The developers of the platform Horizen claim that they managed to find a way to resist the famous “51% attack.” This can, in fact, be called the fruit of their own bitter experience, it was this attack that once cost the platform more than $500 thousand.
As is known, the key to success in “51% attack” is getting an attacker or a group of attackers to control more than half of the distributed registry nodes in a particular blockchain. This makes it possible to enter any information into the blockchain and confirm it, for example, by creating new blocks in unlimited quantities, filling them with any transactions.
How does Horizen propose to deal with this? It proposes to make changes to the proof-of-work consensus algorithm with the so-called “delay function”. That is, miners who can theoretically prepare such an attack will receive penalties.
The fact is that for the implementation of the “attack 51%” it takes time because the attacker miner needs to secretly produce a certain number of blocks before transferring them to the blockchain. And the penalties for delaying the placement of new blocks in the blockchain will make this process too expensive.
Technically, a new version of the code changes the function of the basic consensus algorithm, the so-called “longest chain rule”. For instance, penalties apply if the new proposed unit is located at a distance of five or more blocks from the most recently created one. “Attempting such an attack will cost much more, 10 times more,” says Horizen co-founder Rob Vilone.
In his opinion, successful “51% attacks%” caused damage not only to those projects where they ended in success but also to cryptocurrencies as a whole because they questioned the reliability of the technology and undermined its credibility.
Vilone also noted that the developers of Horizen began to think about solving this problem immediately after their own platform had been attacked, resulting in the appearance of 36 fake blocks. “It seems to me that we have a rather elegant and simple solution that guarantees that this is unlikely to happen again,” he said. “A similar attempt will be too expensive now.”
Due to the peculiarities of the architecture of Horizen, a delay of 5 blocks or more can be explained solely by hostile intentions. “One block is calculated on average in 2.5 minutes; registration of a new block on the network takes 1-2 seconds from anywhere in the world. That is, there are no reasonable reasons why there will be a gap of 5 blocks from the last one created,” explained Vilone. However, a situation may arise when different chains of blocks will compete with each other, but this issue is supposed to be resolved by a vote of miners.
As previously reported by HashTelegraph, Horizen is the result of the re-branding of the ZenCash platform. The project team has promised that it will concentrate on creating ready-made applications, increasing the anonymity of transactions and will offer the community new functions, such as on-chain treasuries – a foundation whose funds will be spent on the development of Horizen.
