What Caused the Bitcoin Unlimited Node Crash?
Bitcoin Unlimited nodes went down like a rock yesterday as a vulnerability was exploited. They now appear to have recovered, but the speed with which nodes fell is unprecedented. The cause appears to be the use of “asserts” in production. This will get a bit technical, but we asked a pseudo-anonymous Bitcoin Unlimited developer who would rather not be named to provide an explanation for a non-technical audience. He told CCN: “Assertions are used to capture programming errors, i.e. to check whether a condition that the programmer *believes* should hold true at a particular point in the....
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On March 15, Bitcoin Unlimited suffered from an attack that led to a 6-hour downtime for miners and node operators. Miners lost over $200,000 in revenue and nodes crashed, bringing the node count of Bitcoin Unlimited down from 800 to roughly 300. This particular attack or software crash didn’t necessarily have a major impact on the Bitcoin network. However, it signified that the Bitcoin Unlimited team most likely don’t have the experience and expertise to lead the development of Bitcoin. The March 15 software crash is Bitcoin Unlimited’s second bug exploitation in 2017. One major criticism....
Former Bitcoin core developer and one of the founders of the Bitcoin Foundation, Gavin Andresen, has once again expressed his negative feelings about Bitcoin Core known via Twitter after a miner with a node running the alternative Bitcoin protocol, Bitcoin Unlimited, lost $12,000 through a bug. Bitcoin Unlimited bug. News of a bug in the Bitcoin Unlimited code that had caused a miner to lose 13.2BTC, which equates to about $12,000, arose on Reddit in the pro-Bitcoin core subreddit, /r/bitcoin, where the poster proclaimed “Bitcoin.com loses 13.2BTC trying to fork the network: Untested and....
The bigger question is how things will evolve from here on out. Bitcoin Core's SegWit adoption seems to have stagnated, even though a few more companies pledged support for this block scaling solution. Bitcoin nodes are an integral part of the network, as they allow for transactions to be broadcasted to other users all over the world. With the ongoing “issues” between Bitcoin Core and Bitcoin Unlimited, it is always interesting to keep an eye on their individual node counts. It appears BU is getting some additional support right now, as they reached a network node all-time high. At the....
Bitcoin.com pool has lost 13.21 BTC or over $12,000 USD due to a bug in BitcoinUnlimited software, which caused it to mine a block bigger than 1MB. So…What Happened? Bitcoin.com, an information portal, which also provides mining pool services has lost out on 13.2 BTC due to a bug in the Bitcoin Unlimited software, which is used on the pool. Bitcoinist spoke with Bitcoin Unlimited developer Andrew Stone a.k.a. “theZerg” to figure out what really happened: Bitcoinist: So what caused this bug? Andrew Stone (AS): The bug was caused by a miscounting of the bytes in the coinbase. Basically the....
The crux of the problem with Bitcoin Unlimited is that the economic majority is making the decisions, including the decision of who gets to be a part of the economic majority (by increasing the cost of participation). Ever since Bitcoin Unlimited gained traction, there has been substantial debate regarding this solution. If all network nodes would be able to select their block size, an interesting future is created. However, this idea poses a set of new problems that need to be addressed in the future. Some people even speculate Bitcoin Unlimited would eventually lead to centralization.....