What if BCH gets hijacked?

Eternal vigilance is the price of liberty.

Once familiar with the world-changing scope of the BCH mission, it's natural to consider the pushback to this. For BCH to succeed, it must successfully navigate, avoid or solve all manner of attacks including social subversion, mining attacks, economic manipulation, cultural complacency, technological stagnation & more. Particularly in light of the BTC Hijacking, it's more than reasonable to ask why the same fate would not befall BCH.

The truth is, there is no way to guarantee that BCH will not be hijacked. The community works as hard as it can to realise the mission of becoming the global reserve currency. However, Bitcoin is an experiment and there is no guarantee it can reach critical mass before larger powers somehow derail it. Adopters & advocates should be aware of this fact, there is no hiding from it. An expectation of guaranteed victory is naive & dangerous.

Bitcoin is a challenge to the existing power structures & they can & will fight back. All BCH adopters should be aware of and prepared for this.

Social Proof of Work

Just as mining energy expenditure allows Bitcoin to verifiably coordinate on a disruption-free path forward, social "Proof of work" is a key defence to sabotage or bad acting. This can include any contribution that helpfully spreads BCH and moves it forward on its mission - whether through business activities, marketing outreach & advocacy, community participation & assistance or otherwise.

BCH adopters should carefully vet the sources they choose to trust in the community. Particularly important is that sources of leadership show longstanding resilience & commitment to the community through action and co-operation with other likewise vetted contributors, a very difficult to fake property. Nevertheless, nobody is above suspicion and while tolerance should be granted to longstanding community members in case of unusual lapses, no-one's credibility is unquestionable given consistent suspicious behaviour. It's possible for anyone to be pressured, compromised, suffer mental health issues or otherwise fall out of alignment with the BCH mission - and in such case it is mostly social alignment by others in the ecosystem that routes around a potential problem forming.

It is important for community members to keep each other honest, including with (well-meaning) criticism where necessary. Being truthful sometimes means uncomfortable conversations. Don't cry wolf unnecessarily, but stay alert.

Resistance to government subversion

Fortunately, there are several factors that assist BCH in staying the free & aligned community driven system it is.

• Cultural education: Because of its history, the BCH community is very familiar with many types of attempted sabotage. It is very important these lessons are continually retold & reinforced to new community members as widespread awareness of these prior attacks is the best defence against similar attempts in future. This is not a culture that can be truly replicated in another community without it also suffering & surviving the trauma of concerted attacks, which is one of the best reasons that BCH is unique.
• Technological preparation: While there is no permanent or software solution to potential social disruption or politics, the BCH community can & does plan ahead where it can technologically. A good example is ABLA, implemented partially to pre-empt another stalled scaling attack. Good ideas baked into software have the advantage of inertia to resist bad actor disruption.
• Cryptocurrency diversification: While governments & banks are powerful & influential, they aren't omnipotent. There's only so much time, money & attention they have to disrupt cryptocurrency adoption. The silver lining of the network fragmentation that occurred after The Blocksize War is that BCH now exists in a sea of competing projects - and attempts to stop forward progress must contend not only with the BCH community but with similar projects as well. Ultimately this fractures their attacks, and incentivises them to eventually give in to the irrepresible demand of the market for efficient money.
• Proportional resistance: While BCH is small, it is too irrelevant to be worth serious effort to undermine. But when it is large, it is too powerful to be directly contested. Bitcoin's threat level is proportional to its ability to resist attacks, a key property that has helped it greatly.

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See also: What about Ethereum (ETH)?

See also: Is low hashrate a problem?