FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE December 28, 2018

HONG KONG

Musicoin ($MUSIC) recently experienced several rounds of 51% attacks, in which a bad actor who controls more than half the available network hashing power attempted to double-spend transactions. Consequently, our exchange partner Bittrex temporarily put MUSIC trading on hold while the issue is resolved.

51% attacks are fairly common at the moment, and other coins have been experiencing similar problems. You can read more about them here.

No user funds were lost as a result of the recent attacks on Musicoin.

After this incident happened, Musicoin’s core team has been actively communicating with Bittrex to solve the issue, and trading will be back online as soon as wallet maintenance is complete.

With the help from several industry experts, including Pirl Labs’ CEO, Julien du Bois, the Musicoin team is developing a full-fledged solution to defend against attackers using notorious “stealth mining” methods to override the chain with double spends. We have set up a testing environment to simulate the attacks and verify the effectiveness of the solution. Our patch will be released to our Github repository within days.

We have also created honeypots to narrow down the hacker’s behaviors and patterns. The information we collect will be provided to law enforcement authorities to aid them in further investigations.

To examine the happenings, and help defend the whole system, you may go download our new client (>= v2.8) and run it at the command line:

$ gmc

You may see occasional chain reorg information like this:

The deep transaction reorg indicates that the hacker(s) is still exhausting their hash power to take advantage of the network.

Rest assured, the Musicoin network is currently stabilized. More announcements will be made shortly in regards to how we plan to combat this in the future.

In wake of the attacks, we have decided to fast track the implementation of our newer, more robust consensus model for Musicoin’s blockchain — Proof-of-Sharism (PoSh). These 51% attacks give us the opportunity to further innovate and ensure this new consensus model has strong network security. In the meantime, we have increased the number of block confirmations as an extra precaution.

We call upon miners to keep faith on this project, and if possible, dedicate more hash rate to help secure our blockchain and deter bad actors.

Our listeners and artists should feel comfortable using the Musicoin platform as usual. Each free listen and upload adds transactions to our blockchain, and in turn, generates more MUSIC to add to our UBI pool. This means that simply using Musicoin not only contributes to the whole economy, it also helps deter attacks. Let’s work together to defeat hackers with the power of music.

About Musicoin

Musicoin (MUSIC) is a smart cryptocurrency($MUSIC) and music streaming platform built upon the Musicoin blockchain. Musicians and listeners worldwide are encouraged to visit Musicoin’s official website at musicoin.org.