🗞 News
Over the past couple of weeks, a number of high profile security incidents have led to a discussion on the security of blockchain protocols themselves. Here's a breakdown:
- Verge Attacked (Again) - Verge was attacked for the second time in as many months. The attacker exploited weaknesses in the protocol design by spoofing timestamps to lower mining difficulty.
- Bitcoin Gold Suffers 51% Attack - Because BTG uses the Scrypt mining algo, it is susceptible to attacks from large scale mining operations that exist to mine much larger currencies which also use that algo (namely, Litecoin).
- Monacoin Suffers Selfish Mining Attack - A selfish mining attack actually requires 100% of the existing network hashrate operating in secret. In this case, in addition to hashpower, the attacker seems to have exploited the way the protocol calculates difficulty.
- EOS Flaws Exposed Days Before Mainnet Launch - Just in case you were starting to think only Proof-of-Work coins were vulnerable, it was revealed that the pre-launch, semi-centralized, Proof-of-Stake, project EOS had major flaws in it's smart contract platform that could have allowed an attacker to trivially take control of all nodes in the network. The issues have apparently been resolved, but it doesn't exactly inspire confidence.
🔮 Blog
The string of mining-related attacks on PoW coins left me wondering:
Has The Window For Bootstrapping A Proof-of-Work Coin Closed?
📊 Statistics
Over 1,000 dApps and 700 Tokens
have been deployed on Ethereum's network since 2017. A good statistic, to be sure. A better one, though? How many users!
