The Bitcoin Gold team has urged cryptocurrency exchanges, mining pools and digital wallets to upgrade BTG Core full nodes to version 0.17.2 as the team has identified an extremely long attack chain of over 1300 blocks on July 10, 2020, against the BTG network which have been mined since July 1, 2020.
According to an official announcement, the team detected the "illicit activity" early on and warned pools and exchanges to protect them.
"We also supplied them with BTG version 0.17.2, which included a checkpoint at block 640650, hash 000000059ec8884fa4fbbdbe46c09cfb4ecba281dfa2351a05084e817c1200ae from July 2 at 2am UTC, mined by MiningPoolHub, a known honest block," the Bitcoin Gold team wrote in the announcement.
The developers claim by checkpointing the above-mentioned block, the attacker’s chain failed to take over the entire network, but this information was not public, and the attacker continued to mine new blocks.
Since the blocks are anchored at a block mined on July 1st (before the checkpoint), the honest pools and exchanges who are running the updated code automatically rejected the attacker’s chain.
The Bitcoin Gold team says it is time for everyone else to upgrade their nodes.
This is not the first time the Bitcoin Gold blockchain network experiences the so-called 51% attack.
Earlier this year, there were two 51% attacks on BTG’s blockchain. They successfully reverted deposits to an exchange. The first reverted ~1900 BTG, the second ~5267 BTG.
In 2018, an unknown party with access to very large amounts of hashpower managed to steal approximately $17.5 million in BTG via the attack from cryptocurrency exchanges.
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