What is Monacoin; It's Recent Selfish Attack

Monacoin is a Japanese based cryptocurrency platform that describes itself as the first and also the most active cryptocurrency platform in the country. Developed and launched in December 2013, this crypto in a just a few months became one of the top 10 crypto platforms in the world as at August 2014. The crypto has experienced a downfall in its value as it has dropped from being among the top 10 to top 40. The Monacoin cryptocurrency makes use of the proof of work algorithm and it has a block time of 1.5 minutes. With its block time, this crypto platform happens to be faster than Litecoin and Bitcoin networks.

Image Source : https://monacoin.org/

This cryptocurrency has bee described as the Japanese version of the Dogecoin and over 90% of its users reside in Japan. According to statistics, this crypto is generally unknown outside Japan. This crypto has been compared to Dogecoin in so many ways. First, they are meme-themed crypto platforms, the only difference being that Monacoin is based in Japan and a has a lower total coin supply.

Just a few weeks back, this Japanese based crypto platform suffered from what has been described as a selfish attack. According to the official website, over $90,000 was lost in the attack. According to various reports, the May 13th attack happened when a selfish miner mined blocks and refused to broadcast that certain blocks have been mined throughout the network. If this miner has mined a block and moves to the second block before other miners found it, he would have created a branch on the network that will be longer than all other chains on the network.

In most blockchain protocols, the chain on the network that has more blocks is seen as the correct chain by the network. This is because it has the most proof of work. If this miner continues to make the chain longer than all others on the network, he will be able to invalidate all blocks that have been found by other miners during the time that chain was hidden.

This mining attack has been described as vandalism and it destroys all other blocks that have been found by other miners on the network. Experts are guessing that maybe this secret miner sent most of the coins that were rewarded to other crypto exchanges that are not in the country, then he will have them converted to other cryptocurrencies before the hidden or secret chain is revealed on the network.

The attacker has not be identified, but it is said, that he used over 57% of the total hash rate in order to effectively execute the attack. Some are of the opinion that this hacker has been trying for a long time to be able to exploit the weaknesses of the platform. Currently, most exchanges that support the trading of the coin has halted all withdrawals and deposits until the problem is fixed by the network.

Since the attack happened, most crypto platforms are now changing their mining process to ensure that they do not suffer from the attack as well.