Bitmain just announced that it has finally developed a better ASIC chip. It will be 42J/TH. Bitfury also announce that they have a new ASIC chip which gets 55mW/GH. https://www.coindesk.com/bitmain-ceo-announces-new-7nm-bitcoin-mining-chip. I put in some figures, and it appears at the current difficulty and 5 cents/kwH price in China, that brings the electricity cost down to less than $1,500 USD to produce 1 BTC. If the difficulty doubles, it will still be less then $3000 USD to produce a BTC. And I suspect some of the larger mining farms in China are getting a better deal than 5 cents/kwH. Therefore, the break-even floor is going to be lowered.
However, I really don't think BTC is going to go much below 5000 USD. After all, Bitcoin core just patched up a major bug that was present for almost 2 years, and the market responded like it was just noise.  

I think that I am misunderstanding what exactly this means.


Are they talking about the double spend input, that uses a previously created UTXO? Or are the talking about the newly created UTXO that had two double spend inputs and now has a block built on top of it?

Edit: I understand this better now. This answer on slack helped clear things up for me.  https://bitcoin.stackexchange.com/questions/79481/how-does-the-most-recently-found-critical-vulnerability-cve-2018-17144-work

This latest dump almost looks like a fat fingers error made in the margins market on Bitfinex. The amount of shorts on Bitfinex also spiked during the same minute and then it went down sharply in the next minute. I suppose the whale could have set a very tight stop loss. One could also blame it on spoofy, I suppose.

I am uncertain how any miner would have been able to spread counterfeit coins effectively, since the other aspect of the bug was to cause nodes to crash. Wouldn't this have hampered the transfer of coins on the renegade chain? The only strategy that I can see for an attacking miner would have been to implement shorts before the attack, and somehow close the shorts after the bad news has spread, but before the exchange(s) freeze the trading. They would then have to transfer the ill gotten funds off the exchange(s) in a hurry, before the victim exchange(s) caught on and froze their account.

Actually, with Bitmex fee structure, the odds are only ~ 5% against you at 100x if you are a maker on both open and close. If you are a taker on both the open and close, your odds are only approximately 15% against you. Hey, that's much better than Powerball or Megamillions. 

It appears Clam's last commit was in January 2017. This was before the vulnerability in Bitcoin Core was introduced. Your coins are safe.

https://youtu.be/FD0mrmmYaKQ

I know in the joke video, the victim longed the top; however, I suspect a 100x short, attempting to "short the top" has a good chance of the end result being the same. Especially, implementing the above procedures. 

Any clone coin which forked off of Bitcoin core 0.14.x through 0.16.2, is probably affected. This also includes coins that update their code by porting over changes made by Bitcoin Core.
Here is one of the lines of code in the validation.cpp that needed to be patched. ( https://github.com/bitcoin/bitcoin/commit/d1dee205473140aca34180e5de8b9bbe17c2207d?diff=split#diff-24efdb00bfbe56b140fb006b562cc70bL3035 )
 
Bug code:

Patched code:

You may want to go to a particular wallet's/coin's git to see if it's latest update has the buggy line of code in the validation.cpp. However, some wallet/coin devs tend to change the code slightly, so this check might not be foolproof.

I know for sure that Bitcoin ABC (BCH) and Litecoin implemented the patch. However, I am not certain about the 100's of other altcoins out there.

The exploit chain is not going to be free money. With the knock offline aspect, the network would not be viable. The exploit chain is not usable.  Also, you are aware that Bitcoin ABC had to employ the patch too, right? It appears there are still over 700 Bitcoin ABC nodes that have not upgraded, yet. https://cash.coin.dance/nodes Fortunately, Bitcoin Unlimited did not need the patch because their code was originally forked off of Bitcoin core v 0.12.x

Edit: Since the majority of the hashrate has now switched to the patched code, any miner trying to invoke the vulnerability now is going to have their block orphaned. The only way that their chain will survive is if they further modify the code and implement replay protection.

