Crippling DDoS Vulnerability Put the Entire Bitcoin Market At Risk (thenextweb.com) 37
A major flaw was spotted in the Bitcoin network that could have allowed miners to bring down the entire blockchain by flooding full node operators with traffic, via a Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) attack. "A denial-of-service vulnerability (CVE-2018-17144) exploitable by miners has been discovered in Bitcoin Core versions 0.14.0 up to 0.16.2." the patch notes state. "It is recommended to upgrade any of the vulnerable versions to 0.16.3 as soon as possible." The Next Web reports: Developers have issued a patch for anyone running nodes, along with an appeal to update the software immediately. As far as the attack vector in question goes, there's a catch: anyone ballsy enough to try to bring down Bitcoin would have to sacrifice almost $80,000 worth of Bitcoin in order do it. The bug relates to its consensus code. It meant that some miners had the option to send transaction data twice, causing the Bitcoin network to crash when attempting to validate them. As such invalid blocks need to be mined anyway, only those willing to disregard block reward of 12.5BTC ($80,000) could actually do any real damage.
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Yet more proof (Score:2)
That the NSA, CIA, FSB, Chinese Intelligence, and MI6 don't give a shit about blockchain, it's not something that governments really care about, etc.
Hey, efficiency! (Score:2)
Instead of paying Bitcoins to get your data back after a ransomware attack, now you can just cut out the middleman and let hackers steal all the Bitcoin directly.
Truth (Score:4, Interesting)
Can we please just change the name of Bitcoin to CrimeCoin already? That's the only thing it's good for.
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What? That doesn't make any sense. The US Dollar is far better for crime and used a lot more than Bitcoin for crime. Bitcoin is trivially traceable and hard to spend unlike the dollar.
Bitcoin has a lot of valid legitimate uses, such as cheap cross border payments, a hedge against inflation for countries like Venezuela and Argentina, a means of people without established banking sectors to transact, etc. It's also very useful in cases where there is risk of counter-party payment reversals in traditional
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OK, so you're calling Venezuela's "cryptocurrency" (which never existed) a legitimate use?
If you're worried about payment reversals, you probably ARE doing something criminal, or at least shady. Try doing business with established, reputable businesses!
No. None of your suggested "legitimate" uses are better served by Bitcoin than by traditional currency.
Re: Truth (Score:1)
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Nowadays Bitcoin is only useful for speculation. It cannot be used for small payments because of the high transaction fees, and its value is too volatile...not to mention the energy cost associated with it.
That was true in November and December 2017, but you're rehashing peak from a year ago.
These days, transaction fees are pennies and timing is less than 30 minutes.
Also, the primary use of bitcoin around the non-darknet internet is for gambling and sports betting sites. Casinos that accept bitcoin instead of fiat currency. There are only a couple of states in the US with legal gambling, and I can't drive 20 hours on a whim to get to one of them. The US Treasury Department cracks down as hard as it can on
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Micro-transactions, as suggested by nohup above, would be dwarfed by the transaction fees of "only pennies." How does that make Bitcoin a viable option for micro-transactions?
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Look into lightning network, or other technologies like payment channels. That can reduce transaction fees from "only pennies" to "fractions of a penny"
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Bitcoin may be king, but that's not what Venezuela went with. They made up their own "cryptocurrency" based on future oil revenues.
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Just because their government tried to mandate something doesn't mean "venezuela" decided. The people on the ground don't want the government cryptocurrency.
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No, I'm saying that Bitcoin in some ways is better than the Venezuelan Bolivar, not their cyrptocurrency project.
There are plenty of uses that are better served by Bitcoin or cryptocurrencies, or can be with wide adoption and further development of the field.
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Bitcoin has a lot of valid legitimate uses,
It's laughable the defenses I hear when I call Bitcoin what it is.
It's very similar to the defenses of BitTorrent. Oh sure, it's cool, it's useful, lots of great stuff you can do with it. I can defend BitTorrent all day, it's fantastic really.
But that doesn't change anything about what BitTorrent is actually used for, like 99%-1%... it's used for software piracy.
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You know bitcoin is not anonymous right?
$82,500? (Score:3)
Sure it might be $82,500 at time of publishing but later today it'll be $60,000, making the attack more likely. Of course, tomorrow it'll be $120,000, which makes the attack less likely.
Is the fad wearing thing yet? (Score:2)
Stupid (Score:2)
This wouldn't harm Bitcoin at all. It would just affect DDoS individual nodes until they patched. No lasting impact on the network.