ETC Labs hired the law, firm Kobe & Kim, to bring the case to justice. The organization says that it will analyze the transactions to identify those responsibly.
A team of developers from ETC Labs will take legal action against those responsible for the two 51% attacks that Ethereum Classic recently suffered. This is the first time that members of the blockchain community have planned to bring a cryptocurrency theft by miners to state authorities.
ETC Labs announced the hiring of a law firm and blockchain analytics firm CipherTrace to investigate the case in depth.
Since last July 31st, the Ethereum Classic blockchain has suffered several attacks that manipulated the record of its transactions. The attackers caused the ETC network to lose more than USD 6 million after they managed to manipulate the accounting records of the blockchain.
The impact of this attack on the network has led members of Ethereum Classic Labs to hire the law firm Kobe & Kim, who will be in charge of filing criminal charges against those responsible. On the other hand, the firm CipherTrace will be in charge of leading the investigation and analysis of transactions to find the miners who perpetrated the attack.
Ethereum Classic thus becomes the first blockchain that plans to demand legal repercussions for all those involved in a 51% attack on it. If they succeed, ETC Labs could set a risky precedent for decentralizing public blockchains. Government authorities (trusted third parties) would be involved in problems derived from deficiencies in the security of these networks since they do not have the support of the mining community.
A 51% attack is a type of malicious activity that groups of miners can do on a blockchain by concentrating more than 50% of their hashrate. In this way, these miners can delete the transaction history and replace information. They would do all this to spend the coins stored in the blocks of the network more than once and seize the rewards for mined blocks.
The decrease in the hashrate on Ethereum Classic continues to be one of the reasons for the proliferation of these types of attacks since it is inexpensive for miners to do these activities. Leading to a legal dispute over the security mechanisms typical of the operation of blockchains seems a sterile debate. However, it could motivate the imposition of legal measures that are detrimental to the decentralization and community development of these networks.
In recent days, a group of miners managed to accumulate this amount of hashrate on the Ethereum Classic blockchain on two occasions. They double-spent 807,260 ETC and 238.306 ETC on each of these raids. In this way, the malicious miners managed to steal more than USD 6 million from the Ethereum Classic network, not to mention the fees per block mined.
Ethereum Classic has already suffered 51% attacks on other occasions. For example, it was the victim of a theft of 219,000 ETC through the double-spending of cryptocurrencies in January 2019.
The community has proposed changing the mining algorithm to avoid this type of incident, but the solution has raised doubts and debates. While discussions about an update continue, Ethereum Classic is still exposed to attacks of this type since it has a hashrate of only 2.98 TH/s.
By Alexander Salazar
