Attempted 51% Attack on Bitcoin Gold Was Thwarted, Developers Say
Bitcoin gold’s developer team announced late Friday night that it foiled a 51 percent 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 1300 blocks late Friday night.
- Developers had circulated an update that featured a checkpoint at block 640650 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,” developer 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.
- The price seems to have been unaffected by the attempted attack, trading between $9 and $10 since Tuesday, according to Bitfinex
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