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.

Comments

What doesn't kill bitcoin will make it stronger

[JcMorin]

Bitcoin evolve and update it's codebase to adapt those kind of scenarios. Remember it's an experimental currency, so far so good!

Re:What doesn't kill bitcoin will make it stronger

[JcMorin]

Most fiat currency live about 100 years. Giving the fact that Bitcoin is a totally new concept (no central authority) I guess 20-30 years would be enough to prove that it' a viable currency in the long term.

Re:What doesn't kill bitcoin will make it stronger

[jklovanc]

What are you basing your "100 years" on? The US dollar went fiat curency in 1971. What fiat currencies lasted about 100 years?

Re:What doesn't kill bitcoin will make it stronger

[Anon-Admin]

In 22 months, sure.

In 2011 it was $5.80 a coin and today it is $245.00 a coin.

It is all a matter of perspective.

Re:What doesn't kill bitcoin will make it stronger

[Anon-Admin]

I dont agree. It was in the mid 200's (235-240) before the hype and big jump in price. It reached a high dollar amount, which is way above the valuation that bitcoin could sustain. After which it has corrected back down to the mid 200's and has held there for the last year.

I would say that the long term trend is flat with a slow rise, I also expect to see another large spike when and if the hype picks back up.

Re:The system isn't very good

[LordLucless]

Why? You realize this sort of attack was entirely expected, and that the system is engineered to withstand it, and did, trivially?

Re:has lost 75 percent of its value in the last 22

[JcMorin]

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.

Re:TRIGGERED

[sexconker]

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.

why is this news?

[samantha]

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.

And then before

[DrYak]

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.

BTC vs bitcoin

[DrYak]

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.)

BTC (currency/commodity) vs bitcoin (protocol)

[DrYak]

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).