Yahoo Finance Attempted 51% Attack on Bitcoin Gold Was Thwarted, Developers Say
Bitcoin gold’s developer team announced 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,” website maintainer CryptoDJ said in the post.
According to the cryptocurrency’s official website, there are only 108 bitcoin gold nodes which are 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 price seems to have been unaffected by the attempted attack, trading between $9 and $10 since Tuesday, according to Bitfinex
UPDATE (July 11, 2020, 04:23 UTC): This article has been updated with additional information.
