Vertcoin suffers another 51% attack

Yesterday, Vertcoinsuffered its second 51 percent attack in a year. According to Vertcoin’s lead maintainer James Lovejoy, the attack saw 603 blocks replaced with 553 blocks mined by the attacker. The reorganization caused 5 double-spend attacks worth about $29. Lovejoy stated there is “strong evidence” that the attack was carried out renting hashrate from Nicehash, a cloud mining company.

Why it matters:

• Vertcoin is one of many coins optimizing for ASIC resistance in pursuit of keeping mining accessible to average people. Beyond the fact that the network garners little hashrate to support it and it's inexpensive to attack it, cryptocurrencies opting for ASIC resistant algorithms open their attack surface significantly by only allowing their coin to be mined using GPUs and CPUs. Security for such coins is more difficult to model given that GPUs and CPUs have use cases other than cryptocurrency mining, making it unknowable how much idle hash power is out there.
• Today marks almost a year to the date when Vertcoin was first 51 percent attacked. Interestingly the market appears to be non-reactive to news of 51 percent attacks as seen with the Ethereum Classic incident earlier this year.