ViaBTC halting BTC withdrawals? Heads up!!

I am unable to withdraw any BTC from ViaBTC.

I sent BCH to ViaBTC and immediately traded it for BTC. Now I can't withdraw any of that BTC.

On the withdraw page, "BTC available" is 0, and I get the following message:

"Part of withdrawal is unavailable due to pending deposit or unexecuted orders."

My deposit was confirmed after one confirmation and my order has fully executed.

EDIT 2

For BCH deposits, ViaBTC requires 20 confirmations!! In my case this means that withdrawal is not possible before BCH block 478589 has been mined!

EDIT 3

ViaBTC just tweeted that 20 confirmations are required to prevent 51% attacks.

EDIT 4

There has been no new block for the past 5 hours. The most recently mined block is 478570. Given the value of 0.15 BTC per BCH, the expected number of mined blocks in 5 hours would be 4 to 5. This could be variance, but this could also be a another red flag.

EDIT 5

Ok, after over 12 hours, two new blocks have finally been mined. The miners actually mine at a loss because the difficulty is still as high as that if the BTC chain whereas BCH is worth much less.

The slow mining and the 12 hour gap might be intentional to force the difficulty down. BCH has extra difficulty adjustment logic that reduces the difficulty by 20% each time a new block is found too slowly. However, the latest block 478572 still has the same high difficulty as the BTC chain.

I will update this post after block 478589.

Submitted August 02, 2017 at 11:43AM by trilli0nn http://bit.ly/2w4WPfE