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The 184 billion BTC overflow bug is a reminder that even “immutable” code is only as trustworthy as its review process. The real miracle isn’t that a bug happen

by anupj 1y ago

The 184 billion BTC overflow bug is a reminder that even “immutable” code is only as trustworthy as its review process. The real miracle isn’t that a bug happened, but that Satoshi patched it in hours and the network agreed to roll back. Decentralization is great, but consensus is everything

vbezhenar 1y ago
As long as there's singular entity which leads the changes to the protocol, there's no decentralization.
- exe34 1y ago
  Leading doesn't mean coercion. Leadership in decentralization implies consent.
  - LegionMammal978 1y ago
    Comsent by whom? In most "decentralized governance" projects I've heard about, all you need is for the holders of 51% of the tokens to agree, and the holders of the other 49% have no recourse but to leave.
    - fouc 1y ago
      with bitcoin isn't it more about 51% of the compute rather than 51% of the token?
      - LegionMammal978 1y ago
        Yes, but I was talking about "decentralized leadership" in all the projects following Bitcoin, which often use 51% of stake instead of 51% of mining capacity, under the social theory that the biggest stakeholders will be the most invested in the outcome of the project.
        MichaelZuo 1y ago
        Those with at least 51% of the sustained hash power can already redefine “Bitcoin” to be whatever they want… At any time whatsoever? (assuming they stay cohesive enough as a bloc) So this seems like a pointless distinction.
        deleted 1y ago
        [deleted]
        Retric 1y ago
        51% hashing power doesn’t prevent forks. Including forks to 51% of the token systems. That’s the thing people thing of crypto coins as math, but they’re still a social construct.
        olalonde 1y ago
        That statement is a bit misleading. The damage an attacker can do through a 51% attack is much more limited than that. It allows an attacker to censor transactions or perform double spends, but it does not allow them to "redefine Bitcoin" (e.g. change consensus rules, arbitrarily reassign coins, etc.).
        MichaelZuo 1y ago
        Why can’t such a bloc for example rename Bitcoin to Buttcoin?
        olalonde 1y ago
        Anyone can do that, it doesn't require 51% of the hash power. And it's already been done hundreds, if not thousands, of times (the more technical term for them is "shitcoin").
      - Geee 1y ago
        No, that's completely different thing. Mining power only "decides" about the blocks in the blockchain. 51% is only relevant in the context of taking over the blockchain by 51% attack. Software versions and updates require social / economic consensus and have nothing to do with mining power. Bitcoin is open-source protocol / software and everyone can use whichever version they like. But there's also economic incentives to use the most used version and to make sure that it will keep being the most used version, i.e. forks are bad and should be avoided, therefore it's in everyone's interest to reach consensus.
        daveguy 1y ago
        So there are two different places that a coup against bitcoin could occur? Processing and Software. With something like 45% of processing controlled by entities in Iran, China, and Russia, it seems like an absolute fools game to put any significant wealth in Bitcoin. All it would take is a significantly effective worm to destroy bitcoin. But hypers gonna hype. You couldn't pay me to hold a Bitcoin.
        DaSHacka 1y ago
        > All it would take is a significantly effective worm to destroy bitcoin. But hypers gonna hype. As opposed to any other modern financial system with significant liquidity in digital assets? I fail to see how substantial private ownership distributed amongst those countries makes it significantly vulnerable.
        mathiaspoint 1y ago
        It's the same as any currency. If the place you want to spend it only accepts currency y then you must trade for currency y to spend money there. Since Bitcoin is software anyone can fork it and create a currency y with the same ledger up to the fork but few people do because convincing other people to trade for it without a very strong argument is hard.
        drexlspivey 1y ago
        What do you think "Iran" can do if they controlled 51% of processing power?
- hyghjiyhu 1y ago
  Your critique is valid but outdated. This happened way back in 2010. Satoshi disappeared a long time ago now. There are still influential people, but none with the authority of Satoshi himself.
  - joshstrange 1y ago
    See also, the DAO hack.
    - jowea 1y ago
      Yeah that's a great example. I think sometimes people take "code is law" too seriously, when it is clear to me the code is just a deterministic way to form a consensus that works 99% of the time and the other 1% you get forking.
    - whatsupdog 1y ago
      What Ethereum did after DAO was way more sinister. At least with the Bitcoin "roll-back" there were no transactions reversed. The miners just got together and started mining from a previous point in the Blockchain, and eventually the new chain had more work done and was validly accepted by even outdated nodes. Ethereum just went ahead and added this to their protocol: "ummm this transaction stands reversed, you don't need to verify signature for this particular transaction". This blot will stay in the protocol for ever.
  - wslh 1y ago
    Bitcoin (et al) is/are not fully decentralized in the sense that a core development team actively maintains and proposes changes, even minimal ones. While it's true that major updates require broad consensus and may be rejected by nodes if controversial, we should acknowledge that certain points of centralization exist, particularly around development and decision making. These often overlooked aspects now carry more financial consequences, especially as Bitcoin becomes more intertwined with regulated financial instruments and political power. For example, now, many L2s around Bitcoin are fully depending , and influencing on a future change: enabling again the OP_CAT opcode [1]. [1] https://github.com/sCrypt-Inc/awesome-op-cat https://github.com/sCrypt-Inc/awesome-op-cat
- FabHK 1y ago
