Our monitoring system has noticed a problem with MOAC pools on the 31st of January. There were all signs of 51% attack type. We’ve already stated that many Dagger Hashimoto coins were under attack in January. We’ve even made a special article to explain what actually the 51% attack is – Crypto Mythbusters: 51% Attack Explained.
51% Attack on MOAC
There was a MOAC blockchain split. As a result, we’ve got a lot of Rejected blocks: Orphan and Stale. Other pools have the same problem. We must state that these kinds of problems seriously affect the miners as they receive no reward for the Rejected blocks.
Attack Investigation
We’ve found the miner who was doing this attack. To be honest we were really disappointed as it was not just a simple attacker. It was a well-known MOAC mining pool BYLT.GQ. At the moment the hashrate of this pool is about 5% of all MOAC network. So for some unknown reason, this mining pool was manipulating the network for a short period of time. BYLT.GQ was disconnecting his node from the network and then loading the huge hashpower +- 600 GH/s. Btw. the current network hashrate is only 455 GH/s.
When BYLT.GQ was reconnecting his node to the network – the public chain was not valid anymore as it was shorter. All the pools except the attacker’s pool were receiving the rejects.
We have no idea why has this pool performed this fraudulent activity. Was it a double spend attack on the cryptocurrency exchange or just this pool was having a “little fun”? We ask MOAC team to do their own investigation. This screenshot represents the blocks found during the attack.
Conclusion
We think this extremely immoral and provocative attitude of the public mining pool. We strongly believe that all the pools are responsible for the cryptocurrency network stability. The less stable the network is the less coin price we could expect. In the end, miners are hurt the most. In this situation BYLT.GQ pool was using the hashpower in his own interest undermining the basis of the cryptocurrencies in general.
No matter if funds were stolen or not, 2Miners are sure the fact of deliberately ruining the network is unacceptable. We will never hold this kind of “experiments” on our mining pools.
Update
MOAC Team has decided to compensate the rewards for all the blocks rejected during the 51% attack.
MOAC blockchain was splitted in 3 during the attack: There were 186 rejected blocks in total. 14 mining pools were affected by the attack and lost the funds including 2Miners PPLNS and 2Miners SOLO pools.
All MOAC coins lost would be refunded: MOAC developers have transferred us the coins for 50 rejected blocks on PPLNS pool and 22 rejected blocks on SOLO pool.
When will the payout happen?.
In the next 24 hours.
I was mining MOAC during this attack. Would I get the compensation?
Yes. The payout would be executed according to this list
https://github.com/2miners/MOAC_reward
P.S.
Thanks to our team 12 more pools (not only 2Miners) have received the compensation for 114 rejected blocks. We hope those pools will distribute the coins among the miners in a fair way.
