The Bitcoin SV Network is facing the negative effects of a miner with a majority of hash power producing empty blocks on the network.
In an Oct. 16 announcement, the Bitcoin Association said that it was facing issues from a majority miner on the Bitcoin SV network.
The miner is said to be intentionally obfuscating his coinbase string with a constantly changing string but has been identified by a wallet address where the coinbase rewards are frequently sent.
“Alongside trying to be anonymous while mining a global public ledger, we have observed a pattern of malicious activity from this miner that has increased week after week,” said the Bitcoin Association.
Moreover, the miner has been steadily increasing his presence on-chain that has posed a problem for other honest miners on the network. These actions have also resulted in some transactions not being included in blocks produced, leading to a situation where transaction memory pools are being filled with millions of transactions.
The motivation to mine an empty block may come from the fact that the block subsidy received from doing so is enough of a financial reward, whereas the fee earned from validating millions of transactions is marginal.
In response to the situation, the Bitcoin Association said it is taking steps to contact all relevant exchanges and miners to freeze all rewards associated with the malicious miner. It also plans to pursue criminal charges against the miner in question.
Bitcoin SV is a fork of the Bitcoin Cash protocol, which in itself is a fork of the Bitcoin blockchain aimed at solving Bitcoin’s scalability issues. Bitcoin SV developers believe that solutions like the Lightning Network go against the ethos of Bitcoin and the true way to scale the blockchain is by increasing block size.
