Bitcoin Gold Responds to Fresh Double Spend Assault

The improvement group at the back of Bitcoin Gold has launched an replace on ultimate week’s 51 p.c assault, which the attacker weaponized thru a double spend assault to scouse borrow budget from cryptocurrency exchanges.
Revealed on Thursday, the replace showed that the attacker had won majority regulate of the community’s hashrate and used that regulate to reorganize the blockchain and opposite transactions.

On this case, the attacker made deposits at cryptocurrency exchanges, traded the cash for BTC or some other coin, after which withdrew the budget. Subsequent, the attacker used their dominant computing energy to power the remainder of the community to simply accept falsified blocks that reversed their preliminary deposits and brought about those budget to fade from exchange-controlled wallets.

As CCN reported, an deal with related to the attacker had despatched itself greater than 380,000 BTG in a sequence of transactions in line with double spending conduct. It’s now not transparent what number of of those transactions ended in a hit thefts from exchanges. In idea, the attacker may have made off with greater than $18 million price of budget, however provided that each and every transaction ended in a a hit robbery (once more, the attacker’s price of luck has now not been verified).
The challenge’s builders blamed the assault partially on the truth that bitcoin gold’s mining set of rules — Equihash — is utilized by various different cryptocurrencies, rendering the pool of to be had hashpower a lot higher than the bitcoin gold community’s person hashpower.

Bitcoin Gold had already deliberate to transport to a brand new set of rules, a choice the neighborhood made after mining producer Bitmain introduced that it used to be accepting preorders for the first Equihash ASIC miner, and the builders stated that shifting to this new set of rules will render the community “dramatically more secure” from long run 51 p.c assaults.

They stated that, specifically within the wake of the hot a hit assault, they’ll deploy the brand new set of rules as briefly as conceivable
“Whilst it might be higher to provide all our companions greater than seven days to check and deploy to keep away from disruption, those assaults have already compelled disruption on us all, so we really feel it’s absolute best to get the improve finished once we perhaps can,” they concluded.