Verge is a cryptocurrency that prides itself on advanced technology and a focus on privacy, but it has fallen under ridicule for being dishonest about their claims. Last week, a 51% attack on the Verge blockchain has caused the altcoin to undergo an obligatory hard fork to block further assault. The hack caused the coin to drop approximately 25 percent of its value on the news, hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of VXG was stolen directly from the blockchain through a “time warp manipulation.”
A hacker managed to acquire control of the system’s hashrate, supplying them the opportunity to manipulate timestamps of the blocks. With the manipulated time stamps, the hacker was able to process blocks at a blistering speed and collect undue block rewards for hours. The hacker even pestered the Verge group further by submitting an answer to a thread to bitcointalk.org in which he said, “Hey Verge Team, get some real developers and fix your code. We have found another 2 exploits which can make quick hashes as well.”
The hacker had exploited lots loopholes in the Verge code, allowing him to mine numerous blocks in one-second intervals. All of the mining used exactly the same algorithm, which should not have been possible. The exploit lasted for 3 hours which required programmers to roll the blockchain and reverse the damage.
To make matter worse, the assault was not even noticed by Verge programmers or any fault monitoring system. An individual at the bitcointalk discussion board, “ocminer,” discovered the attack first. His warnings fell on deaf ears for hours with programmers and Verge fans criticizing his warnings as FUD until it became obvious that the attack was real and on-going.
After the fact, Verge termed it a “minor incident” that “was not as bad as it could have been.” The Verge community wasn’t as forgiving, though, and they vented their shame on the web. One user stated, “Based on what I see from the dev postings here it’s apparent that if ocminer had never brought this to everyone’s attention, the XVG team would have never admitted to or disclosed what happened. Trying to downplay and being flippant about the severity here is just pissing on the XVG faithful.”
Verge programmers indicated that roughly 250,000 coins had been stolen, but critics assume the number was substantially greater. An individual at the bitcointalk.org thread stated that some pretty simple math shows roughly 3.9 million coins were likely stolen. If that is correct, approximately $200,000 would have been taken. To top it all off, the solution added to Github for “solving” the problem was an unintentional hard fork, which broke synchronization of the entire network and the wallets.
Verge continues to struggle with PR this year, and it doesn’t look like matters are going to improve. You’ve been instances of privacy and anonymity compromise, its Twitter account was hacked and now this 51% attack… All very bad news for Verge, and yet it continues to form particularly well on the charts. It seems, nothing can truly shake the Verge Army!
