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So, even though it's inspired by bitcoin, it doesn't quite have the same rock-solid original implementation. Bitcoin would have collapsed if there were any majo
by jamoes 13y ago
So, even though it's inspired by bitcoin, it doesn't quite have the same rock-solid original implementation. Bitcoin would have collapsed if there were any major cryptographic bugs, but it turns out that "Entire classes of bugs [were] missing." (-Dan Kaminsky, Security Researcher).
I hope that you can help out by reporting your findings back to them. I think Bitmessage is a really cool idea. It has the potential to allow communication to occur no matter what hostile power wants to censor it. It also finally make end-to-end message encryption a default rather than an after-thought.
- nwh 13y agoDon't assume that Bitcoin hasn't had it's share of implementation problems. There's been a couple of remote DOS bugs, remote command execution vulnerabilities, and an integer overflow that lead to the creation of 32 million additional bitcoins. https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Common_Vulnerabilities_and_Exposures https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Common_Vulnerabilities_and_Exposu...
- jamoes 13y agoGood point. Fortunately, there haven't ever been any vulnerabilities so severe that the entire network was shut down until a software update could be released (as the grandparent said he was looking for with bitmessage).
- ctz 13y agoThere was certainly a bug recently where the whole blockchain split and one half of the split ended up losing all the bitcoins they had mined on that limb. As far as cryptocurrencies go, I'd say that was a serious vulnerability.
- nwh 13y agoOddly enough, the Bitcoin foundation paid all the miners on the chain fork for the lost blocks.
- narcissus 13y agoI hadn't heard that before. Is there a link or something that we can read about this?
- nwh 13y agohttps://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=156641.msg1660732#msg1660732 https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=156641.msg1660732#ms...
- narcissus 13y agoThanks for that link... it seems as though there were a lot of people that were thankful and a lot that were against it. Assuming the "guess" of the change address getting 200BTC, that was 800BTC that they paid out. Not knowing enough about it all, why was one of the commenters there saying that it was from the EFF do you know?
- nwh 13y agoIt would have been from the forums funds. At one point they had at least half a million dollars in bitcoin from various ventures, probably more.
- celticninja 13y agoIt was paid out of bitcoin faucet funds, the bulk of which were donated by the EFF when they stopped accepting bitcoin. A position on which they have recently changed their stance.
- erikpukinskis 13y agoThe protocol functioned perfectly through that episode. The miners split into two camps, each who supported a fork, and the longest fork won. That's not a bug, that's a feature.
- olalonde 13y ago> that lead to the creation of 32 million additional bitcoins. What?
- nwh 13y agoI was referring to CVE-2010-5139. Essentially somebody discovered that they could craft a transaction that caused a crazy number of Bitcoin to be introduced to the chain at that transaction, and used this to credit themselves on the main network. At that point the the exploit was patched and a new chain formed back before the transaction occurred, orphaning it in the process. The developers don't seem to want to talk about it, but there's an original thread on bitcointalk.org that details the network event. https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=822.0 https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=822.0 ED: I got the number wrong above, it wasn't 32M BTC but 92,233,720,368 BTC
- gwern 13y agoDon't forget the one where you could spend anyone's coins. That's pretty serious.
- throwaway2048 13y agohttps://bitmessage.org/forum/index.php/topic,1666.0.html https://bitmessage.org/forum/index.php/topic,1666.0.html gives a pretty through rundown of the discovered issues with bitmessage.