Bitcoin Gold Got 51% Attacked, Now Surges By 19%

One researcher at the MIT Digital Currency Initiative recently discovered that Bitcoin Gold got attacked by 51% on January 23 but in the last 24 hours, the cryptocurrency has increased by 19% in price.

A report published on the code repository GitHub, the MIT DCI research assistant James Lovejoy said that two separate attacks were carried out on Bitcoin Gold blocks within a span of two days.

As you may know if you have read our altcoin news, a 51% attack is quite possibly the most serious form of attack against a cryptocurrency. If carried out successfully, it allows attackers to re-organize blocks and charge data within a blockchain.

Moreover, analysts show that a 51% attack can cause dire consequences for a cryptocurrency. It is not cheap or easy to carry out a 51% attack. The attack itself requires a lot of control over a blockchain network’s hashpower.

For a major coin like Bitcoin or Ethereum, a 51% attack is quite impossible. One could do it but there would not be any incentive to do so and the attacker would end up losing money. As Lovejoy said, the orders of tens of blocks on the cryptocurrency are not enough to eliminate the incentive of launching a 51% attack against it.

“Based on Nicehash market price data for Zhash we estimate the cost of generating each reorg at around 0.2 BTC (~$1,700) and the attacker would have recouped around the same value in block rewards. Therefore, it is possible that the attacks were profitable if the double-spends succeeded at defrauding the attacker’s counterparty, or break-even if the double-spends were unsuccessful. This suggests that a confirmation requirement on the order of tens of blocks for BTG is still far too few to make the budget constraint to launch an attack significant,” the report read.