Vertcoin's Struggle Is Everyone's Struggle

You may not have heard of Vertcoin, a crypto project designed to curtail concentration in mining power in the interests of broad-based participation.

Now, the bear market in cryptocurrencies has posed them with a challenging question: was their constant commitment to maintaining the competitiveness of affordable, general-purpose mining equipment worth it? Is their otherwise laudable goal of democratized mining only creating an untenable security risk?

The problem, these critics say, is that if mining is relatively cheap and can be employed by simply taking a machine that's currently doing one thing and having it do a different task, it's easy for an attacker to deploy enough hashing power to seize control of the network.

What's more, it's not clear that ASIC mining models are immune from the root cause of Vertcoin's problems.

Essentially, falling coin prices made mining less profitable and resulted in lower rental rates for already-installed hardware on cloud mining sites such as Nicehash.

If the attacker is already a large-scale ASIC miner, that's not necessarily a big leap, either.

Some developers are seeing the Vertcoin experience as a warning for all cryptocurrencies, viewing this bear market, which is playing havoc with mining profitability, as an all-encompassing threat to consensus models.

In contrast with a mere $131 per hour cost for a 51 percent attack on Vertcoin as of Friday, a bitcoin attack would have cost you $226,000 per hour, according to the website Crypto51.

If bottom-fishers eventually stabilize bitcoin's price, which is now down more than 80 percent over the past 12 months, it will allow the protocol's in-built difficulty adjustment to catch up and start to restore mining profitability.

The recent incursion into the Vertcoin network by specially designed Vertcoin ASICs showed how hard it is to keep up with the threat being amassed against it.