  Indeed. Permissionless blockchain is much less of a technological innovation, but more of a governance innovation, specifically an accountability sink, where instead of a named entity (corporation, institution, person) being in charge, you have this amorphous blob in charge that does come together if its interests are affected (this 184 bn Bitcoin bug, the DAO hack, etc.), but otherwise even in the presence of heinous crimes shrugs and says: "who, me? what can I do?" I don't understand why that's so attractive to so many participants - possibly because the enormous negative externalities of such a thing more often than not don't fall on themselves, but other, more vulnerable people. (Not always though: when 200 Bitcoin were stolen from ultra-libertarian Bitcoin developer Luke Dashjr, he came crying for help from the bad bad centralized FBI rather quickly...)
- Salgat 1y ago
  BTC has occasionally obtained community driven patches by distributed consensus rather than a centralized approach (as recently as 2021 with the Taproot soft fork). When Quantum Computing finally becomes a threat to BTC, there will almost certainly be a distributed consensus to update the protocol again. Now what happened with Ethereum could be argued as not so decentralized since the organization (Ethereum Foundation) has extremely strong political influence over the corporations that support it.
  - deleted 1y ago
    [deleted]
  - clysm 1y ago
    I really hate the “someone will certainly solve this problem!” mentality. You can’t just magically update the protocol to work around the ability of someone to break elliptic curve cryptography. That not how this works. It’s not how any of this works.
    - yieldcrv 1y ago
      You… can. Once people catch wind of bitcoin being moved from secure places, nodes will cease processing transactions, quantum capable thieves will be frozen Network will upgrade if it hasnt already, nodes will only process transactions on the network with the most other nodes They might even resume from a few block back. No different than branching from an old commit If this doesnt match your philosophy of legitimacy, you can try continuing in the orphanage chain and get other nodes to join you. May the longest chain win! This has all been theorized before and has subsequently happened before and the resolution has given confidence to attract more capital.
      - clysm 1y ago
        And what happens to all those cold wallets where people can recover the secret key or forge signatures for it? They money is just gone, either by thieves or the network disallowing them to be spent.
    - 1y ago
nivertech 1y ago
It’s based on a social consensus only, the rest (Nakamoto Consensus, PoW, longest chain, difficulty adjustment, block halving, artificial limited supply, decentralization, censorship-resistant P2P network, open source, etc.) is a combination of a Rube Goldberg machine & crypto bros LARPing.
- aleph_minus_one 1y ago
  I halfway disagree: There is a huge scientific merit of the algorithms for reaching a distributed consensus when not all participants can be trusted (including the fact that the Bitcoin paper uses game theory to give evidence why malicious entities attempting to create another fork will by the mere design of the algorithms have a hard time). What is, of course, social consensus are some aspects about what it "socially" means that there exists this concrete consensus in the blockchain. By the design of the protocol and its data structures, there do exist boundaries concerning possible "social interpretations" of this consensus, but a lot of aspects are up to different interpretations.
  - bravesoul2 1y ago
    Bitcoin is the OG Birkin Handbag. Valuable for the story. People compete to own a bit of it for that. You can create your own Bitcoin clone and own all of it! But no story, no value.
    - aleph_minus_one 1y ago
      > You can create your own Bitcoin clone and own all of it! That is what I wrote: > What is, of course, social consensus are some aspects about what it "socially" means that there exists this concrete consensus in the blockchain. In your private Bitcoin clone, such a consensus has a "socially much more boring" interpretation.
      - bravesoul2 1y ago
        I'm not disagreeing though. Just adding.
pards 1y ago
Just like the Ethereum fork in 2016 [0]. Before then, the battle cries of the crypto advocates were: - Blockchains are immutable! - The code is the law! ...until someone exploited a code defect and took the founders' money, then they re-write history and ignored the hypocrisy. [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_DAO https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_DAO
- bravesoul2 1y ago
  Powers gonna power
- aleph_minus_one 1y ago
  > ...until someone exploited a code defect and took the founders' money, then they re-write history and ignored the hypocrisy. Not everybody agreed - and so the Ethereum Classic blockchain was created, causing all the problems that go hand in hand with having different, forked blockchains: > https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ethereum_Classic https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ethereum_Classic
- mrweasel 1y ago
  That's probably more important than worrying about bugs in the code. There will be bugs, the concern is what are the rules for rectifying the damage done by those bugs. Plus, where do I go to appeal if I disagree with the decision?
- Dylan16807 1y ago
  > ignored the hypocrisy You don't need to exaggerate so strongly.
- splix 1y ago
  That's different because in Bitcoin's case there was a clear violation of the specification, of how it supposed to work. So the bug was fixed to make the software working as it intended to be. If there were two node implementations then one would just stop to work until fixed. In Ethereum's case there were no violation of any specification. In fact there were no bug in the blockchain itself. Just someone took founder's money, they didn't like it and so they decided to get them back. And note that after that, there were bugs in the nodes code that were breaking the spec (which you should compare to the bitcoin's bug), but because of multiple node implementations only some of the nodes stopped and so we don't care about those issues.
londons_explore 1y ago
> and the network agreed to roll back Is there a tiny community of a couple of nodes running the original network?

