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Once Hailed As Unhackable, Blockchains Are Now Getting Hacked (technologyreview.com)
schwit1 shares a report from MIT Technology Review: Early last month, the security team at Coinbase noticed something strange going on in Ethereum Classic, one of the cryptocurrencies people can buy and sell using Coinbase's popular exchange platform. Its blockchain, the history of all its transactions, was under attack. An attacker had somehow gained control of more than half of the network's computing power and was using it to rewrite the transaction history. That made it possible to spend the same cryptocurrency more than once -- known as "double spends." The attacker was spotted pulling this off to the tune of $1.1 million. Coinbase claims that no currency was actually stolen from any of its accounts. But a second popular exchange, Gate.io, has admitted it wasn't so lucky, losing around $200,000 to the attacker (who, strangely, returned half of it days later).
Just a year ago, this nightmare scenario was mostly theoretical. But the so-called 51% attack against Ethereum Classic was just the latest in a series of recent attacks on blockchains that have heightened the stakes for the nascent industry. [...] In short, while blockchain technology has been long touted for its security, under certain conditions it can be quite vulnerable. Sometimes shoddy execution can be blamed, or unintentional software bugs. Other times it's more of a gray area -- the complicated result of interactions between the code, the economics of the blockchain, and human greed. That's been known in theory since the technology's beginning. Now that so many blockchains are out in the world, we are learning what it actually means -- often the hard way.
Just a year ago, this nightmare scenario was mostly theoretical. But the so-called 51% attack against Ethereum Classic was just the latest in a series of recent attacks on blockchains that have heightened the stakes for the nascent industry. [...] In short, while blockchain technology has been long touted for its security, under certain conditions it can be quite vulnerable. Sometimes shoddy execution can be blamed, or unintentional software bugs. Other times it's more of a gray area -- the complicated result of interactions between the code, the economics of the blockchain, and human greed. That's been known in theory since the technology's beginning. Now that so many blockchains are out in the world, we are learning what it actually means -- often the hard way.
It depends how you define "hack." These days the meaning is pretty liberal but even by the standard "doing something that was not intended to be allowed by design" then yes a 51% is indeed a hack.
Robbing a bank with a crew could also technically be a "hack."
I'm only adding this because you make it seem like this is normal and should just be dealt with as "meh whatever" when I don't think that's the best approach.
I don't know how much krypto koolaid you have to drink to not understand that being the victim of a 51% attack is a mortal blow to a chain's credibility.
Just look at the price man. People are abandoning the network. GPUs are on firesale to the point where it's going to hurt Nvidia's stock price.
And as people leave, the 51% only gets easier.
Nonsensical technobabble like: "A lot of wallets for PoS and other coins have added algorithms and checkpoints to practically eliminate most of the 51% attack vectors also. It's still an ongoing threat but if the coin still matters the ecosystem responds and shuts most attacks down pretty swiftly and with minimal to no loss."
Only speaks to the suckers anymore.
Hope you got your money somewhere safe. Like a bank.