Unknown miner recovered and assigned 8,979 BCH from SegWit addresses.

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

The Bitcoin Cash (BCH) network encountered a problem shortly after its launch in August 2017. Because of similar address formats, BCH users had long sent coins to SegWit addresses that were not supported by Bitcoin Cash. As a result, up to 18,000 BCH were sent to these addresses by mistake.

Recent Coinmetrics data shows that known pools managed to return about half of their BCH back to their owners using their coin recovery programs. But one unknown miner managed to get enough blocks to take about 9,000 BCH. Jameson Lopp reported this on Twitter and wrote:

"The unknown miner was able to recover almost 9,000 BCH, which were erroneously sent to SegWit addresses. Over $3 million to date".

Coinmetrics has been tracking the problem since the early days when hundreds of coins were lost. Some pools, like BTC.com, even created a service to file claims for lost BCHs, although it only worked temporarily. Later, the pool decided to complete the recovery of small amounts, setting a minimum fee of 10 BCH for a 100 BCH recovery.

Currently, BTC.com and BTC.top — major coin recovery miners. However, the unknown miner has already recovered and assigned 8,979 BCH, and this may not be the limit. The condition to gain access to &#8212 coins; be a miner or contact a miner ready to enable a non-standard transaction scenario. Ordinary users cannot send the required type of transaction to the blockcheck.

At some 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 blocker. This stopped the spread of transactions extracted 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, and the number of coins sent to SegWit addresses has decreased significantly since April 2019. The search for lost coins continues, although it is now more difficult for owners to organize the return of small transactions.