Author: Gregory Maxwell 2018-08-20 20:14:50
Published on: 2018-08-20T20:14:50+00:00
Since 2012, experts have known that Bitcoin's non-overlapping difficulty calculation is vulnerable to gaming with inaccurate timestamps, which can massively increase the rate of block production beyond the system's design. However, the vulnerability can be fixed with a soft-fork that further constrains block timestamps, and a few proposals have been floated along these lines. In order to test mitigations against this issue, a demonstration of timewarp was put early in the testnet3 chain, pegging the difficulty way down and churning out blocks at the maximum rate allowed by the median time protocol rule.Despite this vulnerability, there hasn't been a big priority into fixing it because it requires a majority hashrate and could easily be blocked if someone started using it. However, since there haven't been too many other network consensus rules going on lately, several proposals have been suggested that are fully compatible with existing behaviour and only trigger in exceptional circumstances like a timewarp attack. Therefore, the risk of deploying these mitigations would be minimal.In light of this, the author thinks it would be useful to ask the list if anyone else is aware of a favorite backwards compatible timewarp fix proposal they want to point out.
Updated on: 2023-05-20T17:34:39.330970+00:00