Post
Topic
Board Altcoin Discussion
Re: 51% attack
by
qwizzie
on 21/01/2021, 23:43:35 UTC
Recently Firo, former Zcoin had a 51% attack and it was possible to change/tamper data of 306 blocks(or so). What exactly is that? Is it like the guy who had control of 51% of the network had overwritten the block? How does anyone get benefitted from such an attack? What's the step to prevent such attack?
https://cointelegraph.com/news/privacy-focused-firo-cryptocurrency-suffers-51-attack

That is mentioned in the article :

Quote
For the Firo team, the attack was only possible because the project was yet to deploy Chainlocks on the mainnet. A Chainlock is a secondary validation layer that reportedly
mitigates a 51% attack.

According to Yap, with Chainlocks activated, an attacker would need to control at least half of all Firo master nodes in addition to the usual 51% mining hash rate dominance.

Firo has reportedly completed the testing protocols for Chainlocks and is primed for its full deployment in the next few weeks. When integrated, Chainlocks will be the latest protocol
feature added to the project after activating the Lelantus upgrade.

What the article fails to mention is that ChainLocks has been developed by Dash, has been active on the Dash network for some time now (July 2019) to protect Dash against 51% attacks.
Firo announced in June 2019 that they were implementing ChainLocks into their codebase. Strange that it took them this long (still a few weeks to go according article).

https://dashnews.org/zcoin-to-copy-dashs-chainlocks-51-attack-proofing/
https://dashnews.org/dash-activates-chainlocks-51-attack-protection-becomes-most-secure-decentralized-currency/#