Author: Steve Coughlan 2011-09-08 15:25:57
Published on: 2011-09-08T15:25:57+00:00
On September 9, 2011, Matt Corallo wrote to the Bitcoin development mailing list about discussions on the Bitcoin StackExchange site regarding the alert protocol. Some have suggested that it may carry potential for abuse and others have argued that it is merely deprecated. Due to enough concerns being voiced, Corallo forked bitcoin/bitcoin, removed the questionable code from main.cpp, and submitted a pull request. Gavin Andresen noted that the topic deserved discussion and some consensus should be reached before acting on the pull request. He also argued that the feature was still more useful than dangerous and would argue against its removal.Corallo questioned whether the alert system was valuable, an unnecessary risk, or just a snippet of deprecated code. He pointed out that the alert system requires signature verification when it receives an alert, making it not a DoS target. The alerts must be signed by a key that only Gavin and Satoshi have. In much software, the alert system carries a risk for abuse, but since Bitcoin is financial software, if there is an urgent problem, such as the overflow bug, alerts must notify people to upgrade immediately. Alerts no longer have the ability to put Bitcoin into RPC safe-mode, they are literally just a message, and Corallo sees no reason why they should be removed.The email also included an advertisement for the next generation virtual desktop model.
Updated on: 2023-06-04T19:01:03.932661+00:00