March 28, 2024

Unknown miner restored and assigned 8,979 BCH from SegWit addresses

An unknown miner was able to recover almost 9,000 BCH mistakenly sent by users to SegWit addresses, andappropriated these coins.

Bitcoin Cash Network (BCH) has encountered a problemshortly after launch in August 2017. Due to the similarity of address formats, BCH users for a long time sent coins to SegWit addresses that are not supported on the Bitcoin Cash network. As a result, up to 18,000 BCH were sent to these addresses by mistake.

Recent Coinmetrics data show thatWell-known pools using their coin recovery programs managed to return about half of the BCH back to their owners. But one unknown miner managed to get enough blocks to appropriate about 9,000 BCH. Jameson Lopp tweeted this and tweeted:

“An unknown miner was able to recover almost 9,000 BCH, which were erroneously sent to SegWit addresses. More than $ 3 million today. ”

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Coinmetrics tracked a problem from the first days of it.occurrence when hundreds of coins were lost. Some pools, such as BTC.com, even created a service for claiming the return of lost BCH, although it only worked temporarily. Later, the pool decided to complete the recovery of small amounts, setting a minimum fee of 10 BCH for recovering 100 BCH.

Currently BTC.com and BTC.top&#8212; the largest miners engaged in the recovery of coins. At the same time, an unknown miner has already recovered and appropriated 8,979 BCH, and this may not be the limit. Condition for gaining access to coins &#8212; be a miner or contact a miner willing to enable a non-standard transaction scenario. Regular users cannot send the required type of transaction to the blockchain.

At one point, BTC.com and BTC.top managed to prevent one attempt to recover lost coins by actually performing a 51% combined attack on the Bitcoin Cash blockchain. This stopped the distribution of transactions obtained by an unknown miner in a specially prepared block that would give him access to the lost BCH.

BCH changed the address format in 2018, andThe number of coins sent to SegWit addresses has significantly decreased since April 2019. The search for lost coins continues, although it is now more difficult for owners to organize the return of small transactions.

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