17.06.2014 - Bitcoin currency could have been destroyed by '51%' attack
Bitcoin has stared down an existential threat, after a consortium of miners briefly gained enough processing power to theoretically destroy the currency. For a few hours on Friday, mining pool Ghash.io controlled 51% of all the processing power being used to perform the calculations that keep bitcoin secure. If it had abused that power, it would have had the ability to irreversibly take money from other users, simply by rewriting the register of who owns which bitcoins. But shortly after the threshold was breached, some members of the mining pool pulled their computing power from the group, averting – or at least, delaying – catastrophe...............................................Full Article: Source
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