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A blockchain reorganization, or “reorg” for short, occurs when a block is removed from the blockchain to make room for a longer chain to form. Although blockchain is recognized as an advanced technology, it may still face challenges and obstacles. One example of these challenges is blockchain conflict, which occurs when two blocks are published simultaneously, creating a fork in the blockchain.
By law, miners must recognize the longest chain as valid and remove all other chains. This principle causes transactions that are mistakenly sent to the wrong branch to be rebuilt in a new block, delaying the confirmation of a small number of transactions.
Reorganization occurs frequently in congested networks and block concurrency in networks such as Ethereum and Bitcoin. This rearrangement of the chain makes all nodes have the same information.
The consequences of the reorganization on the blockchain also have several effects. These effects include increasing the costs of nodes, delay in transaction confirmation, uncertainty in conducting transactions, and vulnerability to attacks.
Finally, a look at reorganizing attacks on the blockchain shows that these attacks may have different goals, including making a quick profit or causing problems for exchanges and users. To deal with these attacks, early detection and warning mechanisms in the blockchain network come to help.
Making it harder to trade a digital currency may lower its unit price in fiat currency and cause more problems for traders. However, if an attacker were to act with the goal of profiting from a reorg attack, his interest would not be in an unsustainable drop in the market price. Research conducted on past attacks on Bitcoin Gold, Litecoin Cash, Expanse, and Vertcoin have shown that only the price of VTC dropped significantly and returned to its initial price after a while.
which was forked in October 2017 and promised to restore GPU mining to the main BTC chain. With fewer nodes and the unit price never dropping below $5, BTG has always been an attractive target for Reorg attacks. Reports have shown that in two attacks in 2018 and 2020, exchanges lost around $17.5 million due to the higher value of BTG at the time.
And it was recognized as a digital currency just before the popularity of Bitcoin. The incident is noteworthy because of Gavin Andresen’s use of the Alert Key system to notify miners, which ultimately led to the removal of the key from the BTC protocol. It should be noted that BTC does not yet have a built-in solution for miners to take immediate action to fix the problem.
Which seemed to be done, or at least strongly supported, by a group of BCH supporters called Voluntarism.dev. These attacks were raised as one of the notable ones due to their similar occurrences to Reorg’s attacks on BSV.
ETH Bitcoin blockchain reorganization attack occurred in 2021 called Bacon Chain and is also known as the longest Reorg attack. This attack happened due to the confusion of the validators in choosing the block and the reorganization took more than 5 blocks.
