ETC Reorganization Chain Split Likely Caused By Bad Internet?-Report

The ETC Reorganization that caused a chain split yesterday was initially thought to be a 51% attack, It now turns out that it could have happened because of bad internet as we are reading more in the upcoming Ethereum classic news.

The Ethereum Classic blockchain went through a reorganization yesterday, on August 1 at the 3,693 of the blocks were reorganized which was considered a 51% attack, causing a chain split which saw one miner process all of the blocks in a period of 12 hours.  The reorganization of the blockchain is now deemed to be a non-malicious mistake by one miner who had a bad internet connection and is now in process of being addressed. Due to the nature of the ETC proof of work consensus algorithm, the blockchain moved forward on the “split” chain decision.

Earlier today, @eth_classic $ETC, experienced a chain reorg of 3,693 blocks.

Our alert system caught this immediately and automatically halted withdrawals and deposits.

This looks like it may be a 51% attack.

We will update you as things unfold.

— Binance (@binance) August 1, 2020

The biggest crypto exchange in the world, Binance announced they will suspend all ETC deposits and withdrawals and it even speculated that Ethereum Classic might have been under a 51% attack. A few hours later, the Ethereum Classic development team responded and suggested that the blockchain reorganization was most likely caused by a miner that had a bad internet connection according to a post by Yaz Khoury, Austin Roberts and Sam Johnson on HackMD:

 “It could be that the offending miner has lost access to internet access for a while when mining, which led to a 12 hour mining period and about 3000 blocks inserted. On the first 2000 blocks, there was 1 miner and a total of 5 transactions.”

According to the developers, the transactions will be resubmitted in the mempool later if they have failed. Ethereum Classic holders don’t have to worry about anything. Despite the possibility that ETC suffered some king of a glitch, the developers are not ruling out the possibility of foul play:

 “It also seems that the offending miner has uncled their own blocks by how fast they were mining. It doesn’t appear actively malicious. It might be a deliberate attack as well, but it doesn’t seem there was any major double-spend attack.”

The fact that no one tried to double spend ETC transactions suggests monetary profit was not the main motive. Ethereum Classic will not move ahead on the chain including the 3,693 blocks because the network nodes switched to the “attacked” chain when they saw it had the “heaviest” amount of proof of work. ETC developers recommended:

 “Continue mining the chain as-is (chain is currently following the heaviest work which includes the about 3000 block inserted). This is the recommended option as the chain is following Proof of Work with the longest chain as intended.”