by anupj 1y ago

vbezhenar 1y ago

As long as there's singular entity which leads the changes to the protocol, there's no decentralization.

exe34 1y ago
Leading doesn't mean coercion. Leadership in decentralization implies consent.
- LegionMammal978 1y ago
  Comsent by whom? In most "decentralized governance" projects I've heard about, all you need is for the holders of 51% of the tokens to agree, and the holders of the other 49% have no recourse but to leave.
  - fouc 1y ago
    with bitcoin isn't it more about 51% of the compute rather than 51% of the token?
    - LegionMammal978 1y ago
      Yes, but I was talking about "decentralized leadership" in all the projects following Bitcoin, which often use 51% of stake instead of 51% of mining capacity, under the social theory that the biggest stakeholders will be the most invested in the outcome of the project.
      - MichaelZuo 1y ago
        Those with at least 51% of the sustained hash power can already redefine “Bitcoin” to be whatever they want… At any time whatsoever? (assuming they stay cohesive enough as a bloc) So this seems like a pointless distinction.
        deleted 1y ago
        [deleted]
        Retric 1y ago
        51% hashing power doesn’t prevent forks. Including forks to 51% of the token systems. That’s the thing people thing of crypto coins as math, but they’re still a social construct.
        olalonde 1y ago
        That statement is a bit misleading. The damage an attacker can do through a 51% attack is much more limited than that. It allows an attacker to censor transactions or perform double spends, but it does not allow them to "redefine Bitcoin" (e.g. change consensus rules, arbitrarily reassign coins, etc.).
        MichaelZuo 1y ago
        Why can’t such a bloc for example rename Bitcoin to Buttcoin?
        olalonde 1y ago
        Anyone can do that, it doesn't require 51% of the hash power. And it's already been done hundreds, if not thousands, of times (the more technical term for them is "shitcoin").
    - Geee 1y ago
      No, that's completely different thing. Mining power only "decides" about the blocks in the blockchain. 51% is only relevant in the context of taking over the blockchain by 51% attack. Software versions and updates require social / economic consensus and have nothing to do with mining power. Bitcoin is open-source protocol / software and everyone can use whichever version they like. But there's also economic incentives to use the most used version and to make sure that it will keep being the most used version, i.e. forks are bad and should be avoided, therefore it's in everyone's interest to reach consensus.
      - daveguy 1y ago
        So there are two different places that a coup against bitcoin could occur? Processing and Software. With something like 45% of processing controlled by entities in Iran, China, and Russia, it seems like an absolute fools game to put any significant wealth in Bitcoin. All it would take is a significantly effective worm to destroy bitcoin. But hypers gonna hype. You couldn't pay me to hold a Bitcoin.
        DaSHacka 1y ago
        > All it would take is a significantly effective worm to destroy bitcoin. But hypers gonna hype. As opposed to any other modern financial system with significant liquidity in digital assets? I fail to see how substantial private ownership distributed amongst those countries makes it significantly vulnerable.
        mathiaspoint 1y ago
        It's the same as any currency. If the place you want to spend it only accepts currency y then you must trade for currency y to spend money there. Since Bitcoin is software anyone can fork it and create a currency y with the same ledger up to the fork but few people do because convincing other people to trade for it without a very strong argument is hard.
        drexlspivey 1y ago
        What do you think "Iran" can do if they controlled 51% of processing power?
hyghjiyhu 1y ago
Your critique is valid but outdated. This happened way back in 2010. Satoshi disappeared a long time ago now. There are still influential people, but none with the authority of Satoshi himself.
- joshstrange 1y ago
  See also, the DAO hack.
  - jowea 1y ago
