Author: Dave Collins 2015-09-01 15:59:24
Published on: 2015-09-01T15:59:24+00:00
The person asking the question in this context is interested to know about the supposed btcd mainnet forks that have occurred due to a consensus failure since it came out of alpha. The answer states that there hasn't been one so far, but there might be in the future, just as it can happen with Bitcoin Core as well. A potential instance was found due to fuzzing, which prompted an audit of the code base and resulted in improved test coverage in Bitcoin Core. However, Bitcoin Core has had actual forks on mainnet during the same period.The author believes that the community needs to take the reality seriously that an infrastructure built on a single implementation is incredibly fragile and prone to unintentional hard forks regardless of the existence of alternative implementations. The absence of real disaster prevention measures for unintentional incompatibilities between different versions of the same implementation adds to this fragility. It is mentioned that several improvements such as improved test coverage and more robust and modular code have already been made after the incident and that it has not ended poorly by any means.Furthermore, the post made by Monarch via bitcoin-dev is also referred to, where they state that even heroic attempts at making consensus-compatible re-implementations have ended rather poorly. Bitcoin-ruby and btcd have collectively had numerous consensus failures, some only recently found by fuzzing the scripting environment. There are more failures than publicly disclosed, and almost any failure can be leveraged to split the network and steal money. Ethereum attempted to create four clients, written to a defined specification, and even with all the money in the world has managed to have numerous consensus failures due to misunderstanding or implementation.
Updated on: 2023-06-10T21:32:34.297439+00:00