Attempted 51% Attack on Bitcoin Gold Was Thwarted, Developers Say
A 51 percent attack on Bitcoin Gold was unsuccessful.
Jul 11, 2020 at 2:21 a.m. UTCUpdated Aug 19, 2021 at 3:02 a.m. UTC
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Bitcoin gold’s developer team announced Friday night that it foiled a 51% attack that it had known was coming for over a week.
- Bitcoin gold alerted exchanges and mining pools of the attack on July 2, and posted a notice to the community on July 10 noting that it was time for "everyone else to upgrade their nodes."
- The team only revealed the attempted network takeover to the public after the unknown attacker, which had been mining blocks since July 1, released 1,300 blocks late Friday night.
- Developers had circulated an update that featured a checkpoint at block 640,650 on July 2. That checkpoint prevented the attacker’s chain from taking over the honest chain, they said Friday.
- “The majority of honest pool hashpower continues to mine on the honest chain,” website maintainer CryptoDJ said in the post.
- According to the cryptocurrency's official website, there are only 108 bitcoin gold nodes in the world. Nearly 30% of them are in Germany. Bitcoin Gold communications director Edward Iskra told CoinDesk that these only represent immediately responsive nodes, and not ones that don't allow incoming connections.
- The asset’s price seems to have been unaffected by the attempted attack, trading between $9 and $10 since Tuesday, according to Bitfinex.
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UPDATE (July 11, 2020, 04:23 UTC): This article has been updated with additional information.
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