AurumCoin Claims Cryptopia Refutes a 51% Attack Resulting in Lost Funds

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There are some serious allegations in the cryptocurrency world. Dirt slinging has, unfortunately become all too common. Even so, every single bit of potentially disastrous news needs to be taken into account at all times. The AurumCoin team claims the Cryptopia exchange will not confirm a 51% attack against the network caused nearly 16,000 AU (worth roughly $200,000 at the time of writing) to be lost in the process.

What AurumCoin Claimed has Happened

When it comes to altcoin networks, a 51% attack is always a very prominent threat first and foremost. Any network is subject to such attacks, although not all of them will suffer from such incidents. In the case of Bitcoin Gold and Verge, 51% attacks have disrupted their respective networks in the past year and a half. It now seems AurumCoin is the latest to fall victim to this particular development

According to the project’s website, a successful 51% attack against the network was conducted. This attack forced nearly 16,000 AU to end up in the wrong wallet, as the transfers to Cryptopia were never confirmed. When issues like these arise, there is a growing concern as to who is responsible for the missing coins and how the situation will be addressed moving forward,

Although this theft appears to be a genuine concern, Cryptopia is – allegedly – unwilling to take any action to resolve the matter. The company is not necessarily planning to admit there is a problem. As such, its users are trying to reclaim any lost funds without much success. It is unclear if these missing AU pertain to funds being transferred to or from Cryptopia.

One has to keep in mind crypto exchanges cannot take full responsibility if something happened outside of their control. If someone attacks the AurumCoin network at an opportune time, there is no “window” for exchanges to freeze transactions. It is unfortunate for those who lose money because of such incidents. However, service providers can only do so much, as they are not directly responsible for the security of individual networks.

For the time being, it remains unclear what will happen to AurumCoin or the missing funds. If the funds is in control of a hacker, they will most likely never be returned tot he rightful owner. If the transactions were never broadcasted, the funds should be recovered without too much friction. As such, there are a lot of unknowns where this incident is concerned.

Incidents like these highlight the need for cryptocurrency enthusiasts to take full control over their funds at all times. Relying on centralized exchanges is and always will be problematic, for a wide variety of reasons. Although Cryptopia seemingly isn’t to blame in this regard, it is evident they are caught up in the situation. An unfortunate turn of events for the cryptocurrency industry, although it will not be the last 51% attack either.

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3 Comments

  1. This is more dishonest journalism. Cryptopia has not denied anything. A simple look at the Crypotopia website would reveal that Cryptopia published the 51% attack while Aurumcoin was falsely claiming that Cryptopia was hacked. Both the Aurum coin website and this article has been archived as proof of this dishonesty.

    • Cryptopia exchange was hacked (51% attack), a total of 15,752.26 AU is missing from Cryptopia’s wallet. Aurum coin network is not the responsibility of anyone, same as Bitcoin network, it is open source distributed crypto currency. What’s worse is that cryptopia exchange do not admit it. This is not the way to solve this problem.

  2. 51% attacks have happened to a number of POW coin networks recently. When it happened to Bitcoin Gold it triggered a delist from Bittrex. It can only occur when the coin network maintains insufficient network hashrate to protect against such an attack. The attacker didn’t “hack” the Aurum coin network. Instead they exploited the low Aurum coin network hashrate and effectively took over the Aurum blockchain during the attack.

    The attacker controlled over 51% of the hashrate with a secret privately mined chain which when broadcast to the Aurum coin network over-ruled the legitimate publicly mined transactions by the honest miners. Which causes what is called chain re-organisation. When this occurs the blocks previously displayed on block explorers that were showing as confirmed are discarded (orphaned) and replaced with the blocks mined by the privately mined chain.

    Coin networks can avoid this by ensuring that the algorithm and reward parameters are such as to entice sufficient hashrate to secure the network. They can also implement checkpointing and other technological countermeasures.

    When a 51% attack occurs on a coin network it means that the coin is neither immutable nor decentralized.

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