What exchange is going to want a coin where a pool could basically double their coins every single block?   Plus the exchange would basically have their node knocked offline when a block is found. This would then require them to rescan their hot wallet. Then when the next block is found, they would need to rescan again. The hot wallet would be in constant maintenance node. I suppose an exchange could get this to work if they run an spv wallet instead. However, I am not aware of any exchange that is willing to run their hot wallet in SPV mode.

I think you need to do some more research on exactly how this exploit would have operated. The offending miner would have knocked all the other miners offline. Furthermore, it would be difficult for the pool to offload their extra coins, since most, if not all, exchanges also run a full node that would be knocked offline as well. I suppose the pool could find some sucker and do an OTC trade with.   Also, the patch to the code would sufficiently "roll back" the chain since any miner running a node with the patch would orphan any chain that happens to be built upon a block that contains two duplicate inputs in the same transaction. (The bug happened because the core dev who originally coded in this "optimization" set the check for this transaction to false, when verifying a block.)

Here you can find exactly what line of code needed to be patched.
https://github.com/bitcoin/bitcoin/commit/d1dee205473140aca34180e5de8b9bbe17c2207d?diff=split#diff-24efdb00bfbe56b140fb006b562cc70bL3035

Old code:


New code



I suspect that the majority of the nodes that have not upgraded to the patch are hobby nodes. Any pool or exchange not upgrading their node deserves what may be coming their way.  By the way, only 283 out of 1083 of the Bitcoin ABC nodes have upgraded to the latest patch. https://cash.coin.dance/nodes (Bitcoin Unlimited didn't need the patch.)

I follow @whalecalls on twitter and all I get is OKex info, How do I get this info?

Well, it appears that this bug could have only been implemented if a miner intentionally does it. This demonstrates that miners of BTC are simply not going to go out and look for vulnerabilities to exploit, which would most probably hurt the BTC price; and also, in the end, orphan all of the blocks that they found when implementing the bug.

I would think the fact that all of the miners are colluding to boycott segwit transactions would be considered bad news to traders.

A pool verifying segwit transactions in their blocks would include both non-segwit and segwit transactions. The block would have more transaction and the total fee would be a little better than a pool that verifies non-segwit transactions only.

If A is the total fee of all of the non-segwit transactions and B is the total fee of the segwit transactions, then A+B>A.

So Bitcoin Core has a devastating bug in the code since March 2017 Also, it appears that every single shitcoin that forked off of Bitcoin core 14.0-16.3 is also going to have to patch things up. We really dodged a bullet here. Hope no other surprises are lurking in the code. 

LOL. The conclusion on the chart states this is bullish for Bitcoin Cash.

It's the "important" one. This recent announcement is stating that they are now officially considering this and want more comments from the public. They have a whole slew of questions at the end part that they want the public to answer. I will be surprised if they do not go ahead and delay, come 30 Sept. Quite frankly, I wish that they would just go ahead and deny and we would be done with it. Unfortunately, if they deny, I'm sure it will be appealed. It's pretty clear to me that the SEC wants to be assured that there is minimal market manipulation going on. Many of us here already highly suspect that their is lots of dirty pool being played in the BTC markets.


Meh, looks like noise to me.

Don't be fooled by the "low" Bitmex fee. That is the fee charged on the whole leveraged amount. So if someone goes 100x, they are actually paying 2.25 % maker and 7.5 % taker on their actual risked amount. (or something like that.) And that is only for one way in the trade. Eventually, you will want to close your position at some point and pay the fee again.

A 700% rise would only bring the price to just above 16000 sats. Unfortunately, I personally would need a better rise than that to ROI. Although, that would be close. When this project started, I bought hash on hashnest to get enough coins for a Masternode. Unfortunately, I still am far from ROI. So, I am what you call a bagholder. Hope this goes to the moon.

If all of the miners decided to run non-Segwit nodes, I'm sure that would hurt the market value of BTC, and hurt their bottom line. I am sure there will eventually be at least one pool that will relent and go back to verifying segwit transactions. Or someone in this space will create a new pool that does run a segwit node. Since that pool would be paying out slightly more due to the transaction fees, many miners would switch to that pool. Other pools would probably be swayed to abandon their little boycott and start mining segwit tx again.