Charlie Lee, the creator of Litecoin, discusses this week’s 51% attack on the Ethereum Classic blockchain. He describes how the attacker was able to gain control of more than 51% of the network, why it was inexpensive for them to do so, how they profited from their attack and who loses money in such an attack. We talk about what types of blockchains are susceptible to these types of attacks, whether or not Coinbase or other exchange will de-list ETC and why the price of ETC hasn’t dropped — and what that means for cryptoeconomic theories around 51% attacks.
Thank you to our sponsors!
CipherTrace: http://ciphertrace.com/unconfirmed
Episode links:
Coinbase blog identifying the 51% attack: https://blog.coinbase.com/ethereum-classic-etc-is-currently-being-51-attacked-33be13ce32de
Charlie’s tweet about how a coin that’s dominant in its respective mining algorithm will not be vulnerable to 51% attacks: https://twitter.com/SatoshiLite/status/1082369887278837763
Charlie’s tweet about how only decentralized blockchains are susceptible to 51% attacks: https://twitter.com/SatoshiLite/status/1082491687169998848
Haseeb Qureshi tweet storm about the ETC 51% attack: https://twitter.com/hosseeb/status/1082815549132816384