EBA: 51% Attack Remains Bitcoin’s Biggest Problem — Emily Spaven, www.coindesk.com

The head of the European Banking Agency last week revived anxieties over a so-called 51 percent attack on the Bitcoin network, challenging assurances that mining monopolies commanding more than half of all computing resources required to make new coins either won’t emerge, thereby effectively destroying the crypto currency’s central tenet of distributed trust, or they won’t abuse their power.

On Friday, EBA chief Dirk Haubricht weighed at an event called Controlling Cryptocurrencies in Birmingham, saying such claims don’t hold water, in a report by Emily Spaven at Coindesk.

As a financial regulator, I don’t believe it. I’ve seen so much stuff happen from the financial institutions that created the financial crisis — and that is partly what brought about virtual currencies in the first place — so I don’t believe in those promises any more.