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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.
Tell me again why bitcoin is so much more secure than the traditional banking system.
Because it's distributed, so a bad guy would have to have huge computing resources to overwhelm the good guys! That'll be so expensive it won't be worth the cost.
Oh, wait...
You do not have a moral or legal right to do absolutely anything you want.
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.
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.
The achilles heel of bitcoin is that it has to be expensive to be secure. The cost of securing 51% needs to exceed the profitability of achieving it. Thus as the market cap of bitcoin rises, the greater the potential to engage in a profitable double spend. So the cost of the transactions has to rise. SInce the transaction reimbursement has to cover the cost of the hash confirmation and that's paid in bit coin then either the fees or the reward value has to increase. This may possibly, but not necessarily, indirectly pressure the value of a bit coin to rise, further increasing the market cap.
There are some newer currencies just created that appear, at my superficial glance, to escape from some of that pressure on the cost of the transaction securing the block chain.
But for bit coin and similar one is stuck with proof of work having to be exorbitant as the profitability of foul play rises. Eventually the only people who can mine are the people who steal electricity. It's not a bug, it is in fact the ONLY thing that makes it work at all other than pure good will and altruism
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
Btw, ETC is a minority fork of ETH, so nobody cares about ETC and it has near zero use
Somebody cared enough to marshall enough computing power to overwhelm the network, which is why we are discussing this.
I find it amusing how bitcoin and its associated spin offs have replicated financial history. PhD candidates will be writing papers on this idiocy for years to come.
And one is also expected to trust at least half of those controlling the computing resources... not sure I trust a fraction of that number.
And "trust" is your only option- it's all you can do, you can't rely on law enforcement to protect you eCoins. Because eCoins are not backed by government or insured by governments, governments are less inclined to help you get your money back if stolen by thieves and hackers.
"That's the way to do it" - Punch
The trouble is that it used to be expensive to have 51% of the computing power because of all the hardware you would have to buy. That is no longer true. Now I can rent the computing power to have 51% computing power for the length of the confirmation period. Here is a link https://www.crypto51.app/ to the cost to rent so much computing power and the percentage of the required computing power you can rent. You will notice that as of January 8th you could rent 102% of the computing power to launch a 51% attack on Etherium classic and it would only cost you $4700
... bitcoin has much much more security ...
That's because it's transmorgrified into a speculative gambling architecture. The blockchain is static in size and all that's left is to rearrange the Monopoly money.
It little behooves the best of us to comment on the rest of us.
So much of their creation was rooted in people lamenting about how much more wonderful things were in the past, without understanding what went wrong then. So yeah.. amatures recreating mistakes professionals dealt with 200 years ago.