Several days after the Mike Hearn and Gavin Andressen announced their coup attempt it is becoming clear that the XT effort is an effort to misrepresent a neutered, less robust, and rapidly changing system as Bitcoin. A number of parties are catching onto the false sense of urgency which has been pushed hard by Gavin Andressen over the past year and supported by a number of flooding attacks presented as "stress tests." Continually the coup's propaganda has been crashing into the hard face of reality as the reaction to the flooding attacks show Bitcoin works as advertised when the attack ends up allowing for a demonstration of transaction fee markets. Continue reading
Category Archives: Bitcoin
Coinwallet Plans Spam While the Spamming is Cheap
Last month a venture calling itself "Coinwallet" flooded the Bitcoin network with spam in what the company called a "stress test." The spam delayed underpaying transactions without fees insufficient to secure space to be confirmed in a block resulting in a scenario where a fee market for block space could develop. A Coinwallet representative recently stated the company will be performing another stress test in early September, claiming there will close to 4.6 GB worth of spam that will flood the network. Continue reading
No XTCoin Support Committed to the Blockchain Yet
Days after Mike Hearn and Gavin Andressen announced a not quite Bitcoin client that when triggered by a particular set of events create an altchain, miner adoption of their forking client remains so low not a single block containing a vote for their coup has been committed to the blockchain. This is in the face of a self declared mining operation claiming a third of a petahash swearing their fealty to Hearn and Andressen's new pet altcoin. In the time since Hearn announced the fork though a pseudonode implementation which passes most tests to be counted as a forking XT node has been published alongside a full node Bitcoin Client which appears to be an XTCoin node in everything except actually forking over to XTCoin if a fork is actually ever triggered. With this early reception to Mike Hearn and Gavin Andressen's fork ultimatum the chances of an actual XTCoin creating fork occurring appear to be low.
Hearn Releases Code to Potentially Fork XTC from Bitcoin
This weekend Mike Hearn announced the release of a version of his BitcoinXT client which would hard fork a new altcoin referred to here as XTCoin from the Bitcoin network. Should enough blocks be mined which profess to contain a vote to trigger Hearn's XTCoin fork, the XTCoin blockchain would split from the Bitcoin Blockchain an allow blocks to be mined at a maximum size of 8 megabytes each growing exponentially to a maximum size of 8 gigabytes 20 years after XTCoin forks should XTCoin somehow manage to keep enough hashpower to continue producing new blocks over the entire span of time. As mentioned in the Hard Fork Missile Crisis XTCoin, like any other altcoin forked from Bitcoin and fraudulently misrepresenting itself as Bitcoin would come under devastating economic attack which would almost certainly render further mining on the XTCoin chain a costly money losing endeavor. Continue reading
Copay Multisig Vulnerability Reported
Coinspect has reported the existence of a bug in the Copay multi-signature Bitcoin wallet produced by BitPay. In affected versions of Copay the vulnerability allowed the compromise of one party to empty the shared wallet by submitting a transaction type which would exploit the protocol used by Copay wallets to automatically sign transactions. Coinspect alleges that after reporting the flaw to BitPay on July 20th the flaw was fixed in Copay version 0.4.1 for this particular exploit scenario. Given the nature of this exploit Qntra advises users considering Copay or any multisignature scheme which involves any protocol for automatically engaging additional signers to use extreme caution recommending potential users default to avoiding the shitware involved entirely on first principles. If you trust keys to software that could automatically sign a transaction it could be tricked just as readily into signing a confession.
New Per Block Transaction Highs Wedge Some Nodes: Patch Available
In the past several hours there have been at least two blocks with a sufficient number of transactions per block to leave bitcoin nodes relying on Berkeley Database for block handling to wedge when set to the post March 2013 limit of 40,000 database locks and objects. For a few hours doubling that amount to 80,000 sufficed until a still more complex block arrived. A patch has recently been published which should remedy this issue until such a time the universe undergoes heat death. The patch works by raising the maximums Berkeley Database is configured with in order to handle any number of transactions that can fit into a Bitcoin block. On some platforms like OpenBSD which aggressively allocate memory in advance for safety reasons Bitcoin's RAM usage is increased noticeably with this patch. If your system enforces low per-process memory limits you may have to edit you system's settings.
Selkis Tips Fiat Agenda For Bitcoin
Ryan Selkis, known on social media as @TwoBitIdiot, has begun concern trolling over "wealth concentration" in Bitcoin and proposed moving Bitcoin to a permanently inflationary reward schedule by 2020. Such a change would of course never be implemented in actual Bitcoin, but the fact that it is being introduced by someone titled "Director of Investments" at some organization calling itself the "Digital Currency Group" strongly suggests that fiat interests in the United States that would like to not only inflate the blockchain in order to force centralization. It suggests United States based fiat interests would like to destroy the very image of what Bitcoin is. Continue reading
Karpeles Facing Charges in Japan?
Mark Karpeles the CEO of the infamously defunct Mt. Gox is facing charges on fraud based on a
report released this week. An anonymous translation of the report can be seen below: Continue reading
Ministry of Games Begins Hosting Eulora Dependencies
Eulora's publisher Ministry of Games has now begun mirroring source packages for Eulora's dependencies Cal3D and Crystal Space on their downloads page. This comes after a week of downtime on SourceForge. An beneficial side effect is that this move removes the requirement to use SVN to acquire the right version of Eulora's dependencies in order to install the game.
Phuctor Factors 100th RSA Modulus
The Phuctor, operated by No Such lAbs, has factored its hundredth modulus by using Euclid's Greatest Common Denominator algorithm. The Phuctor began digesting a dump of public keys from sks keyservers back in May. Less than two weeks later Phuctor had managed to factor a key attached to a key in the PGP strong set. Considering the way the news of Phuctor's first key factoring was handled all interested parties should examine the set of public keys factored for their own betterment.