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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 The cause seems to be out-of-date software, and software that assumed blocks were valid instead of checking them.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."
Bitcoins are for bumheads.
Serves zero purpose, completely useless.
Modern app appers know that only apps can app apps, so you should use AppCoin or AppApp, not Luddite Bitcoin!
Apps!
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!esaelp gnola evoM .laed gib a toN
"This did not compromise the bitcoin protocol or network or anything like that."
It may not have compromised existing bitcoins, but I'm sure those people who thought they'd mined a new coin, but really didn't, feel gypped.
The main gist of the story really is simply: Some who took (incorrect) shortcuts paid the price for it by foregoing some profits.
Shortcuts? Since when has using not-up-to-date software been considered a "shortcut" to anything but being hacked?
You mean the money they just created out of thin air isn't really real?
Stop the presses.
You are welcome on my lawn.
The irony is that just a few stories down, there is a lot of talk about why more people don't drive EVs and how important it is for the world to get off fossil fuels.
So... how much power generated by fossil fuels was consumed "mining" bitcoins last month?
I can't think of anything less "green" than a computer pulling hundreds of watts sitting around 24/7 chewing on random numbers.
Looks like a new entry is coming.
Table-ized A.I.
Fifty thousand dollars dollars?
Any sufficiently unpopular but cohesive argument is indistinguishable from trolling.
On the bitcoin.org website: "WARNING: many wallets currently vulnerable to double-spending of confirmed transactions."
Offhand, I'd consider that a significant "compromise", given that vulnerability to double-spending dramatically undermines confidence in using Bitcoin. If this situation continues for any length of time, you can just about guarantee that the bad guys will begin to exploit it.
Are they vulnerable to double spending attacks for the indefinitely future because of one bad block or was it just during the block's formation? And the way I understand it, the mining pool that solved the block would have to be the one injecting the malicious data itself since the old method of block validation is good enough to prevent double spend attacks but I could easily be wrong about that.
So... how much power generated by fossil fuels was consumed "mining" bitcoins last month?
Probably a few coal trains.
Mod that motherfucker up! He knows what's going on!
Fuck, this incident keeps getting downplayed, but it's a GODDAMN DISASTER!
How the fuck can anyone trust Bitcoin after this and the other incidents that have happened? How?
How the fuck can we trust Bitcoin when some of its supporters claim that a GODDAMN DISASTER like this one isn't the GODDAMN DISASTER that it is?
Can't say I feel sorry for the bitbrains. This idea of creating fake money by wasting electricity always seemed stupid to me.
Probably a few coal trains.
Well sure, thus my question as to why people here rail against SUVs and such, but seem to love Bitcoin so much...
So... how much power generated by fossil fuels was consumed "mining" bitcoins last month?
Very close to zero. Bitcoins are mined where power is cheapest, which means where there is plenty of hydropower, like in Iceland and the US Pacific Northwest. It is not cost effective to mine bitcoins using electricity from FFs.
Far less than the amount of power used to run the credit card networks.
Because government is bad, ...m'kay.
"Be particularly skeptical when presented with evidence confirming what you already believe." -
Happy 4th of July everyone! The founding day of the greatest nation on Earth - the nation which has helped to bring or restore freedom to countless millions around the world.
If you are free, this is the day to be thankful for the nation who has led and protected the way.
Shitcoin strikes again! People who invest in that are fucking morons.
Leftists never grasp the full picture...
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.
This might be true, but only because it ignores the inconvenient fact that the credit card networks handle way the fuck more transfers than bitcoin does. In electricity usage per dollar (or euro or whatever) transferred, the credit card networks are hundreds or thousands of times more efficient.
Will cover it.
The whole thing is just a sneeze away from being compromised to the point of uselessness.
My power comes from coal and natural gas and costs less than 11 cents per kWh.
Are you suggesting that is too expensive to mine with?
Are you suggesting that no one outside of those areas are mining Bitcoin?
That's because we like to share.
Very close to zero. Bitcoins are mined where power is cheapest, which means where there is plenty of hydropower, like in Iceland and the US Pacific Northwest. It is not cost effective to mine bitcoins using electricity from FFs.
Bullshit. Give us one shred of evidence that this is happening. Anyone involved in bitcoin mining isn't one bit interested in environmental issues, and coal is still the cheapest form of energy.
Per transaction, or total?
I'm willing to bet that a single Bitcoin costs a whole lot more to produce than a credit card transaction takes to process.
Or to put it another way, if you were to replace the entire existing credit card system with Bitcoin, would it use more or less power than the current system?
