of the two blockchains. The report claims:

“Based on our calculations, around 3,392 BCH may have been successfully double spent in an orchestrated transaction reversal. However, the only victim with respect to these double spent coins could have been the original ‘thief.’”

As the BitMEX researchers report, the aforementioned problems led to the fact that during hard fork 25 transactions for a total of 3,392 BCH were not included in the reorganized chain, and are now considered double spend.

Last week, as we reported BCH was accused to be centralized and being a victim of a 51% reorg attack by BTC.top and BTC.com. The attack was carried out in order to prevent the unknown miner from seizing the coins that were sent to the “anyone can spend” address after a hard fork in May 2017.