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Man Behind Week-Long Bitcoin Attacks Reveals Himself
An anonymous reader writes: A Russian man that calls himself "Alister Maclin" has been disrupting the Bitcoin network for over a week, creating duplicate transactions, and annoying users. According to Bitcoin experts, the attack was not dangerous and is the equivalent of "spam" on the Bitcoin blockchain servers, known in the industry as a "malleability attack," creating duplicate transactions, but not affecting Bitcoin funds. Maclin recently gave an interview to Vice.
Bitcoin evolve and update it's codebase to adapt those kind of scenarios. Remember it's an experimental currency, so far so good!
No, that's why neither the summary nor the article use the term. You got butthurt out of something you imagined out of thin air.
Why? You realize this sort of attack was entirely expected, and that the system is engineered to withstand it, and did, trivially?
Just because you're paranoid doesn't mean there isn't an invisible demon about to eat your face
cookies was hacking, now this sheesh.
by TheSpoom (715771) Uncaring Linux user here. I have nothing to add to this but please continue. *munches popcorn*
I guess you were not there when it got way more drastic drop in price. In 2011 we got a 90% drop in price... http://arstechnica.com/tech-po... That said, the experimental currency still worth more than 200 times the USD; itself a pretty string currency compared to the hundreds other currency on the planet.
This isn't even coherent. What?
No, because he didn't disrupt the network. He just spammed the blockchain a bit. No transactions were forged, interrupted, or otherwise fucked with. Just a few extra megs to store the full blockchain for those running full nodes.
lets see if we can get the chain up to 1TB
It's not specific to Slavia. Look at any minecraft server. Heck, look at any MMO game at all. There are jerks everywhere.
Not even that. With TX malleability, extra transactions are broadcast around the network, but only 1 is actually stored in the blockchain. He didn't add a single byte to the blockchain that wasn't already going to be there.
Then how is it now(*) 40 GB-ish? I doubt bitcoin dates back to 1200 A.D.
(*) last time i checked
CLI paste? paste.pr0.tips!
Bitcoin is designed to make it very difficult to successfully get fake transactions into the accepted blockchain except on a very short and soon corrected basis - even if you had huge amounts of hashing power which this individual did not. An entire week of lame attempts? Boring.
Viva Chavez and his minion!
Mod me down, my New Earth Global Warmingist friends!
"Alister Maclin"? I love his books! "The Gums of Navarone", "Ice Station Zorba" and who can forget "Where Beagles Dare"?
Yeah, so far so good as long as you don't mind that BitCoin has lost 75 percent of its value in the last 22 months.
And before it has gained 400% in a few months, and before...
Seems that "a roomful of pigeons picking furiosly with their beaks at numpads" is the best approximation of BTCs value over time.
There would be riots if that was happening in a real currency market.
Such a thing in a real currency market would require everyone involved being on high doses of LSD.
More seriously:
- BTCs as a longterm storage currency isn't that much useful (unless you're a big gambler). Just don't store any longterm savings into this.
- bitcoin, the protocol, with all the technologies involved (blockchain) and thus all the software developed (as mentioned by parent poster) are all very useful and very well designed.
It already works today, and solves whole classes of problem (the simplest: it solves the problem of pushing around values (BTCs) without needing a central authority but instead distributing the control accross the whole network. The kind of simplification that SEPA brought to sending currency around between european banks, bitcoin protocol brings it to the world of online payment. Except at the scale of hours instead of days).
Instead of having companies working as single points of failure (Paypal, or the duopoly Visa / Mastercard) and requiring both side of the transaction (customer and merchant) being clients at the same company, bitcoin enables each side of a transaction to pick any solution of their liking no matter which, as long as both end point follow the bitcoin protocol. Thus there's no "bitcoin company inc." that a government could shut down, and no matter which payment processor a merchant has chosen, a client doesn't need to get bitcoin from the same place.
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
I guess 20-30 years would be enough to prove that it' a viable currency in the long term.
even if BTC as a currency never gets any useful due to exchange rate instabilities,
bitcoin the protocole is already extremely useful.
(absence of a central authority being instead distributed across the whole network, and thus freedom to chose any provider for both ends (customer and merchant) of a transaction - both don't need to have accounts at PayPal, or at the Visa / MasterCard duopoly, etc.)
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
Expected, yes. Engineered to withstand - no. Bitcoin Core nodes accept as many transactions as they can with no memory limit until eventually they bloat up so much the operating system kills them. The official "solution" for this is to babysit your node and if you see it running out of memory, change a command line flag to make it ignore any transactions with lower than the given fee. Unfortunately of course, this also ignores all end user transactions paying lower than that fee as well.
I maintain a fork of Core called Bitcoin XT. It has a flag that lets you set a maximum number of transactions to keep in memory at once (and in a future version it'll change to be a max number of bytes, as that's the actual resource that's limited). The node will randomly remove a transaction from the pool to make room for a new one when out of space. As during an attack the memory pool is mostly full of spam, obviously this logic mostly involves kicking out spam to make room for {more spam, actual legit transaction} as opposed to just falling over and dying.
bitcoin is also a network protocol (designed to shift around values using blockchain technology).
TFA's attacks are mainly attacks on the protocol. (i.e.: he didn't try to steal BTCs currency/commodity, he tried to wreak havoc the blockchain. The bitcoin network handled that quite well).
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
Bitcoin is designed to make it very difficult to successfully get fake transactions into the accepted blockchain except on a very short and soon corrected basis - even if you had huge amounts of hashing power which this individual did not. An entire week of lame attempts? Boring.
Which is exycatly why bitcoin, the piece of software and its protocol, together with the underlying blockchain technology, are very useful *as of today*, despite the fact that BTC currency seems to have a complete random value.
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
Not in the slightest.
In fact that comment is somewhat embarrasing.
- Dan