    Yeah that's a great example. I think sometimes people take "code is law" too seriously, when it is clear to me the code is just a deterministic way to form a consensus that works 99% of the time and the other 1% you get forking.
  - whatsupdog 1y ago
    What Ethereum did after DAO was way more sinister. At least with the Bitcoin "roll-back" there were no transactions reversed. The miners just got together and started mining from a previous point in the Blockchain, and eventually the new chain had more work done and was validly accepted by even outdated nodes. Ethereum just went ahead and added this to their protocol: "ummm this transaction stands reversed, you don't need to verify signature for this particular transaction". This blot will stay in the protocol for ever.
- wslh 1y ago
  Bitcoin (et al) is/are not fully decentralized in the sense that a core development team actively maintains and proposes changes, even minimal ones. While it's true that major updates require broad consensus and may be rejected by nodes if controversial, we should acknowledge that certain points of centralization exist, particularly around development and decision making. These often overlooked aspects now carry more financial consequences, especially as Bitcoin becomes more intertwined with regulated financial instruments and political power. For example, now, many L2s around Bitcoin are fully depending , and influencing on a future change: enabling again the OP_CAT opcode [1]. [1] https://github.com/sCrypt-Inc/awesome-op-cat https://github.com/sCrypt-Inc/awesome-op-cat
FabHK 1y ago
Indeed. Permissionless blockchain is much less of a technological innovation, but more of a governance innovation, specifically an accountability sink, where instead of a named entity (corporation, institution, person) being in charge, you have this amorphous blob in charge that does come together if its interests are affected (this 184 bn Bitcoin bug, the DAO hack, etc.), but otherwise even in the presence of heinous crimes shrugs and says: "who, me? what can I do?" I don't understand why that's so attractive to so many participants - possibly because the enormous negative externalities of such a thing more often than not don't fall on themselves, but other, more vulnerable people. (Not always though: when 200 Bitcoin were stolen from ultra-libertarian Bitcoin developer Luke Dashjr, he came crying for help from the bad bad centralized FBI rather quickly...)
Salgat 1y ago
BTC has occasionally obtained community driven patches by distributed consensus rather than a centralized approach (as recently as 2021 with the Taproot soft fork). When Quantum Computing finally becomes a threat to BTC, there will almost certainly be a distributed consensus to update the protocol again. Now what happened with Ethereum could be argued as not so decentralized since the organization (Ethereum Foundation) has extremely strong political influence over the corporations that support it.
- deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]
- clysm 1y ago
  I really hate the “someone will certainly solve this problem!” mentality. You can’t just magically update the protocol to work around the ability of someone to break elliptic curve cryptography. That not how this works. It’s not how any of this works.
  - yieldcrv 1y ago
    You… can. Once people catch wind of bitcoin being moved from secure places, nodes will cease processing transactions, quantum capable thieves will be frozen Network will upgrade if it hasnt already, nodes will only process transactions on the network with the most other nodes They might even resume from a few block back. No different than branching from an old commit If this doesnt match your philosophy of legitimacy, you can try continuing in the orphanage chain and get other nodes to join you. May the longest chain win! This has all been theorized before and has subsequently happened before and the resolution has given confidence to attract more capital.
    - clysm 1y ago
      And what happens to all those cold wallets where people can recover the secret key or forge signatures for it? They money is just gone, either by thieves or the network disallowing them to be spent.
  - 1y ago

