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Bitcoin Snafu Causes Miners To Generate Invalid Blocks
An anonymous reader writes: A notice at bitcoin.org warns users of the cryptocurrency that many miners are currently generating invalid blocks. The cause seems to be out-of-date software, and software that assumed blocks were valid instead of checking them. They explain further "For several months, an increasing amount of mining hash rate has been signaling its intent to begin enforcing BIP66 strict DER signatures. As part of the BIP66 rules, once 950 of the last 1,000 blocks were version 3 (v3) blocks, all upgraded miners would reject version 2 (v2) blocks. Early morning UTC on 4 July 2015, the 950/1000 (95%) threshold was reached. Shortly thereafter, a small miner (part of the non-upgraded 5%) mined an invalid block--as was an expected occurrence. Unfortunately, it turned out that roughly half the network hash rate was mining without fully validating blocks (called SPV mining), and built new blocks on top of that invalid block. Note that the roughly 50% of the network that was SPV mining had explicitly indicated that they would enforce the BIP66 rules. By not doing so, several large miners have lost over $50,000 dollars worth of mining income so far."
You mean the money they just created out of thin air isn't really real?
Stop the presses.
You are welcome on my lawn.
Please be assured that if you aren't currently free and are in possession or mineral resources, we'll be on our way to bomb you into freedom shortly... :P
I do not fail; I succeed at finding out what does not work.
How the fuck can anyone trust Bitcoin after this and the other incidents that have happened? How?
You can trust Bitcoin by learning how it works and following the proper procedures that you would if you playing with real money.
The Bitcoin system is highly resistant to "rouge" or bad actors in the system. Someone running mining software that does not follow the agreed upon rules for the system is an example of a rouge actor. When this happens the rest of the system votes down the decisions made by the rouge actors. In this case some miners were not following the system wide agreed upon protocol, generated bad data, and the rest of the system (correctly) rejected that bad data thus maintaining the integrity of the overall system as designed.
What was lost were some rewards that would normally have been paid out for operating correctly. Since the rouge actors were not operating correctly, they were not rewarded (for their invalid work). If you were hired to paint a house white and you painted it orange, would you expect to be paid? The miners did not do the work they were being paid to do. True, many miners mine within a pool and depend on the pool operator to do the right thing, but if the pool operator is not doing the right thing, it is not a flaw in Bitcoin. Lke the painting analogy, if you work for a painting company and the painting company gives you the wrong color of paint, you wouldn't expect the homeowner to pay you, if you want to get paid for your labor, your beef would be with your boss, the the homeowner.
On the transactional (non mining) side, if you are running an incomplete Bitcoin client, it is now taking longer to achieve a level of confidence that your transaction is officially as "approved" by the network. As always it is the responsibility of those making the transactions to wait an appropriate time to ensure that their transactions have been approved. This has always been the case with Bitcoin and has not changed.
Shortcuts? Since when has using not-up-to-date software been considered a "shortcut" to anything but being hacked?
It doesn't have to do with out of date software, but software that is pretending to say it has been updated to do checks when it doesn't to save cpu cycles. That is a shortcut, not doing proper checks.
How about blanc and bleu :)
Let's just ask the guy who set it up. We can't? He's in hiding? He's been hiding for YEARS? Oh yes, I can really trust it now.
From learning how it works it's a shameless pyramid rewarding those who get in early so long as a steady stream of people decide to sign up but there is zero value or trust holding up the pyramid. Short term users who use it as a barter item and unload it quickly are not exposed to much potential pain, those who are holding onto it, their future is barely floating in very deep water and I must say I'm truly amazed the entire thing has not sunk yet.
Anyone involved in bitcoin mining isn't one bit interested in environmental issues
They don't use hydropower because it is "environmental". They use it because it is cheap.
coal is still the cheapest form of energy.
No it isn't. Areas with plentiful hydropower have electricity prices much lower than coal.
Turs out that this "reasonable" rule of 950/1000 blocks conforming before enforcing the new rules, meant to give people the chance to upgrade and leave behind only a small percentage of wayward backwardians, can kick in with roughly half the network hashrate left behind as wayward backwardians.
This says something about the foresight of the people making up this sort of rule. Since they're busily tinkering with the bitcoin protocol which then gets let loose on the network, I say we're having a bit of a problem with the integrity of protocol and network, though not in the usual "unknown cyber-bogey-men found a hole" fashion. The rot starts at the very top, in the heads of the "core committers". They're not nearly conservative enough and have very little insight in the consequences of what they're doing. While it is true that few others would have done better, these people are in a position of trust and should work hard on getting that insight without letting this sort of thing go loose in the wild.
Let's just ask the guy who set it up.
Even if he was still around, he might have set up a broken system. Instead, you should learn about how it works and check the mathematical proofs.
We can't? He's in hiding? He's been hiding for YEARS? Oh yes, I can really trust it now.
I'm not sure why a public figurehead of something like this would be inherent trustworthy. I'd actally say some public CEO type pushing a reality distortion field would be less trustworthy than a bunch of open source software backed by provable, verifyable maths.
Short term users who use it as a barter item and unload it quickly are not exposed to much potential pain,
And that's why it's popular. For people who use it as a form of currency in transactions, the risk isn't high, so there's the trust. The thing with large crowds is that a huge number of people putting a small amount of trust in something equates to a large amount of trust. As long as people find it useful for transactions, money will keep cycling through and it will stay afloat.
SJW n. One who posts facts.
Yep. How many times has the Fed said "jeez, sorry, you know that cash that we issued, really it's not valid, you need version 2.137 of the cash, you lose.