Is bitcoin broken? Gavin Andresen responds to mining vulnerability paper
Gavin Andresen, writing on the Bitcoin Foundation blog today formally addressed the recent paper published by two academics at Cornell University titled 'Majority is Not Enough: Bitcoin Mining Vulnerable' saying: "It is unfortunate (but entirely predictable) that the release of a not-yet-peer-reviewed paper generated so many sensationalistic headlines. Peer review works best when everybody involved is given time for conversation and debate without being contacted by reporters on deadline." The paper, which drew the attention of major news outlets around the world on Tuesday has already....
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There's been some talk in the news about a recently-published paper by two researchers at Cornell University (you can read more about that on our report here). Initially, leading Bitcoin scientist Gavin Andresen dismissed the report, but he's now issued a statement on the Bitcoin Foundation website: I've received a lot of requests for a response to an academic paper released a couple of days ago with the alarming title
A paper released yesterday by researchers Ittay Eyal and Emin Gun Sirer at Cornell University suggested a subtle new way in which the bitcoin mining network could be vulnerable to a form of economic attack called 'Selfish Mining'. Gavin Andresen, the lead developer of Bitcoin, was quick to dismiss the paper and its contents. Executive summary of Cornell paper: not a big deal even assuming their analysis is correct (I'm not yet convinced). - Gavin Andresen (@gavinandresen) November 5, 2013. Although a similar attack called the 'Mining Cartel Attack' was proposed as early as 2010, the new....
Assuming you haven't already heard of a paper released by two researchers at Cornell University yesterday that suggested the Bitcoin currency is susceptible to a little something called 'selfish mining,' I will do my best to give you the Spark Notes version. The paper - put together by Ittay Eyal and Emin Gun Sirer - explains that rogue mining pools could possibly keep the discovery of a Bitcoin block private whilst other mining pools look for that very same block - expending mining resources. The point in keeping the block private is to allow the described 'selfish' mining pool to get....
Gavin Andresen had some harsh words for the Bitcoin cloud mining industry on Reddit. Gavin Andresen, perhaps the most respected and well-known Bitcoin developer today, made a rather interesting statement about Bitcoin cloud mining the other day, and the strange thing is that it went basically unnoticed by the community as a whole. Redditor /u/zapt0 asked the /r/Bitcoin community about mining contracts and whether or not they could be solid investments, and most of the responses were rather negative when discussion came to the long term prospects of earning money through one of these cloud....
Despite the fact that Gavin Andresen just yesterday announced that he was stepping down as the bitcoin core maintainer, it doesn't mean he has to stop talking about new releases of the software at the core of this technology. In the wake of the major news that a critical bug in the OpenSSL encryption library has been discovered, the web has been abuzz (as has the bitcoin community). A number of exchanges affected have even started reacting by disabling systems until a fix is in place. On Tuesday afternoon, Andresen tweeted that the next release of the bitcoin core, 0.9.1, can be expected....