The 51% attack, which was so much talked about in the crypto-currency world, finally took place in reality. The victim was the Verge Crypto currency, which is included in the top 25 Crypto-currency by the size of the capitalization.
An attack of 51% means that the attacker has at his disposal power greater than that of the rest of the network, a sort of "controlling stake" in generating capacity. After that, the attacker can do almost anything with the network. What happened with Verge (XVG).
The attack was first announced on April 4. After this information appeared on the forum bitcointalk.org the attack ceased, and on April 5th it resumed for a while.
In the table above there is a list of recently appeared blocks in the network, their numbers are indicated on the left. The amount of 1,560 "(XVG)" - is a reward for the block, which should receive the miners. The current price for Verge (XVG) is about 0.05 US dollars, i.е. for one block the miner receives approximately 78 US dollars. It's all more or less normal.
However, a column in which the time is indicated (timestamp) signals that there is something wrong in the network. Note that there are two timestamps. The difference between them is approximately 90 minutes. The correct timestamp is later, and the earlier one is a counterfeit, which the attacker forges.
The attacker can easily afford it, since he has most of the power in the network. Thus, the Verge network "believes" that these blocks are real. Attackers used several shortcomings in the software for Mining Verge (XVG) and can manage the time of creating blocks as you like.
For all these new blocks, the reward was received in full at a rate of 1.560XVG at a rate of about 1 per second, and not more than the usual one in 30 seconds.
Payments
For one unit, an attacker receives approximately $ 78 and thus earns about $ 280,800 per hour. In any case, the earnings of intruders are estimated in millions of XVG.
Now the task for the attackers is to get rid of the received XVG in the most profitable way. They can not sell all received coins at once without the price for this crypto currency sharply dropped. At the same time, they need to do this fairly quickly, until this news spreads among investors as after that the price will fall again.
The most profitable strategy for the attackers and the only real chance to really make money on this is that they hope that the community and investors will not give the incident enough significance. What the developers are trying to do.
What will happen to Verge (XVG)?
Without a doubt, this was a successful 51% attack, which formally makes this coin functionally useless. But at the same time, Verge (XVG) is in the top 25 crypto currency, has a serious history (both for crypto currency) and a strong community, so the price will almost certainly not fall to zero.
Moreover, the developers said that they are preparing a special patch with which they hope to fix the problem, but at the same time they do not plan fork, which means that the perpetrators will have all their means. But there is no guarantee that the attack will not be repeated again by the developers, at the moment, they did not provide.
In addition to this, Verge (XVG) announced some serious partnership, details of which will be known on April 16. If this attack does not affect the agreement, and the partnership does turn out to be serious, then this crypto currency has all the chances to stay afloat. Moreover, it has already begun to attract the attention of mainstream media, such as Forbes.