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Vertcoin has recorded uninterrupted attacks of 51%, resulting in a $ 100K double spending on the network.
Approximate couple of months for Vertcoin
In a detailed blog post, Coinbase's security engineer Mark Nesbitt revealed that the Vertcoin network suffered repeated attacks of 51%, with the largest reorganization with a length of 310 blocks and a depth of 307 blocks which, according to the specialist, may have caused double spending of up to $ 100,000.
The incidents started in October and occurred on four different occasions, the last of which was presumably under way at the time of publication of the blog post on December 2nd.
According to Nesbitt, the latest incident consisted of four reorganisations, which led to double-expense transactions.
It is worth noting that the Vertcoin mining algorithm is deliberately oriented against ASIC and ASIC devices making them particularly inefficient. Instead, mining on the network is designed to be accomplished exclusively through commonly available graphics cards. This is presumably an attempt to hedge against the centralization of mines.
Nesbitt argues, however, that this is largely counterproductive to network security because it allows anyone in the world who uses graphics cards to attack money over networks extracted with ASIC (eg Bitcoin) where only ASIC users can attack the coin.
The importance of network strength
This year saw a 51% increase in attacks on cryptocurrencies such as Verge, Bitcoin Gold and ZenCash, just to name a few. Some projects have already taken measures to prevent this type of accident in the future. The Bitcoin Gold team has revealed that it provides a difficult fork as a solution to prevent attacks by 51%.
A 51% attack occurs when an individual or group of individuals control more than 50% of the network hashing rate or computing power.
The Bitcoin network is by far the safest blockchain today. The mining bitcoin is designed to be particularly energivorous. The computational power needed to generate new blocks requires a large amount of electricity to power specialized mining hardware.
In short, attacking the network is much more expensive than defending it.
The Crypto51 monitoring site measures the theoretical cost of 51% of attacks on each network. According to this, supporting such an attack against Vertcoin would cost only $ 125 an hour, while an attack on the Bitcoin network would cost $ 255,744 an hour.
What do you think of the latest 51% attacks on Vertcoin? Do not hesitate to let us know in the comments below!
Images courtesy of Shutterstock
