This was communicated by James Lovejoy, a researcher at MIT's Digital Currency Initiative, with a post on GitHub published a few days ago; Bitcoin Gold suffered a new 51% attack (the second in the past two years) between 23 and 24 January.

A 51% attack occurs when a malevolent subject takes control of 50% plus one of the nodes of the network (he basically manages to control the hash rate himself) and can therefore rewrite the data recorded in the blocks as he wishes.

With the first attack, which occurred on January 23, about 14 blocks were modified and this allowed the attackers to take possession of just under 20 thousand dollars; subsequently, after six hours, a new attack allowed to take away from the network just over 50 thousand dollars, for a total which, overall, allowed to take away from the community just over 70 thousand dollars.

The attack was certainly fruitful given that, as you can see by visiting the site https://www.crypto51.app/, the estimated cost for an attack of one hour on the Bitcoin Gold blockchain is just $ 800; therefore, we can say that the two attacks that took place could hardly have cost more than 2/3 thousand dollars and allowed to take away from the network as many as 70 thousand dollars.

A nice booty, no doubt about it; however, the thing that sincerely leaves us strangled is that, contrary to expectations, the price of Bitcoin Gold in the hours immediately following the two attacks rose instead of falling, going from $ 10.42 to $ 11.60 in a short time and touching a day high of $ 11.74.

Obviously this kind of situation is often used by the mainstream press to affirm how insecure cryptocurrencies are, however one should not be misled by a certain vulgar; not all blockchains are so cheap to attack, for example, to launch an attack against bitcoin would take as much as 704 thousand dollars and there would not even be concrete guarantees that the attack would be successful.