nivertech 1y ago

It’s based on a social consensus only, the rest (Nakamoto Consensus, PoW, longest chain, difficulty adjustment, block halving, artificial limited supply, decentralization, censorship-resistant P2P network, open source, etc.) is a combination of a Rube Goldberg machine & crypto bros LARPing.

aleph_minus_one 1y ago
I halfway disagree: There is a huge scientific merit of the algorithms for reaching a distributed consensus when not all participants can be trusted (including the fact that the Bitcoin paper uses game theory to give evidence why malicious entities attempting to create another fork will by the mere design of the algorithms have a hard time). What is, of course, social consensus are some aspects about what it "socially" means that there exists this concrete consensus in the blockchain. By the design of the protocol and its data structures, there do exist boundaries concerning possible "social interpretations" of this consensus, but a lot of aspects are up to different interpretations.
- bravesoul2 1y ago
  Bitcoin is the OG Birkin Handbag. Valuable for the story. People compete to own a bit of it for that. You can create your own Bitcoin clone and own all of it! But no story, no value.
  - aleph_minus_one 1y ago
    > You can create your own Bitcoin clone and own all of it! That is what I wrote: > What is, of course, social consensus are some aspects about what it "socially" means that there exists this concrete consensus in the blockchain. In your private Bitcoin clone, such a consensus has a "socially much more boring" interpretation.
    - bravesoul2 1y ago
      I'm not disagreeing though. Just adding.

pards 1y ago

Just like the Ethereum fork in 2016 [0]. Before then, the battle cries of the crypto advocates were: - Blockchains are immutable! - The code is the law! ...until someone exploited a code defect and took the founders' money, then they re-write history and ignored the hypocrisy. [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_DAO https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_DAO

bravesoul2 1y ago
Powers gonna power
aleph_minus_one 1y ago
> ...until someone exploited a code defect and took the founders' money, then they re-write history and ignored the hypocrisy. Not everybody agreed - and so the Ethereum Classic blockchain was created, causing all the problems that go hand in hand with having different, forked blockchains: > https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ethereum_Classic https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ethereum_Classic
mrweasel 1y ago
That's probably more important than worrying about bugs in the code. There will be bugs, the concern is what are the rules for rectifying the damage done by those bugs. Plus, where do I go to appeal if I disagree with the decision?
Dylan16807 1y ago
> ignored the hypocrisy You don't need to exaggerate so strongly.
splix 1y ago
That's different because in Bitcoin's case there was a clear violation of the specification, of how it supposed to work. So the bug was fixed to make the software working as it intended to be. If there were two node implementations then one would just stop to work until fixed. In Ethereum's case there were no violation of any specification. In fact there were no bug in the blockchain itself. Just someone took founder's money, they didn't like it and so they decided to get them back. And note that after that, there were bugs in the nodes code that were breaking the spec (which you should compare to the bitcoin's bug), but because of multiple node implementations only some of the nodes stopped and so we don't care about those issues.

londons_explore 1y ago

> and the network agreed to roll back Is there a tiny community of a couple of nodes running the original network?