If the only defence of your policies is to silence your critics, the chances of your ideas being the wrong ones are pretty high.
Over the past week, CoinGeek.com has suffered through several distributed denial of service attacks (DDoS). The first one was a big one, and we had to upgrade our defences. Thank-you to the beautiful people at Cloud Flare, subsequent attacks have caused minimal disruptions.
On Thursday BitcoinSV.io was hit with a massive DDoS attack.
The attack comes soon after the website published a listing of wallets, block explorers and other business and services that have chosen to add their support for Bitcoin SV after the ABC decision to move away from Bitcoin BCH.
The timing of these attacks could be coincidental, but the timing of the attacks is somewhat suspect. We won’t cast aspersions towards any of the bastions of free speech in the bitcoin community, but it does highlight a problem with society in recent years.
I was always led to believe that you let your opponent talk and you listen. You present your well-reasoned arguments and allow the better ideas to succeed for the betterment of the society.
With their most recent changes, 5th since the upgrade, ABC’s critics continue to grow. People are critical on social media, and now the mainstream tech press is starting to join the chorus of critics admonishing the Bitmain and Bitcoin.com funded group of developers.
TNW, formerly known as The Next Web, has written a scathing article titled “Bitcoin Cash ABC update exposes potentially catastrophic vulnerability” where it highlights the vulnerabilities opened up by ABC’s slapdashed approach to blockchain development.
For many on Twitter, the checkpoints are a bridge too far as it removes the security provided by the proof of work principal as laid out in the original whitepaper, with many saying and we agree, that ABC is no longer Bitcoin.
The move removes the trustless decentralized system, and it allows a “trusted central authority” to publish these checkpoints. Ask yourself, whom do you trust? Roger Ver, Jihan Wu or Amaury Sechet, I’m sure they’re all nice people to share a meal with but do you trust them with all your money?
DDoS attacks, several updates untested updates and all manner of collusion with wallets and exchanges seem like the actions of desperate men.
There are rumours that the Chinese government is behind this or there is a secretive cabal trying to control the chain for nefarious reasons. I believe it’s much simpler than a crazy conspiracy; this is about plain old-fashioned greed.
The group is desperate to make Wormhole token a thing. Back in August, there was an offer, 1000 wormhole tokens for every BCH burned. This 1000-1 ratio isn’t for everyone, the general public would be and will be offered 10-1 rate when wormhole becomes a widely accepted token.
My sources tell me that Jihan, Roger and a few trusted allies either orchestrated or took advantage of this 1000-1 proposal.
Despite crowing from Ver, the hash war isn’t over and as the chorus of dissent against ABC’s move away from Bitcoin grows louder, and the support for SV swells, we expect more attempts to silence the critics but you can’t DDoS the planet.
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