GRIN ASIC Miner IPOLLO Stepping Up Production to Triple GRIN Network Hashpower Soon
Preface
On Nov. 7, 2020, the privacy coin Grin is victim of 51% attack. Cointelegraph reported this attack and claimed in the news that the estimated cost of performing a 51% attack on Grin network for one hour was $75 at the time of writing.
51% Attack Cost
According to an analysis of this attack, an unknown miner could have rented up to 10KG/Second GRIN C32 hash power from NiceHash, a cloud mining operation that allows users to rent hashrate. The price of the NiceHash C32 algorithm increased from 0.12 to 0.22 BTC/KG/Day at the time of attacking. The attack lasted for one hour, the total cost of the attack can be estimated as: 0.22(BTC/KG/Day) x 10(KG) x 15000($/BTC) / 24(Hours) ~= $1375. Even it is far more than $75 as claimed in above news, it is still a little lower than some other popular blockchains, such as BTC, ETH, LTC, ZEC, Etc. Grin’s position is very near to DASH, according to the following table from crypto51.app.
51% Attack History
In the history of cryptocurrency, there were several interesting 51% attacks.
·BTC 51% Attack Risk in 2014：In 2014, Ghash.io gained control of over 51% of the network hashrate. At that time, Bitcoin had obvious lower visibility than today. As a strong supporter of the Bitcoin, Ghash.io gave up 10% hash power immediately and limited the ratio to 40％, for protecting the security of Bitcoin network.
·ETC — Malicious 51% Attack： On Jan. 5, 2019, ETC experienced 51% attack and thousands of ETC was double spent. On this attack, ETC insisted its principle as before, that it would never reorg or roll back the chain. In 2016, due to the same reason of “Code is Law”, ETC community forked from ETH. Another interesting notice on this 51% attack is that the ETC price didn’t slip at all as expected.
·BCH — 51% Attack in 2019： In May of 2019, BCH network upgraded for Schnorr signature feature. A mining pool named “fakeunknown” transferred all BCH which were sent to SegWit address by mistake to its own wallet. BTC.com and BTC.top publicly launched 51% attack and deleted these transactions by a reorg. Although this 51% attack on BCH network was motivated by good intentions, this accident still resulted in controversy.
Like two sides of a coin, when 51% attack breaks the blockchain network security, it is also a positive network security test. Since Bitcoin was born, the miner has switched from CPU、GPU、FPGA to ASIC, and the 51% attack happened numerous times in these history. These attacks make Bitcoin more and more strong. Grin has a same way to go like what happened in Bitcoin.
PoW Strategy of GRIN
It is well known that GRIN developed a consistent PoW strategy and welcomes the ASIC miner. According to the rule, GRIN will obsolete GPU mining algorithm AR29 on January 15, 2021 and then step into the ASIC mining phase completely.
IPOLLO miner is the first GRIN ASIC miner and produced since 2nd half of 2020, which will greatly increase the hash power of the GRIN network to fight 51% attack. In this respect, GRIN’s PoW strategy is unquestionably correct and successful.
Triple GRIN Network Hashpower Soon
Currently, IPOLLO miner has provided over 30% hashpower in GRIN network. With the improvement of supply chain, it will continue to provide hashpower support for GRIN community. Based on this malicious attack, IPOLLO miner promises to step up the production with a total 20K(G/S) hashpower in the remaining time of 2020, to support the GRIN community strengthen the GRIN network. By then, the total GRIN hashpower will triple, and the NiceHash cloud hashpower will drop to <25% and will not be available for the 51% attack on GRIN network. In the dark forest of PoW, currencies with greater hashpower are more likely to big success. With the continuous increasing of hashpower, GRIN network will be more secure and reliable.
Due to the COVID-19, the supply chain of ASIC chips became unstable this year, and the delivery time was difficult to predict. Therefore, IPOLLO made very few ads. Now, since the supply chain is beginning to stabilize and delivery dates of ASIC chips are relatively clear, IPOLLO will step up the production. At the same time, for better decentralized mining, IPOLLO will put more focus on small, domestic miner, such as the G1-Mini miner.
In the future, over 51% of IPOLLO miner for GRIN will be provided by decentralized small miner, so that more people can support and maintain the GRIN network together.
