This College Freshman Is Out to 51% Attack Your Cryptocurrency

According to a crypto enthusiast and security researcher going by the handle "Geocold51," most small-scale cryptocurrencies are at risk from the industry's most feared vulnerability - the 51% attack.

On Saturday, October 13, geocold51 decided to display just how easy it was - livestreaming his attempt to 51% attack Bitcoin Private, a crypto with close to a $47 million market cap.

Speaking to CoinDesk, geocold51 said, if a cryptocurrency can be so easily attacked, "It's sort of a misvalue of a given currency by different investors."

According to geocold51, without access to cloud mining, an attack like he did on bitcoin private would have cost him about $100,000 in hardware.

Because geocold51 announced the livestream on Reddit, the attempted attack got quite a bit of attention - even dogecoin creator Jackson Palmer tweeted about watching.

Still, the livestream didn't work exactly as planned, and because of that, geocold51 said he would run a complete attack later.

Because he had announced the attack in advance, the einsteinium community boosted the hash rate because it was worried that such an attack could cause a chain split and create a second blockchain that people could get stuck on, according to Ben Kurland, one of the project's board members.

Seeing the increased hash power, geocold51 decided to attack bitcoin private instead. According to geocold51, he got up to 60,000 views during the Twitch livestream, before Twitch shut the stream down.

Geocold51 argued, even if it is easy to buy hash power and take over a network, it might not be feasible to make a lot of money from an attack.

Geocold51 is committed to continuing, using the donations he received to maybe even try to 51% attack more cryptocurrencies as well.