ETC Labs: Regulation is key to preventing 51% attacks

According to BlockBeats, after experiencing multiple 51% attacks in the past two months, ETC Labs issued a statement saying that regulation is the key to preventing future 51% attacks. Terry Culver, CEO of ETC Labs, revealed that according to information provided by CipherTrace, which was hired to investigate the attack, the attacker used the proceeds from the first attack to rent computing power for the second attack.

The idea of ​​using power-renting agents to attack proof-of-work blockchains is not new. NiceHash is one such company that can rent computing power, and Cointelegraph spoke to the company's chief marketing officer, Andrej Skraba. Skraba said that while NiceHash's crypto exchange platform is a regulated entity and therefore follows regulatory requirements for KYC and other related requirements, its computing power rental business is not regulated and its users are not required to disclose their identities. When we asked whether the company would consider establishing such a procedure to deal with attacks, Skraba replied: It will all depend on the European Union and what decision they will make in this regard.

He also noted that a good analogy for NiceHash is an Internet Service Provider, or ISP, that simply delivers data packets: NiceHash can send data packets to mining pools, and those data packets can be described as hashing power. So if we really want to build a truly decentralized world, we can't put limits on traffic. He added that it's difficult for intermediaries like NiceHash to detect attacks as they happen. It's even more challenging to prevent them from happening in the first place. Skraba acknowledged that having proper KYC and AML in place can help reduce the risk. However, he argued that it doesn't solve the problem.

While regulation can reduce the likelihood of future attacks, this is more of a long-term plan. Not only will it take time for appropriate legislators and regulators to develop a proper framework, but it must be global to be effective when hash power is a proxy.

Other solutions being discussed by the ETC community include a checkpoint system (which can manually prevent future attacks), switching to another hashing algorithm, and finally some strategic moves like building a decentralized fund management vault.

Some believe that the final attack was carried out by ETH miners. Since the two blockchains use the same DaggerHashimoto hashing algorithm after the fork, and ETH enjoys a fairly high hash rate, it is quite easy for ETH miners to attack the project that hard forked from Ethereum.