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Bitcoin's Software Gets Security Fixes, New Features
itwbennett (1594911) writes "The software driving Bitcoin's network was upgraded Wednesday, with security fixes addressing a problem that defunct bitcoin exchange Mt. Gox blamed for losing nearly half a billion dollars worth of bitcoins. The latest version of bitcoin's software, 0.9.0, contains more than a half dozen fixes for transaction malleability, according to the release notes for the software. Bitcoin Core also contains a new feature for payment requests. Previously, merchants couldn't attach a note describing an invoice, and people also could not supply a refund address to a merchant. The latest version automatically supplies a refund address."
This wouldn't have prevented the Mt. Gox implosion since they weren't using the reference implementation. The foundation also renamed the software to "Bitcoin Core" to avoid confusion between Bitcoin-the-network and Bitcoin-the-reference-implementation,
While I do agree calling it something like 0.9.0 is stupid would it make a difference if it was called 9.0? It's the same software.
Do people expect someone to take seriously a piece of software to manage financial transactions with a version like that?
Apparently people do take it seriously, so it looks like the answer is yes.
Staying in the 0.x range for a long time is typical for open-source software -- a lot of packages don't go to 1.0 until they have been in use for many years. It doesn't necessarily imply anything bad (or good) about the reliability of the software.
If BitCoin was commercial software, no doubt it would be up to Version 7 Professional Platinum Collector's Edition now... but then again, if it was commercial software, it would probably be closed source, and therefore nobody would trust it enough to use it, and we wouldn't be having this conversation.
I don't care if it's 90,000 hectares. That lake was not my doing.
The point of using such a version number is exactly to remind people that Bitcoin is new and experimental. It's quite possible to understand that something is a risky experiment, yet still take it seriously - these two things are not incompatible.
Banks and governments routinely have to upgrade banknotes and other forms of security on their own money, which you can see as "fixing bugs" in the sense that the ability to counterfeit is a bug. Development never really stops, so a 0.9 vs 1.0 is an entirely arbitrary line in the sand.
You can turn that around and make the same criticism of credit cards, from the sellers perspective. They're also a scumbag magnet. Trying to sell anything with credit cards is a fraud nightmare. Banks routinely approve transactions that are later reversed due to card detail theft, and the seller is just expected to suck it up. I've seen what big sellers have to do to control fraud. And sellers matter: it takes two to tango!
That said, Bitcoin can theoretically do dispute mediated transactions (where they could be reversed later in case of seller fraud). However the user interfaces and workflows for this are immature and so in practice it's not done much today. Perhaps this year we will see that change.