Hello, welcome to the Friday, May 25th, 2018 edition of the Sandcent Storm Center's Stormcast. My name is Johannes Ulrich, and I'm recording from Reston, Virginia.

If you wondered about all of the opt-in, opt-out mails that you received on Thursday, that's because Friday, May 25th is also the first day.

The general data protection regulation or GDPR is going to be in effect.

Haven't really seen much fishing or so being mixed in with these emails.

I guess the fishers really haven't caught on to this, or

they figure that users will actually just ignore most of these emails.

Looks like there's evidence that a double spent attack was successful against the Bitcoin Gold Network. Bitcoin Gold is a cryptocurrency

that was forked from the original Bitcoin back in 2017. It currently ranks at around

number 30 for the largest cryptocurrencies by market cap.

So certainly not a small currency, but maybe not big enough to withstand a 51% attack.

Apparently the same attacker has tried that before against the original Bitcoin network,

but now has been successful against Bitcoin

Gold. At this point, it's estimated that the attacker made about $18 million in Bitcoin

gold. The way an attack like this works is that an attacker is trying to spend the same

bitcoins twice. Now, typically, that's not supposed

to work because the Bitcoin network itself is designed that only one node really can confirm

a transaction. But if an attacker does hold a majority of the processing power, then there is a good possibility that the attacker is able to confirm the attack as well, in addition to the rest of the Bitcoin Gold network.

Now, the target here appears to be crypto coin exchanges.

The trick here is that the attacker needs to be able to have someone accept the large

transaction. And of course, crypto coin exchanges are more likely going to accept these large

transactions. One defense against the attack is to actually not accept a transaction until a number of additional transactions have been

confirmed by the network. It appears at this point in the Bitcoin Gold Network. You have to

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