CHEAPETH

DESCRIPTION OF EVENTS

"Someone made cheapeth as an alternative to ETH. $CTH" "You like ethereum? You wish you could use it, BUT TRANSACTIONS ARE 100 DOLLARS?!? You need cheapETH. It's 100% compatible with eth, except 1000x cheaper!!* If you have ETH, you already have cheapETH!"

"The transaction fees on Ethereum do not scale with the amount of money moved, where if there was a way to apply different amounts of security to them, they should."

"That's where cheapETH comes in. It's just as capable of doing all the same compute and contract operations, but it's not capable of securing all the value. It's a home for fast in and out high value, lower value, or no value transactions. We estimate 99% of the Ethereum transactions require nowhere near the security of the entire Ethereum blockchain, yet they all pay for it and get it every time. cheapETH lets you not pay for it if you don't need it."

"cheapETH is a fork of the main Ethereum chain at block 11818959. Think Bitcoin Cash, but for Ethereum instead of Bitcoin. The money is cheap, the transactions are fast, and the party is still going." "Think about it. A transaction that costs $77 on ETH, is only $0.08 on cheapETH. Made possible by cheapgas. The cheap eth gang solves the gas crisis."

"A 51% attack is one of the main ways in which a blockchain can be attacked. The premise of most blockchains is that, as long as the majority of hash power is controlled by good actors, looking to support the network, then it will work normally. But if a bad actor takes control of the majority of the hash power, then they can cause some issues."

"One of the main ways that bad actors profit from a 51% attack is by performing a double spend. Using their greater amount of hash power, they secretly mine a longer alternative version of the blockchain. They will then make a deposit to a crypto exchange and see their balance go up. Then they will broadcast their alternative (and crucially, longer) chain to the network, eroding their previous transaction. This leaves them with their original money and the balance on the exchange."

On May 17th, 2021 "At 07:12 UTC, I successfully ran a 51% attack against @realGeorgeHotz's http://cheapETH.org Ethereum clone chain. With a network hash rate of 559.64Mh/s, I rented ~1.44Gh/s of miners to control ~72% of the network."

"Agnihotri chose a tiny clone of the Ethereum blockchain called CheapETH to run the experiment. It has much greater block sizes (similar to Bitcoin Cash), making it cheaper to send transactions. But unlike Ethereum’s 629 trillion hashes per second, it has just a measly 559 million hashes per second. This makes it much more vulnerable to attack."

"To carry out the attack, Agnihotri rented mining power capable of performing 1.44 billion hashes per second. This enabled him to take up about 72% of the network’s hash rate. He also rented a virtual machine to run the blockchain on. The total costs were under $100." "<$100. Largest expenses were a 16c/64gb vm for the weekend to sync geth and run scripts from and the ~$40 I spent to rent hash power for 4 hours."

"I setup a GCP instance w/ geth tracking cheapeth, open-ethereum-pool, a stratum proxy, and a few convenience scripts I wrote. Then, I rented hashing power from @miningrigrental." "I pointed the hash rate to my own pool. Disconnected from the network by blocking peers. Sent a few txs (that I wanted to double spend). Mined solo for a few minutes. And then, replaced all past blocks with my longer chain fork (ignoring any txs I sent in step 3)."

“I've never seen a 51% attack against a live network (for good reason I suppose; most folks attacking networks for monetary gain probably don't want to publicize themselves),” tweeted Anish Agnihotri today, adding: “So I recorded it for you.”

"While Agnihotri attacked the network, he did not carry out a double-spend attack at the same time. In the documentation within the video, he points out the points at which a bad actor would perform such an attack. Afterward, he said that he would airdrop tokens to any pools that were affected by his attack through loss of mining and transaction rewards."

"cETH has no value, cheapETH is not the main Ethereum network (which is infinitely harder to 51% attack), no third-party transactions were disrupted, I will airdrop to pools who's "revenue" was impacted, and this was for educational purposes only."

CheapETH is a fork of the ethereeum blockchain which features cheaper transactions due to the smaller network. A white hat hacker named Anish Agnihotri demonstrated a 51% attack. All funds were returned after the demonstration.

HOW COULD THIS HAVE BEEN PREVENTED?

51% attacks can be prevented through a mix of increased block confirmation times and setting checkpoints to prevent large-scale reorganizations. This means the exchange will not allow withdrawals based on newly deposited funds (which could still be taken back through a 51% attack), and nodes will be prevented from accepting longer attacking chains.

Check Our Framework For Safe Secure Exchange Platforms

https://mobile.twitter.com/certik_io/status/1395275460087517188 (Jan 10)
Hacker shows how he '51% attacked' Ethereum clone CheapETH for $100 (Jan 10)
@CheapEth Twitter (Jan 10)
cheapETH (Jan 10)
https://coinmarketcap.com/currencies/cheapeth/ (Jan 10)
The developer conducted an "educational" 51% attack on the CheapETH Ethereum clone - World Stock Market (Jan 10)
CheapETH will be easy to attack with a 51% attack. If you want to play with Ethe... | Hacker News (Jan 10)
51% Attacking George Hotz's CheapETH Ethereum Clone Chain - YouTube (Jan 10)
@_anishagnihotri Twitter (Jan 10)
@_anishagnihotri Twitter (Jan 10)
cheapETH (Jan 10)

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