The empire strikes back. As the people rise and gain the majority of miners who have decided, Bitcoin Core developers have gone on the attack.
A bug on the overlay xThin client has been exploited, rather than professionally and rationally revealed, to send Bitcoin Unlimited nodes down crashing. Miners are not affected as far as I am aware, but non-mining nodes are coming down like a rock.
Bitcoin Core developers attack Bitcoin Unlimited – image from coindance
The story is developing. Bitcoin Unlimited developers are far too busy addressing the matter and coming up with a solution to answer us or the public at this point in time, but we wrote just hours before this attack that Bitcoin Core supporters were threatening with bug exploits. Specifically, a person who goes by the handle of “ciphera” stated:
“Running my fuzzer on the diffs BU have from Core, and have already some crashes. Hopefully some of them are exploitable. Going to collect as many zero-days to release at the most opportune time possible.”
I’ve been under the impression, and somewhat taken for granted, that Ciphera is Eric Lombrozo, a prominent Bitcoin Core developer and a spokesperson for the Bitcoin Core client.
He has been a very vocal supporter of Bitcoin Core and his company, Ciphrex, has vocally advocated for full blocks and a settlement system. Now, he appears to have fallen so low as to attack bitcoin.
He is using the playbook of none other than John Dillon, who himself says “my day job involves intelligence, and I’m in a relatively high position.” In a leaked and authenticated conversation back in 2013 between Peter Todd and John Dillon where they discuss “If I were the US Government and had co-opted the “core” Bitcoin dev team, you know what I’d do?” – Dillon states:
“Every time anyone tried mining with [an alternative client], I’d use my knowledge of all the ways they are incompatible to fork them, making it clear they can’t be trusted for mining…. all I would have to do to keep them marginalized and the majority of hashing power using the approved official implementation is slip the odd consensus bug into their code.”
After four years, we now have Bitcoin Core developers – who have increased transaction fees to be uncompetitive with even PayPal, who have created transaction delays that cause high frustration for users – unashamedly attack the people’s money.
Bitcoin Core, you behave worse than standing armies. You wish to imprison us. You wish to chain us. You ban us, you censor us, you attack us. You wish to centralize bitcoin in your own hands where you can use the bugs you yourselves have probably sneaked in the bitcoin clients as a means of control.
You can’t win. Bitcoin will pass this test. Bitcoin will withstand this attack. This artificial wall will be brought down, whether in bitcoin itself or through another, perhaps better, digital currency. These chains will be broken. Liberty, if history has any say, will triumph.
Disclaimer: The views expressed in the article are solely that of the author and do not represent those of, nor should they be attributed to CCN.
Image from Shutterstock.