---
Or perhaps if you were to be honest about the whole thing... Even with Bitcoin, you still are using the existing system, since very few places take bitcoin and most that do convert it into dollars or euros right away.
So you now have twice as many transactions, once for bitcoin, another for the "old guard" banking system.
Bitcoins aren't printed...
I thought the current plan was distributed malware so that somebody else paid for the power?
Fair enough...
How does Bitcoin solve that? Should it become more than a side show, do you honestly believe government will stay out of it?
Does the submitter know what it means?
The acronym is a pretty accurate description of Bitcoin.
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
I cant believe they wasted all that energy digging holes and filling them again, ....in the wrong place!
My power comes from coal and natural gas and costs less than 11 cents per kWh.
Are you suggesting that is too expensive to mine with?
Yes. That is about twice the price of wholesale hydropower.
Are you suggesting that no one outside of those areas are mining Bitcoin?
There are a few small miners outside these areas, but the big ASIC miners are located in areas where cheap hydropower is available.
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.
I thought the current plan was distributed malware so that somebody else paid for the power?
You would need to run and manage a botnet of thousands of computers to generate as many hashes as a single ASIC. It just isn't worth it. Nearly all new bitcoins are mined on ASICs.
However, in electricity usage per Bitcoin, the Bitcoin system is infinitely more efficient. In fact, the credit card network is just a transaction network. It has zero efficiency at actually producing dollars.
- In Soviet Korea, only old people loose all their bases to Natalie Portman's petrified hot grits overlords.
Maybe this is out of date but that does seem to be exactly what was happening at one point:
http://blog.malwarebytes.org/fraud-scam/2013/11/potentially-unwanted-miners-toolbar-peddlers-use-your-system-to-make-btc/
As for thousands, why not? Botnets are huge these days.
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.
There are a few small miners outside these areas, but the big ASIC miners are located in areas where cheap hydropower is available.
And there is no better use for this power besides running computers 24/7?
Your replies miss the point I'm afraid...
It is not cost effective to mine bitcoins using electricity from FFs.
Jesus, Firefox now generates electricity too?
It must have been something you assimilated. . . .
Government could, would, and already to some extent does attempt to regulate it, but it's intentionally designed to be resistant to effective regulation. This is part of its appeal: because of this "feature", it can be used as the Paypal of drug trafficking, weapons trafficking, murder-for-hire, and other such markets that the evil governments of the world try to stamp out because all governments are run by jealous losers who want to oppress the Ubermensch. After all, the free market would work just fine for murder-for-hire markets because I could just hire a hitman to kill you, too, and then we could trade the hitman contracts with each other so that we'd both live instead of both dying, and we'd be motivated to do that because neither of us wants to die. And if you can't afford to hire a counter-hitman well then you're a loser and you deserve to die anyway. Anyone who disagrees with this is obviously a lazy bastard who doesn't understand the wise economic philosophy of Atlas Shrugged.
Bitcoin is also intentionally designed to have its own built-in and unmodifiable monetary policy separate from any government or regulating body. This monetary policy is of course built on perpetual deflation, because making it so that savers' money grows by simply hoarding it is the best way to ensure they will be motivated to make the risky investments necessary for long-term economic growth. If you disagree with this, you're obviously okay with the government stealing everyone's money with inflation, and you're also a worthless lazy bastard who's probably in debt and on the government dole.
Bitcoin is awesome.
vi ~/.emacs # I'm probably going to Hell for this.
mod up
anti bitcoin shills lol
i agree.
fuck the paid trolls
If you disagree with this, you're obviously okay with the government stealing everyone's money with inflation, and you're also a worthless lazy bastard who's probably in debt and on the government dole.
So what you're saying is that your argument doesn't stand up without insulting and attacking anyone who disagrees with you?
Bitcoin is also intentionally designed to have its own built-in and unmodifiable monetary policy separate from any government or regulating body.
And when the government outlaws bitcoin exchanges? Oh sure, there will be a black market, there always has been. But it will prevent it from being anything more than a minor thing.
The current monetary policies of central banks aren't perfect, but they are far better than what we'd have if the whole world was stuck with a currency that couldn't be managed.
It is Iceland. Producing needed heat is not a waste. Free computation becomes a side effect.
I don't get your logic, because both EVs and computers use electricity. Are you saying that EVs get their electricity from green sources, and Bitcoins are mined with filthy old fossil-fuel power?
Also, consider monetary systems where banknotes are hauled around in armoured trucks, vs. a computer network that accomplished the same with a fraction of the resources.
In general, people should do more with computers/networks, instead of driving around to offices.
Escher was the first MC and Giger invented the HR department.
