According to official sources, the ETC security solution proposed by the ETCLabs and ETCCore teams called MESS that can prevent 51% attacks will be activated at a block height of 11,295,300. According to the current block generation time, it is estimated to be about 23:00 on September 28, Beijing time. The exchanges, mining pools and other nodes need to update the Core-geth client to implement the MESS solution.
MESS is an effective termination system. The core protocol of ETC is responsible for IsaacA. It has been developed in cooperation with OpenRelay and ChainSafe. It has been successfully tested. MESS eliminates all by treating large block reorganization as suspicious objects and greatly increasing its cost. Motivation for profit to prevent 51% attacks, which will force the difficulty of large-scale reorganization of attacks to be greatly increased.
Previously, due to the client replacement and migration problem of the ETC network, the ETC network frequently encountered 51% computing power attacks, and even some attacks only cost a very low cost to cause the double-spending problem. Therefore, in addition to the basic network security, ETC also needs Make corrections on the function algorithm.
This is why MESS was proposed. In a simple summary, it is to classify the reorganization phenomena in the network, and then take certain measures for large-scale reorganization.
It is mentioned in the description document of MESS in github that small reorganization is healthy, and large reorganization is suspicious. Nodes should give priority to the content of local fragments and treat others with caution.
This means that the local fragment is data generated through the previous block header, rather than a brand new ledger.
The emergence of MESS is not a major modification of the consensus, but a kind of addition and modification. This time, there is no need to perform a hard fork, only the client needs to be updated. It can maintain the original GHOST protocol of Ethereum. change.
The normal operation of the pow blockchain is explained by game theory and economics, but it is not restricted by this. Miners are not forced to mine on the longest chain available to them. They do so because they bet it will be profitable for them. But sometimes mining on the longest chain may not make money for them. For example, if the longest chain is clearly made by criminals, miners can mine on any chain they want, can include any transaction they want, can process, propagate, postpone or ignore the block they want.
So MESS is actually a convention proposal for network participants to keep the network as uniform as possible. I hope the ETC community can continue to repair on the basis of continuous technical updates.
