Part of the philosophical justification for the "full-disclosure movement" is the belief that, much like scientific discoveries, they almost never happen in a v

Part of the philosophical justification for the "full-disclosure movement" is the belief that, much like scientific discoveries, they almost never happen in a vacuum by a lone brilliant researcher. Which is to say, that it is entirely possible (I'm not going to presuppose how likely) that this has been known about for some time, and used for other nefarious purposes in a manner that wasn't so "easily" detected (the existence of a master record of all Bitcoin transactions makes it much more likely for this to be found than people exploiting it in some random app). It could be that somewhere right now, in dozens of coffee shops throughout Eastern Europe, South America, and Asia, a group of collective hackers, each unaware of the existence of any others, read this blog post and uttered their linguistic equivalent of "Son of a Bitch".