Duh, even as much as I love sharing, sharing is not everything, aka "the whole picture".
Any system set up by humans, will be exploited by humans. So no system is perfect, because too much abuse of the system or common resources, will have more and more grave consequences.
Bitcoin, even if it just serves a role to keep governments and banks honest, will serve a role in the ecosystem.
I do, however, dread the day if Bitcoin should become our only currency for some unfathomable reason.
Luckily, Dodgecoin would be there to save the day, so no worries.
> The current monetary policies of central banks aren't perfect, but they are far better than what we'd have if the whole world was stuck with a currency that couldn't be managed.
Thanks for your faith-based insight that allows for no options save no management or unlimited management.
A problem we have now is that central banks could manage the currency without any limits applying whatsoever - as we would have had if we were using fiat but that had to be minted or printed.
The current malaise stems from a process of debasement, misallocation, moral hazard, and inefficient processes that happened after governments had already captured more than 50% of their captive productive economies.
It also calls into question the reliability, stability, and maturity of Bitcoin as a fully digital payment & store of value system.
And this is where it gets to the hard part, the interface beween Bitcoin mathematics theory and the actual real world.
Just like in a high-end stereo system, you have to put most of your money in the transducers.
A fucking monetary exchange that is so fucking complicated that only a few elite understand something as needing to do something so simple as having a common value between two entities and being able to exchange some or all of it.
JFC people, digital currency (as implemented by today's deranged minds) represents the complete and final breakdown of making any sense of this insane, idiotic, stupid, hubris of a system and this can only end badly.
WTF - These people are so fucking near-sighted, they can't see the forest through the trees.
It all comes down to how does one game the system so that one doesn't have to contribute anything to society, mostly because one has nothing to contribute, mostly because they are lazy, evil assholes.
Tesla battery bro! & solar. Far out man!
Sorry, but why is this news? Recently generated bitcoins you can't exchange for actual money may be bugged and invalid and useless. Effective value changes from 0 to 0.
Call me back when I can do the groceries with bitcoins.
Isn't 'snafu' an acronym:
Situation
Normal
All
Fucked
Up
Does that describe bitcoin and this 'glitch' properly?
That's why they're called "plugins".
If Dogecoin ever replaces Bitcoin (including its value per coin), I'll be freakin' rich!
Get free satoshi (Bitcoin) and Dogecoins
Even worse, what prevents any large government with sufficient resources to deliberately destabilize the protocol by injecting bad data?
Bitcoin is hip, it's new, it's not your dads money.
If you use bitcoin you're part of the future not part of the past.
You want to be part of the future, cutting edge don't you ?
That's the fashionable crowd.
For others there is the partially correct impression that bitcoin is much more anonymous than credit/debit cards.
Then consider those compute cycles could have been used for Folding@Home and actually helping humanity.
I don't get your logic
Yea, clearly you're not alone there... that is what I find so amazing...
If you don't get it, I don't know what else I can say. It is plain as day to me, if it isn't to you... well, I'm at a loss as to how to explain how pointless it is to run RNG for days/weeks/months for such a purpose...
Iceland is becoming one of the best places to mine bitcoin, thanks to the climate and geothermal power generation:
http://www.ibtimes.co.uk/geoth...
However, I agree that the lowest cost electricity will be the key to bitcoin mining, and that means coal. It should mean nuclear, but that's politically unpopular and basically off the table.
If there was an easy way to startup/shutdown a bitcoin mining operation, off-peak wind power would be a great way to run a mining operation. The wind production credit basically makes the electricity generated free. The problem is getting the mining processors to gracefully start and stop with power fluctuations.
AIUI we have a situation where some miners are enforcing stricter rules than others.
If the strict miners significantly out mine the loose ones then not much will happen. The blocks that don't pass the strict rules will quickly be forked off and die and noone sensible accepts a one-block-confirmed transaction for anything important.
However if the loose miners out mine the strict miners you get a long lasting fork between the strict and loose miners. People whose clients only enforce the loose rules will see what is going on in the loose fork. People whose clients enforce the strict rules will see what is going on in the strict fork. The two forks will most likely contain most of the same transactions but there may be some cases where someone manages to engineer that the same bitcoins are transferred to different places in the two forks, newly mined coins will also go to different people in the two forks.
If the mining rate of strict and loose miners are approximately equal then you have a mess. The two forks could run in paralell for some time and then the strict fork could either hit a run of good luck or be boosted by miners switching to the strict rules and kill the loose fork. AIUI that is the present situation.
