ETC Labs: Monitoring is the key to preventing 51% of attacks
Regulation is the key to preventing 51% attacks in the future, ETC Labs said in a post after it suffered multiple attacks in the past two months, according to Rhythm BlockBeats. According to INFORMATION provided by CipherTrace, which was hired to investigate the attack, the attacker used the proceeds of the first attack to rent computing power for a second attack, ETC Labs CEO Terry Culver said.
The idea of forced agents attacking blockchain for verifying work is not new.NiceHash is one such company that rents out computing power. Cointelegraph spoke with the company's CHIEF marketing officer, Andrej Skraba. Skraba said that while NiceHash's encrypted trading platform is a regulated entity and therefore complies with regulatory requirements for KYC and other related requirements, its computing rental business is not regulated and its users are not required to disclose their identities. When asked if the company would consider setting up such a procedure to deal with an attack, Skraba replied: 'It's entirely up to the European Union to decide what they will do in this regard.'
He also pointed out that a good analogy for NiceHash is that an Internet service provider, or ISP, just provides packets :NiceHash can send packets to the pool, which can be described as a hash capability. So if we really want to build a truly decentralized world, we can't impose restrictions on traffic. He added that intermediaries like NiceHash have a hard time detecting attacks when they occur. Preventing them from happening in the first place is more challenging. Skraba acknowledged that developing appropriate KYC and AML would help reduce risk. But that, he says, will not solve the problem.
While regulation can reduce the likelihood of future attacks, it is more of a long-term plan. Not only does it take time for the right legislators and regulators to put in place the right framework, but it has to be global to be effective where computing power can be a proxy.
Other solutions being discussed in the ETC community include a checkpoint system that can manually prevent future attacks, switching to another hash algorithm, and finally strategic initiatives such as creating a decentralized money management repository.
Some believe that the last attack was carried out by ETH miners. Since the two blockchains split using the same DaggerHashimoto hash algorithm and the ETH enjoys a fairly high hash rate, it is relatively easy for ETH miners to attack projects that are hard split from ethereum.
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