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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 The cause seems to be out-of-date software, and software that assumed blocks were valid instead of checking them.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."
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.
Perhaps my bad spelling makes me a moron, perhaps it doesn't. It does give my post a more humorous version of what I had intended to say.
It works like this: Say the banks are allowed to lend 90% of the money that is deposited, and have to keep 10% of it. Then Alice deposits $1,000. This means that the banks lend out $10,000 since they had to keep 10% of the money. If the government wanted to create money, rather than bothering with silly printing presses at the mint, they could declare that banks could lend 95% of the money deposited. Then if Alice deposits $1,000, the banks could lend out $20,000.
Now, you might have noticed my numbers aren't quite what you expected. Well, it works like this (when the banks lend 90% of a deposit). Alice deposits $1,000. Then Bob borrows $900, and deposits it in a bank. Then Charlie borrows $810, and deposits it. Then Dylan borrows $729, and deposits it... By the time everyone is done borrowing, depositing, and lending, 10 dollars have been lent for every 1 deposited. Of course, in reality only some of the borrowed money gets deposited immediately -- some of the money gets spent and put in a bank, and some gets kept around in wallets or under a mattress. But yeah, most of the money people "have" is in fact created out of thin air, not even paper.
Just don't ask what happens when too many people want to withdraw their money from the bank.
Don't waste your vote! Vote for whoever you want, unless you live in a swing state it won't matter anyways
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.