HomeBlockchainSecurityBitcoin Gold: the longest 51% attack in history

Bitcoin Gold: the longest 51% attack in history

Bitcoin Gold confirmed to have suffered a 51% attack that lasted for 10 days and over 1300 mined blocks.

In fact, hackers were able to perpetuate the attack for 10 days and during more than 1300 blocks, something that is hard to overlook for a long time.

At the beginning of the month, an update of Bitcoin Gold had been released, which has been upgraded to version 0.17.2, and that had not yet been implemented by the entire community, but now it is necessary that everyone moves to the new version of the blockchain in order to mitigate the damage.

In addition, to detect who is still mining the non-original chain, a checkpoint has been introduced at block 640650, in order to determine and prevent that chain from continuing, also because at that point a fork of the blockchain could be created.

The address of the attacker has also been published, from which 12 BTG have passed. This confirms that it was a real attack and not an error due to some network problem.

Incidentally, the Bitcoin Gold team itself warned that if by chance problems arise when updating the system, it would be necessary to invalidate the blockchain manually and write this instruction via the command line or the bgold-cli client:

invalidateblock 00000000635620f22ba8694aea532d51619f8cd060f4e42e85db3cb3a5d1c29c

Unfortunately, as effective as the PoW (Proof of Work) protocol can be, it is still liable to a 51% attack, especially if there are not enough machines and hashpower to counter this situation.

Bitcoin Gold had already experienced a similar situation in 2018, when, through a 51% attack, $18 million were stolen. 

Moving instead to check Bitcoin Gold’s (BTG) chart trend of the last week, it’s possible to see that in the last few hours the crypto is losing about 2% and it’s trading at $9.71, located at position 56 of CoinMarketCap.

Alfredo de Candia
Alfredo de Candia
Android developer for over 8 years with a dozen of developed apps, Alfredo at age 21 has climbed Mount Fuji following the saying: "He who climbs Mount Fuji once in his life is a wise man, who climbs him twice is a Crazy". Among his app we find a Japanese database, a spam and virus database, the most complete database on Anime and Manga series birthdays and a shitcoin database. Sunday Miner, Alfredo has a passion for crypto and is a fan of EOS.
RELATED ARTICLES

MOST POPULARS

GoldBrick