Author: Stefan Thomas 2012-02-29 21:00:44
Published on: 2012-02-29T21:00:44+00:00
On February 28th, 2012, Pieter Wuille wrote an email addressing a vulnerability found in the Bitcoin reference client. The vulnerability involves duplicate transactions and although exploiting it is rather complex, it is still considered a security hole. Wuille suggests adding an extra protocol rule to fix this issue. This rule would disallow blocks to contain a transaction whose hash is equal to that of a former transaction which has not yet been completely spent. Wuille has written about this in BIP30 and has provided a patch for the reference client which has been tested and verified to make the attack impossible.Wuille asks for support for adding this rule to the protocol rules and hopes pools and miners can agree to update their nodes without lengthy coinbase-flagging procedures that would only delay a solution. The change is backward compatible in the same way BIP16 is: if a supermajority of mining power implements it, old clients can continue to function without risk. If there is consensus that this rule is the solution, then implementation of this rule can be done quickly and efficiently.
Updated on: 2023-06-06T03:09:57.084214+00:00