Luke Dashjr, one of the Bitcoin Core developers, has accused the popular mining pool F2Pool of currently conducting an active attack on the BTC network and urged the community to take immediate action.
According to Dashjr, the attack's goal is to force illegal content onto the chain, making Bitcoin perceived as a network that hosts unacceptable content, which could permanently damage adoption.
Dashjr summarizes its arguments as follows: previously, such content was practically too difficult or costly to enter the chain; mempools and miners blocked it through natural filtering and rejection. However, according to Dashjr, recent changes, such as F2Pool's direct request of this data from the P2P network and Libre Relay nodes, and Bitcoin Core 30 release candidates' voluntary dissemination of it, have dramatically reduced the cost and anonymity of the attack. “The cost has gone from six figures to three figures,” Dashjr states, arguing that this makes the attack both practical and anonymous.
Dashjr also openly called on the community: “When miners are in a malicious pool, switch pools, switch to Foundry or Antpool, or even mine your own blocks,” because if content like CSAM gets into the network, the effects will be permanent.
Dashjr argues that if the network cannot protect itself from malicious, consensus-valid activity, the only option is a soft fork to change the consensus and limit data-carrying operations like OP_RETURN.
*This is not investment advice.