It is most likely this will end with the strict miners outnumbering the loose ones, any transactions that only happened on a loose branch will then be killed.
note: i'm known as plugwash most places but i screwd up registering that here somehow in the past and now can't register
I don't get your logic, because both EVs and computers use electricity. Are you saying that EVs get their electricity from green sources, and Bitcoins are mined with filthy old fossil-fuel power?
Also, consider monetary systems where banknotes are hauled around in armoured trucks, vs. a computer network that accomplished the same with a fraction of the resources.
In general, people should do more with computers/networks, instead of driving around to offices.
FlyHelicopters isn't too bright. He's wrong a lot of the time, and every time somebody explains why he's wrong, as you did in your third and fourth sentences, he responds with shock that no one can understand why he's right. It's a rather childish defense mechanism, but he can't seem to help himself.
I'd rather be paid in gold eagles. mostly for tax purposes.
$50 gold eagle has about $1000 of gold in it but the IRS can only tax you on the face value as it is a legal U.S. currency.
Per transaction, or total?
I'm willing to bet that a single Bitcoin costs a whole lot more to produce than a credit card transaction takes to process.
Or to put it another way, if you were to replace the entire existing credit card system with Bitcoin, would it use more or less power than the current system?
---
Or perhaps if you were to be honest about the whole thing... Even with Bitcoin, you still are using the existing system, since very few places take bitcoin and most that do convert it into dollars or euros right away.
So you now have twice as many transactions, once for bitcoin, another for the "old guard" banking system.
Fair point. There are some initial costs to upgrading fintech and creating a fairer form of currency that doesn't rob people with unexpected inflation, bail outs, and bail ins. Even if you prefer inflationary fiat currencies instead of dis-inflationary ones with a planned social contract owned openly by the users you should be grateful that this competition will at least temporarily keep governments and banks slightly more honest.
Yes, that is out of date. It really isn't worth the botnet operators time to mine with CPU's and GPU's these days. They are better off holding the computer hostage with malware like crypto locker which encrypts their hard drive and demands ransom with Greendot cards and bitcoin.
"those people who thought they'd mined a new coin, but really didn't, feel gypped." F2Pool and Antpool, among others, were using a strategy to earn more by mining from the block headers, thus eliminating the time it would take to download a new block. A side effect of this is that they would mine empty blocks. This strategy increased the income of those pools, while reducing the security of the bitcoin system and reducing the amount of transactional load the system could handle as well. It was calculated that the money lost by these major pools by not implementing their software correctly while publicly claiming support for BIP 66 is less than the money earned by their mining from block headers. So I hope they feel more than gypped, because they are douchebags. In this case, considering the security of the protocol, it's not that their software was out of date in it's security implementation, but in the method it used to begin its proof of work, which with the strict implementation of the network rules enforced, did not work for them.
There is plenty of evidence that most bitcoin mines are moving to use hydroelectric power and geothermal. They aren't doing so out of a sense of environmental altruism , but simply because "greener" power is less expensive. http://gizmodo.com/why-bitcoin... http://www.datacenterknowledge... https://www.cryptocoinsnews.co... http://dealbook.nytimes.com/20... http://www.coindesk.com/my-lif...
Then consider those compute cycles could have been used for Folding@Home and actually helping humanity.
Economics is already forcing some users to recycle the heat from ASIC's as space heaters and this demand will continue to grow. Additionally, the coinbase reward for mining is slowly being replaced by Tx fees which will continue to grow rapidly especially when sidechains and inter payment channels like the lightning network are scaffolded on top of Bitcoin to really scale bitcoin up from 4-7 transactions per second to over 100k tx per second. These proposals do not depend upon PoW (proof of work... but certainly supplementing security by this mechanism helps secure the network verses pure PoS. ) and upon other means to secure bitcoin like oracles, ricardian contracts , and mutisig. Thus the amount of energy needed for PoW does not need to scale proportionally with the transaction volume and the environmental concerns are wildly exaggerated.
With a name like linuxrocks123, I would have thought you would have a positive opinion on liberty, and freedom of choice, but then come the torrent of fear mongering and statist comments. Don't be so fearful that you become weak. I'm saying this and I don't like atlas shrugged or ron/rand paul. I just want to be free. I want power decentralized and of course money is power. And if as you elude. you're not okay with the government stealing money through inflation, and you're not lazy, in debt or on welfare it was implied, then why be such a tool for the government, banksters and corporations? Are you against decentralization of power but for the open source movement? It would seem paradoxical.
I'm not opposed to the idea of Bitcoin, or competing currencies.
I'm just opposed to the idea that it consumes tons of power to run RNG and that it will be required to run for more than 100 years.
