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Mintcoin removes PoW to fix potential security issues

Posted by: Bobby (ironhammer5) in News April 3, 2014 9 Comments

The Mintcoin team has today released a mandatory wallet update which removes proof-of-work from the coin entirely, meaning Mintcoin is now 100% proof-of-stake.

The 1.7 wallet update needs to be installed before the block 220,000, and was pushed out as a means to protect against a potential security flaw that was pointed out on the BitcoinTalk forums recently. Due to the low incentive for Mintcoins proof-of-work rewards, it meant the difficulty was so low that it would be easier to perform a 51% attack on the coin.

Removing proof-of-work entirely means that this is now a completely non-issue, and seeing as Mintcoin is already fairly well distributed among users it’s unlikely that security issues will come out of being a pure proof-of-stake coin — although it’s not really something we have experience of at this time.

The Mintcoin developers haven’t really commented too much on the change, aside from this tweet:

Update on potential security issues. As a cautionary measure and since MINT does not really need PoW, we have decided to get rid of the PoW.

Currently the 1.7 wallet has been released for Windows on the Mintcoin website, with Mac and Linux said to be on their way soon.

Update: As several comments have mentioned below, it was in fact the Blackcoin developers that originally discovered this potential security issue and alerted the Mintcoin team. 

Mintcoin: MgGSB5n5UXudLuDCt6xipiBxtk2fSyZTar
  • goblynn

    btw the Blackcoin devs found this threat and notified the mintcoin devs

    • http://highonpotcoin.info Bobby

      Have added a little update to the post to reflect this. Thanks. :)

  • http://blackcoin.co/ StableEvan

    Hey, just pointing out it was the developer of BlackCoin (the first pure PoS coin) that alerted them to the flaw and told them how to fix it. It’s great when the crypto-communities work together!

    • kaka

      1. Blackcoin came 2 weeks after Mintcoin.
      2. Peercoin was the first PoS coin.
      3. Enough Blackcoin shilling in a news post about another coin.
      4. Great seeing communities work together.

      • Mrtn

        True, Blackcoin came later, but BC is actually the first coin to go “POS- only”.

      • http://blackcoin.co/ StableEvan

        1. Blackcoin is still the first _pure_ Proof of Stake coin.
        2. See above
        3. It’s not shilling, it’s relevant to the discussion.
        4. Definitely!

        • Patrick

          Out of curiosity, would not NXT be the first pure PoS coin?

          BC of course being the first PoW/PoS hybrid coin based on Bitcoin/Litecoin to become a pure PoS coin.

          • http://blackcoin.co/ StableEvan

            Ah, you might be correct about that. I’m not really sure about NXT. Thanks for the info :)

  • http://www.blackcoin.co/ Big D

    Might be worth mentioning the BlackCoin developers actually discovered this… http://www.reddit.com/r/blackcoin/comments/22095r/well_done_to_the_blackcoin_developer_for_exposing/