Pakcoin network was targeted by malicious miners doing selfish mining and double spend at Cryptopia from 14th December, 2018 onwards. We were alarmed to see high number of orphan blocks on network and found the reason was selfish mining and double spend at Cryptopia. Attackers might have sold around 5 Million Pakcoins (our estimate) till markets were paused by Cryptopia support on our request. Their selling caused price to slump to near 11 satoshi from around 30 satoshi. Cryptopia has been supportive and account audit is being done while we await their response about the actual facts about double spend.

We are now moving Pakcoin algorithm to Proof of Stake with a fixed block reward system. As we are writing this, new Pakcoin version is being tested and we are hopeful to release the new version soon. Unfortunately, we had to make this move as an emergency step and we couldn’t switch to POS on existing chain hence existing Pakcoins won’t be compatible with the new chain needing coin swap at 1:1.

As PoW is vulnerable for such kind of attacks if a blockchain has insufficient hashing power, Pakcoin could get attacked again in future if we keep going as it is. It’s our responsibility to detect threats and protect the Pakcoin network and users from such attacks.

Pakcoin will now use POS algorithm with fixed block reward. Details will be published in a different post about Pakcoin POS. With the new algorithm anyone can take part in mining of Pakcoin using their PC and getting their pakcoins staked. Mining power will be determined by the ratio of total staked coins vs user’s staked coins, it means that a user would be able to solve the pakcoin blocks according to his ratio of staked pakcoins. There won’t be need for special mining hardware, it will be simple. Interestingly, there won’t be interest system in this POS unlike most of POS coins.

POS system will encourage people to hold pakcoins in order to mine it and will be energy efficient as well. Attackers would have to buy as much as total staked coins in order to launch attack against Pakcoin hence making it difficult to acquire such large amount of pakcoins from market. It will also render their pakcoins less worthy because their pakcoins would be at stake and attacking Pakcoin would mean that they would devalue their investment by themselves making such attacks financially not feasible.

Please do not get panicked, this could happen with any coin out there. Vertcoin was attacked 22 times with exactly same pattern in december 2018 but Pakcoin was attacked just 7 times. Problems come to make us better than before and more powerful and experienced.

Pakcoin users should move their pakcoins to ewallet.pakcoin.org which is the official web wallet for Pakcoin. We will be doing coin swap on Pakcoin Ewallet for old coins with new coins. Please remember that your coins would only be swapped on ewallet.pakcoin.org.

We will take blockchain snapshot on block number 10,000,000 or January 20th, 2019 (Whichever comes first) and after that we will start swap process and will not accept old pakcoins on Ewallet. Ewallet will be switched to the new pakcoin blockchain and will not accept deposits from old pakcoin wallets. We are giving enough time to users to move their pakcoins to ewallet so that there are least chances for someone to miss pakcoin swap.

Remember to deposit your pakcoins to ewallet.pakcoin.org before 20th january 2019 to be safely included in Pakcoin swap.