The irony is that I get the need the reduce our consumption of Earth's resources. If we had magic fusion reactors and unlimited power, then I wouldn't care.
But we don't. :)
The community around the network will recognize and disable the attack through various means. Anti-fragile.
There's also those who support decentralization of power and the sovereignty if the people.
socially constructed concepts, like money, ARE, just like us, an emergent property of the universe.
Where are we going and why are we in a handbasket?
Economics is already forcing some users to recycle the heat from ASIC's as space heaters and this demand will continue to grow. Additionally, the coinbase reward for mining is slowly being replaced by Tx fees which will continue to grow rapidly especially when sidechains and inter payment channels like the lightning network are scaffolded on top of Bitcoin to really scale bitcoin up from 4-7 transactions per second to over 100k tx per second. These proposals do not depend upon PoW (proof of work... but certainly supplementing security by this mechanism helps secure the network verses pure PoS. ) and upon other means to secure bitcoin like oracles, ricardian contracts , and mutisig. Thus the amount of energy needed for PoW does not need to scale proportionally with the transaction volume and the environmental concerns are wildly exaggerated.
Sorry for responding a second time as I didn't realize you were the same person. The bottom line is that you may have been misled into thinking that Proof of Work is the only security mechanism for bitcoin and it will scale indefinitely as an arms race wasting power. This is a fair concern to have but also one that is exaggerated because PoW is only one security mechanism and in the future 99% of transactions will be done either off the chain or through inter-payment channels where there won't be direct payment to fund the "waste of resources" therefore no incentive to fuel a never ending arms race of "wasting electricity". To give you an idea of where we are right now -- there are between 100k -150k Tx per day but this represents only a small fraction of the volume as most volume right now exists "off the chain" and therefore not fueling the arms race of ASICs. In the near future Inter-payment channels will make settlement of on the chain a very small fraction of 1 % of the total volume. Bitcoin is actually much less environmentally dangerous than traditional fiat and payment rails.
Then consider those compute cycles could have been used for Folding@Home and actually helping humanity.
Ending large-scale war and dictatorships will be the most amazing thing to happen for humanity in the past six thousand years.
Yeah, folding proteins is also important.
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
Bitcoin Core 0.9.5 and later never had any problems because it could detect which blocks were invalid.
In other words, it is a complete non-issue for people who update their software more often than once a month. Think about it this way, 95% of miners accomplished this.
Is anyone actually using bitcoins in any meaningful way in real life? And since dollar values are mentioned so often, are there actually places where you can exchange bitcoins for the kind of serious cash (say millions of dollars) they're supposedly worth?
Well, I think current US monetary policy has done pretty well over the years. We haven't had another great depression since the Great Depression, and I think that's a pretty big success. I also think moderate inflation of about 2% per year or so is generally okay and normal for a healthy economy.
I don't consider myself a tool of the government, "banksters", or corporations, although I do think governments, banks, and other corporations have important roles to play in the modern economy. And I wouldn't call myself a statist, although I think personal freedoms, such as freedom of speech, freedom of religion, freedom of association, sexual freedom, 4th/5th Amendment rights, and freedom to make choices about your own body, such as whether to get a tattoo or take drugs, are a lot more important than the freedom to start a coal-mining corporation without the government telling you you have to make sure your workers don't get black lung disease. So I guess I'd say I'm okay with the government intervening in our economic lives a lot more than I'm okay with the government intervening in our personal lives.
And if you look through my previous comments, you'll see I'm pretty hostile to Libertarianism. I think it's an excellent example of a philosophy that's simple, logical, easy to understand, and obviously wrong. But it's impossible to talk people out of it because the arguments for it are basically all circular. The absurdity of the philosophy is such that I could almost see someone make the "free market for hitmen" argument in my post and be entirely serious about it. So, instead of beating my head against the wall by trying to argue with Libertarians and change their minds, I just parody them. Hopefully some people will find the parodies funny at least, and maybe it will prompt someone someday to find the truth on his own.
It's sort of like religion. You're never going to talk someone out of believing in God. So, if you want to do something productive in the religious debate field, you just joke around with parodies like the FSM and the Invisible Pink Unicorn. It's funny, and maybe it will accelerate someone's maturation by letting him see the absurdity on his own.
vi ~/.emacs # I'm probably going to Hell for this.
Apathy, mostly. Why would a government do that?
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes
Let's look at a real-world application: I want to pay a certain amount of money to somebody else. With Bitcoin, there has to be expensive computation to transfer them. With a credit card charge, or bank transfer, there may be very little computation. The idea of Bitcoin mining is not fundamentally to produce Bitcoin, but to encourage people to verify transactions.
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes