Attempted 51% Attack on Bitcoin Gold Was Thwarted, Developers Say

Bitcoin gold’s developer team announced Friday night that it foiled a 51% attack that it had known was coming for over a week.

• Bitcoin gold alerted exchanges and mining pools of the attack on July 2, and posted a notice to the community on July 10 noting that it was time for "everyone else to upgrade their nodes."
• The team only revealed the attempted network takeover to the public after the unknown attacker, which had been mining blocks since July 1, released 1,300 blocks late Friday night.
• Developers had circulated an update that featured a checkpoint at block 640,650https://explorer.bitcoingold.org/insight/block/00000000635620f22ba8694aea532d51619f8cd060f4e42e85db3cb3a5d1c29c on July 2. That checkpoint prevented the attacker’s chain from taking over the honest chain, they said Friday.
• “The majority of honest pool hashpower continues to mine on the honest chain,” website maintainer CryptoDJ said in the post.
• According to the cryptocurrency's official website, there are only 108 bitcoin gold nodes in the world. Nearly 30% of them are in Germany. Bitcoin Gold communications director Edward Iskra told CoinDesk that these only represent immediately responsive nodes, and not ones that don't allow incoming connections.
• The asset’s price seems to have been unaffected by the attempted attack, trading between $9 and $10 since Tuesday, according to Bitfinex.

UPDATE (July 11, 2020, 04:23 UTC): This article has been updated with additional information.