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Coinbase Suspends Ethereum Classic (ETC) Trading After Double-Spend Attacks (zdnet.com)
Cryptocurrency trading portal Coinbase delisted the Ethereum Classic (ETC) currency Monday after detecting a series of double-spend attacks over the last three days. From a report: In layman terms, double-spend attacks are when a malicious actor gains the majority computational power inside a blockchain, which they then use to enforce unauthorized transactions over legitimate ones. According to a security alert published today by Coinbase security engineer Mark Nesbitt, this is exactly what's been happening on the Ethereum Classic blockchain for the past three days, since January 5. Nesbitt says that a malicious actor has carried out 11 (at the time of writing) double-spend attacks during which he moved funds from legitimate accounts to their own. [...] According to Crypto51, it only costs $5,029 to rent enough computing powerto overwhelm the ETC blockchain with your own miners and gain 51 percent hashing power to carry out a double-spend attack.
When a physical bank is robbed, everyone who has dollars in their pockets still has whole dollars. The theft had zero effect on the value of your pocket or what you can buy.
When a crypto-currency exchange gets hacked (aka robbed), the value of what you own can tumble. Plus, add in the shear insecurity of crypto-currency, and you have the reasons why it's a complete failure and nonsense.
That is incorrect. When a physical bank is robbed you lose your money. The only reason you are protected in the US is because the accounts are insured by FDIC up to $250K. The government (your taxes) foots the robbery loss. And if your safe deposit box is robbed your grandmother's ring is gone for ever.
Crypto Exchanges also have insurance. So if coinbase is "robbed", insurance kicks in - just like your physical bank. Might not be as good as FDIC but then your taxes are not funding it.
As for you second point, while physical currency is not susceptible to exchange hacking, it is to foolish government policies. Remember GBP? Or the various European currencies that suffered worse losses than many cryptos.
Actually, the dollar is very resistant to that. The North Korean government printed "superdollars", almost undetectable forgeries for a decade and had no significant impact on the value of the dollar. There was also another source, probably Iranian, that was printing them in the 80's and early 90's and again, didn't have a huge impact on the value of the dollar.
China controls 80% of the hashpower for Bitcoin, between 4 major pools that it controls. China sets the price of Bitcoin and consequently most other cryptocurrencies.
it is no coincidence that the crash in crypto roughly coincided with the Cheeto-in-Chief declaring TradeWars on China.