ETC is under another 51% attack. Can ETC, which is frequently looted by malicious computing power, be saved?

At around 11:00 on August 6, the miner Bitfly tweeted that after August 1, ETC suffered another large-scale 51% attack, which has resulted in the reorganization of more than 4,000 blocks, but the block generation is normal.

Subsequently, Ethereum Classic and ETC Core officially tweeted to confirm the news, and at the same timeCall on miners to unite and jointly resist malicious miners.

"In view of the recent cyberattacks, it is recommended that all exchanges, mining pools and other ETC service providers significantly increase the confirmation time of all deposit and receipt transactions...We have issued an alert for the latest attack, and miners should use whitelist identification, Collaborate to mine the same chain, abandon the chain dug by unknown miners, and jointly defend against this malicious attacker. The whitelist is identified as: 10935623=0x5cb67b046d3402906051d99323c3ce78728b305e2ab2ebf2112f3a7e7dca4f92."

According to data from OKLink, the current ETC network computing power is 4.71Th/s, a decrease of nearly 20%; the ETH network computing power is 183.08Th/s, and there has been no short-term drastic change.

Whether ETH miners can temporarily switch to the ETC network to safeguard the security of the chain, The relevant person in charge of OKLink said that it is almost impossible. "The premise for miners to switch mining pools is to make a profit. If the same computing power is very low in the ETC mining pool, they will not switch to it for the time being."

Just a week ago, the same situation had been played out on the ETC chain.

From 0:30 on August 1st to 11:30 on August 2nd, ETC suffered a 51% attack. The attack was launched by independent miners starting with 0x75d1e. The miner quietly produced 3594 blocks, and then broadcast them to other miners. Due to the large number of these blocks, the order of the blocks has a greater weight than the chains established by other miners, causing other miners to accept this series of blocks. In the end, the attacker block successfully replaced the original block, and reorganization occurred from block height 10904146 to block 10907740.

The attack did not end until 21:00 that day, and the whole process lasted about 6 hours.

The data on the chain shows that the attacking miners purchased the attacking power from the outside at a cost of 17.5 BTC. Bitquery, a blockchain forensics company, disclosed the severity of the incident in a report published on August 5. Bitquery estimated that the attackers made a total profit of 807,260 ETC (valued at $5.6 million at the time), thus obtaining more than 280% return.

For the two attacks, V God is concerned. He said frankly: "This is more proof that PoS is important in the long run. I hope that when we make changes, even 51% attacks on even small blockchains will become a thing of the past." "ETC should Moving to a PoS mechanism. Even given its risk-averse heritage, moving to PoS seems less risky than maintaining the status quo.”