Fight fire with fire: MIT scholar suggests ETC counters 51% attacks
The recent 51% attacks on Ethereum Classic (ETC) have raised fresh questions about the security of proof-of-work blockchains. Darren Tapp, assistant research professor at Arizona State University, and CEO of TAPPMATH database provider, told Cointelegraph: Emin Gün Sirer, CEO of Ava Labs and associate professor of computer science at Cornell University, told Cointelegraph that ETC’s case wasn’t unique: “Any PoW coin that isn’t the leader in its hash function is vulnerable to attacks such as these.”.
“IOHK’s checkpointing proposal is valid but would really be a last resort solution for ETC as a decentralized PoW blockchain network,” Jay Hao, CEO of OKEx exchange, told Cointelegraph. “All decentralized blockchains including BTC are susceptible to 51% attacks by their very nature,” OKEx’s Hao told Cointelegraph, adding further: But the OKEx CEO also put forth a warning: “It’s imperative that ETC fix the vulnerabilities in the network that make the possibility of another attack in the short-term high, as they could place ETC’s future at risk and/or cause exchanges like OKEx to delist.”.
