it suffered in January 2019. The recent reorganization was caused by a single miner.
The blockchain reorganization was confirmed by the Twitter account of ETC and of the founder of Ethereum Classic Labs James Wo. It occurred at block 10,904,146 and was not labeled as an attack, as the miner behind the reorganization was seemingly identified and may have lost its internet connection while mining.
A report from Ethereum Classic’s developers reads:
There was about 3000 block-insertion by a miner who was mining (either offline or there total difficulty could have exceeded current network difficulty while they were honestly mining) for about 12 hours on Core-Geth.
The 3,000 block insertion occurred at the same time the 2Miners mining pool was going offline for maintenance purposes unrelated to the issue. As 2Miner wasn’t producing blocks and 3,000 blocks were inserted into the Ethereum Classic network at that time there was a chain split “which made the network unstable.”
Ethereum Classic’s developers believe the “offending miner has lost access to internet access for a while when mining, which led to a 12 hour mining period and about 3000 blocks inserted.” The reorganization, they add, “doesn’t appear actively malicious,” although it “might be a deliberate attack as well.”
The cryptocurrency’s developers are advising miners to “continue mining the chain as-is” as the reorganized chain is the longest one, and is following the cryptos proof-of-work (PoW) protocol as intended. Last year, it’s worth noting, Coinbase detected a deep chain reorganization of the ETC blockchain, which included a double-spend attack.
At the time, 88,500 ETC tokens, worth about $460,000, were double-spent. Since then, most crypto exchanges set a relatively high number of transaction confirmations to accept deposits and withdrawals in Ethereum Classic, in a bid to prevent further attacks.
Featured image via Pixabay.
