Author: Jorge Timón 2018-08-22 13:48:16
Published on: 2018-08-22T13:48:16+00:00
In August 2018, Gregory Maxwell, a Bitcoin Core developer, posted on the bitcoin-dev mailing list about an issue with Bitcoin's non-overlapping difficulty calculation that had been known since 2012. He explained that it was vulnerable to gaming with inaccurate timestamps to increase the rate of block production beyond the system's intentional design. While there had been proposals for fixing this vulnerability with a soft-fork, none were backwards compatible.Maxwell had put a demonstration of timewarp early in the testnet3 chain to allow people to test mitigations against it. He pegged the difficulty way down and churned out blocks at the maximum rate that the median time protocol rule allows. Although the risk of deploying these mitigations would be minimal, he hadn't put a big priority into fixing this vulnerability because it requires a majority hashrate and could easily be blocked if someone started using it.Maxwell asked if anyone else was aware of a favorite backwards compatible timewarp fix proposal they wanted to point out before he dusts off his old fix and perhaps prematurely cause fixation on a particular approach.
Updated on: 2023-06-13T14:11:30.825042+00:00