Gate io, a US based crypto exchange with a daily trading volume of $94 million, said it has lost over 40 000 Ethereum Classic worth over 220 000 USD after a hacker attack on January 7th. It is assumed that it was a “51%” attack, in which a user or a group seizes the control of the majority of mining power to monopolize control over the network. A successful “51%” attack will allow hackers to rewrite the transaction history of the block chain and double spend coins for fiat currency. Such kind of attacks are typical for block chains that use a proof-of-work (PoW) algorithm. “It happened between 0:40 Jan.7, 2019 and Jan 4:20 Jan.7, 2019 UTC for about 4 hours. All the transactions were confirmed normally on the ETC blockchain and became invalid after the blockchain rollback”, Gate io announced.
The distributed ledger technology used in blockchain offers multiple benefits to businesses that make a difference when implementing a solution that requires a high degree of TRUST OR MISTRUST for business transactions So a blockchain should be a a centralized, undistributed and private digital ledger that is used to record transactions across many computers so that any involved record cannot be altered retroactively, without the alteration of all subsequent blocks ? It simply means blockchain technology is meant for low security transactions. far far too many cases where thieves steal cypto coins. so don't be conned by blockchain patent writers. Their ultimate goal is that they hope someone would use their patents. Patent writers depend on patents to earn tons of money. Cypto coin investers survive by hoping cypto coins would appreciate. traders earn money by trading based on trends.
I dont know how is it possible,the more and more security and advanced features exchanges add,hackers are still better
2018 will likely be known as the apex of #PoW consensus algorithms. Core Devs trying to keep some of these things still running are patching them up like the Cubans did old Chevy cars after Castro took over. They can't scale, they're not safe, very little relative user adoption considering their age in Tech yrs. Utility is the killer app in Crypto Some, not all, 3rd Gen #DLT's are orders of magnitude safer and feature-rich.
There's misinformation on this thread as the posters are trying to discuss a complex system they don't understand. I probably won't add any clarity by posting, but what the heck. ETC does not have a very secure blockchain network, as there's not much incentive for mining it as the coin/reward is of little value. This is not true with a coin such as bitcoin, litecoin, eth, or monero. The attack was not a hack on the exchange, it was a rewrite of the block containing the transactions on the most recent block(s). So the attacker sent 40,000 etc to the exchange, after it's been confirmed on the account (2 blocks/confirmations), rewrote those 2 blocks but not before trading them for bitcoin or some other liquid coins. [An aside, I've never traded on gate.io, but most of these smaller exchanges (smaller than Coinbase) usually will not confirm the transfer on smaller coins until 6 or more confirmations/blocks, so I'm a little skeptical this actually happened, but whatever] This kind of attack only affects the most recent block(s) and the transactions contained within them. To mitigate an attack, just don't validate a transaction unless it has 6 (or more confirmations/blocks). Bitcoin's network hash is ridiculously high. The amount of money to perform such an attack is extremely high (plus the hardware have to be available). And the question that is always asked if such an entity can perform such an attack (Chinese miners if they collude can probably execute this), they will devalue the coin to an extent that there will be no profit to such an endeavor and deeming their hundreds of millions of $ of hardware investment and infrastructure worthless. Game Theory at work. It's all on the bitcoin whitepaper published over 10 years ago. https://bitcoin.org/bitcoin.pdf "To modify a past block, an attacker would have to redo the proof-of-work of the block and all blocks after it and then catch up with and surpass the work of the honest nodes. We will show later that the probability of a slower attacker catching up diminishes exponentially as subsequent blocks are added."
That is probably the reason why the majority will never accept crypto's for anything else then speculative reasons. The majority does not understand anything about crypto's so why would they trust and use them for payments? Most people don't need crypto's as they can live with the existing currencies. And at least they know that the value of $ XXX will always be $ XXX. As almost all prices for goods are expressed in traditional currencies this causes a problem for crypto's that are worth $ XXX and 1 year later only 20% of that amount. 1 year ago they could buy 5 times more for their crypto's then today. That can never be compensated with a "cheap transaction fee". Almost on a weekly basis they hear about coins being stolen. Not so good for trust.