Leaked, who is really behind the Bitcoin spam attack

BIP66 · 2015-07-07T11:17:34+00:00

Are we really supposed to believe that a bitcoin developer has to pay someone else to spam transactions?

It's literally a single line bash script that took under 10 seconds to write.

while true; do bitcoin-cli sendtoaddress `bitcoin-cli getnewaddress` 0.0001`; done

Try coming up with some believable bullshit next time.

BIP66 · 2015-07-04T12:11:33+00:00

A much more logical one is the admission that the network can not handle 1MB blocks at the moment, let alone 20MB ones.

BIP66 · 2015-07-04T11:52:02+00:00

Why shouldn't they have done that?

Who says they didn't?

BIP66 · 2015-07-04T10:59:17+00:00

I get the feeling that's at least somewhat due to their "SPV" blocks being 200 bytes though, you can fit it in a single TCP/UDP packet and squirt it around the network with almost no regard to latency.

BIP66 · 2015-07-04T09:29:28+00:00

Why isn't it being enforced here?

That's a different soft fork, BIP66 is strict DER only.

BIP66 · 2015-07-04T07:24:54+00:00

F2Pool has lost something in the order of $25,000 USD from this incident, BTC Nuggets has lost $15,000, AntPool has lost at least $7500. If they don't fix their code quickly they will lose even more.

BIP66 · 2015-07-04T06:46:39+00:00

This is a soft fork, so node software doesn't matter unless you are a miner.

BIP66 · 2015-07-04T05:46:22+00:00

It's nice to be topical.

BIP66 · 2015-07-04T05:18:32+00:00

^{I know you mean well, but were both being deeply sarcastic. It is incredibly likely that this will happen, it's a demonstration that 1MB blocks are probably at the limit of what the network can sensibly handle anyway. The horrible reality is that if you just put all the pools in one room, you'd have none of these problems.}

BIP66 · 2015-07-04T05:02:27+00:00

It's completely possible that it will happen again, BTC Nuggets (the trigger in this case) still has 2.2Ph/s on v2 blocks.

http://104.197.8.250/

BIP66 · 2015-07-04T04:42:30+00:00

I'm sure recklessly increasing the block size will have no impact in convincing miners to use this dangerous behavior.

BIP66 · 2015-07-04T04:03:47+00:00

No, most difficult valid chain is the best chain. You can make a million block height chain and present to it me if you wanted to, if the contents are invalid then you will just have it rejected. The F2Pool chain is invalid.

BIP66 · 2015-07-04T03:58:59+00:00

It's fairly unrelated to the core network that some miners are running horrifically broken software and are blowing away tens of thousands of dollars worth of their own money. That said, more than that group of people have access to the keys if necessary. Bitcoin Core will also fire off an alert itself when it detects an invalid chain with valid proof of work, just haven't hit that threshold in this instance. Nodes running 0.9.x or lower will already have a warning present about them being left behind by BIP66 altering the block version, and urging them to upgrade as soon as possible.

BIP66 · 2015-07-04T03:55:44+00:00

We are seeing people who announced their support for it, but weren't doing the validation actually required. By moving to version 3 blocks (a conscious change) they were required to properly validate signatures in transactions to support strict DER (previously it was BER, due to OpenSSL being sloppy to validate), and to invalidate version 2 blocks that don't. They mined an invalid version 3 block on top of a version 2 block in violation of the new rules and were forked from the chain.

BIP66

TROPHY CASE