Bitcoin Forum

A Big Vulnerable Bug in Bitcoin Software Could Have Indeed Crashed the Currency

Bitcoin is usually said to be the gold standard for digital currencies, but still the OG Blockchain-based money has strongly catastrophic defects concealing in the software that supports it.

The entire community is discussing about a vulnerable bug which was brought into Bitcoin Core reference client in 2016. The case found in Bitcoin Core software versions 0.14 and above has produced another hot topic regarding the fallibility of developers, and applying a single reference client instead of using several implementation. 

Read the details in the article of Coinidol dot com, the world blockchain news outlet: https://coinidol.com/big-vulnerable-bug-in-bitcoin-software-could-have-indeed-crashed-currency/

https://coinidol.com/upload/resize_cache/iblock/727/900_900_1/727f831c344a2d46cedf68b039a2152b.png

Lol, Coinidol sounds just like bitcoin.com - throwing dirt at Bitcoin developers, suggesting "alternative teams" as the solution, spreading FUD to newbies. The reality is, Bitcoin is still the best cryptocurrency, it's not perfect but it's better than others, other coins historically had way worse bugs. And this bug in Bitcoin client is not too dangerous because it's really hard to execute, so there's no reason for the price to drop, and the price indeed hasn't dropped.

Article (and its accompanying image) sounds a bit alarmist. There's really nothing to worry about since Bitcoin Core developers have already released a software update that patched this vulnerability caused by the bug.

So why did it crashed when we only finding out the reason why? If people have learned this in the first place this will br the main reason of the panic selling but it is my first time seeing this and it was a long time ago. It is kinda strange that this news will popped out a year later of the event of course this won't create more steam compared to when it is actually happening. I really want to know why BTC crashed but I don't think this is the real reason.

These guys are really getting desperate now, by digging up stuff that happened 2 years ago and this was not anything that could not be solved with a little tweak and a quick update of the code. I wonder what they would have said, if they looked at the history of Alt coins like Bitcoin XT and also problems in other well known Alt coins.

Bitcoin <BTC> has one of the best Opensource software developer teams in the world at the moment, so FUD like this is actually very strange.  ::)

You totally misunderstood the explanation I think. Maybe the Bull crashing on CoinIdol's illustration didn't help then again CI illustrations are never really illustrative of the right point heh. The crash refers to the nodes, majority of which run Bitcoin Core. Had the vulerability been triggered and picked up by those running the clients, they'd have crashed. Network would still have been up, just severely crippled.  As it turns out (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5032424.msg45966084#msg45966084), wasn't just the threat of a crash but inflation too, and only announced because details were made public.

I am still wondering why a bug which was present in 2016 is being reported as "news" in 2018. Coinidol must be running short of newsworthy stuff to publish. In any case, Bitcoin has the strongest developers and community backing it. I would rather have my money in Bitcoin than some altcoin where the developer might suddenly decide to take a sabatical.

Here's another, updated, article on the subject:

https://www.coindesk.com/the-latest-bitcoin-bug-was-so-bad-developers-kept-its-full-details-a-secret/

What I can't understand is that why do they keep saying "the bug could have been exploited to print unlimited bitcoin" while in fact, even if that happened all those "fake Bitcoins" would be destroyed and thus no harm would be done? What am I missing here?

don't think you are missing anything, the fake bitcoins would have never been accepted by the chain
coindol resorts to digging up some minor things that happened in 2016 and were fixed promptly and making a mountain out of a molehill
they sound bitcoin.comish in this article, maybe there was a "paid request" for the article to be published?

I guess they are going to run with this latest problem too, https://old.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/9hkoo6/new_info_escalates_importance_upgrading_to_0163/ It does not matter, if they say, " Stored funds are not at risk. " ...These news sites just need something small to run with "click bait" articles.

I hope they not going to fetch this from the archives 3 years later, like they did with this one.  ::)

Similar thing on my mind why an old thing being dig up and i dont see any relevance on this current year, maybe this is indeed a paid request.lol

Nah! they would still make use even a 5 year old news just to make a post.Trust me