Coinbase, has temporarily halted support for Ethereum Classic transactions, deposits, reports CoinDesk.
The attack was made public via The Coinbase Blog this Monday. There, security engineer Mark Nesbitt started the post with a quote from Satoshi Nakamoto’s Bitcoin whitepaper:
“If a most CPU power is controlled by honest nodes, the honest chain will grow the fastest and outpace any competing chains.”
The honest approval of 1 / 2 of the miners (nodes) must alter the blockchain – otherwise referred to as validating a transaction.
Chain Under Fire
Should 51 percent of nodes be studied over, the system will are categorized as attack:
“Failure to meet up this requirement breaks several core guarantees of the Bitcoin protocol, like the irreversibility of transactions. A great many other cryptocurrencies, such as for example Ethereum Classic, also have adopted proof-of-work mining. In case a single miner has more resources compared to the entirety of all of those other network, this miner could pick an arbitrary previous block that to extend an alternative solution block history, eventually outpacing the block history made by all of those other network and defining a fresh canonical transaction history.”
Based on the post, this process is named a “chain reorganization.” Each one of these has “depth” which means the amount of blocks which were replaced. Then, it includes a “length” which is just how many blocks replaced the prior ones.
What Ethereum Classic experienced was this, resulting in what’s called a “double-spend attack” – whenever a digital token is spent more often than once. It is duplicated, in a way. The value of the attack appears to be 88,500 ETC ($460,000) reads the Coinbase Blog. This is the consequence of over 100 blocks being “reorganized.” The info has been validated by Bitfly and Blockscout – block explorers monitoring the blockchain.
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When discussing their next steps, Nesbitt ended the post with:
“Coinbase takes security very seriously. Within that commitment, we monitor blockchains for activity that might be bad for our customers and take prompt action to guard funds. You want to emphasize to customers that Coinbase strives to function as most trusted and safest spot to buy, sell, or store cryptocurrency.”
A Possible Culprit
No one can acknowledge along the attack, bitfly stated that the attack could possibly be ongoing, that your Coinbase post echoed. ”
Cravenho’s explanation isn’t universally accepted, however. Within an e-mail to Coindesk, Ethereum Classic advisor Cody Burns believes the attack was more of a “selfish mining” set up by way of a “client-local phenomenon.” Then, Burns tweeted that “the complete Ethereum network doesn’t ‘reorganize’ simultaneously. It might be much more likely that someone discovered most of Coinbase ETC nodes and ‘surrounded’ them.”
Regardless of the reasons for the attack, companies dealing with Ethereum Classic must do whatever they can to safeguard their user base.
The state Ethereum Classic Twitter account stated that the crypto mining hardware manufacturer Linzhi may be the culprit. Allegedly, the group was testing new machines with a 1,400mH/s hash rate.