Was Bitcoin shut down for 8 hours?

[gentlemand]

You are both wrong:
https://bitcoinmagazine.com/3668/bitcoin-network-shaken-by-blockchain-fork/


It is posts like these that I don't particularly like, people stating facts about Bitcoin that seem true, others see them and also believe them, yet they are furthest from the truth and the answer was already posted in the thread. This is the reason that people like patio11 exist.

I wasn't referring to anything other than his supposition about it happening this time around. It didn't. I'm sure there are clever ways to do it but I'll leave that to experts or three letter agencies.

[Amph]

51% isn't shutting down, it's just a cintrol over the network, if you stop the attack the network will return alive

let me rephrase it, it's impossible to shutdown bitcoin permanently

With a 51% attack you can prevent people from spending coins by not confirming their transactions. If you can't spend your Bitcoin I don't see how you can say the Bitcoin network is up.

Yes you are correct, you cannot shut down the network permanently unless you kill every Bitcoiner and destroy all Bitcoin clients and any evidence of bitcoin ever existing, probably would also be a good idea to outlaw all forms of electronic communication, encryption and privacy to prevent anyone from building something similar to Bitcoin. Anything less than that can be recovered from with enough time and resources. One copy of the Blockchain would be needed to preserve balances, we have atleast 7000.

But the Bitcoin network CAN be down and has been down in the past, it isn't magic, it is vulnerable to attack just like everything else in the world.

the network is still up, but just for the dude who is attaccking it, this isn't shutting down, it taking under control like ai said above, if he can double spend then it mean that the network is up(for him only, but still up)

i think people are not following what i'm saying

[drawingthesun]

No, this is not possible and it did not take place. This is just another nerd searching for attention, twitter followers etc.

No. Theoretically, shutting down the Bitcoin network is possible. It's just that he got confused between bitcointalk.org (which was down for 10 hours, at least for me) and the whole Bitcoin network.

I actually wonder if Patio11 is talking about the March 2013 fork? This lasted 6 hours and the fix was coordinated via IRC.
I remember this fork, but don't remember it as Bitcoin being shut down.

As I recall, everyone was told not to make any transactions due to the fork in progress, so I guess it was a shut down of sorts.

[Carlton Banks]

As I recall, everyone was told not to make any transactions due to the fork in progress, so I guess it was a shut down of sorts.

I witnessed this pretty much as it happened, and I can tell you that the network carried on running (albeit in the forked state, so running but not really functioning). IIRC, an alert was posted with the emergency alert system in the actual Bitcoin Core client, but that probably wasn't the majority of users even back then. So some people carried on mining and transacting regardless, possibly unaware, possibly seeing whether they might be able to exploit the situation somehow .

[XCASH]

As I recall, everyone was told not to make any transactions due to the fork in progress, so I guess it was a shut down of sorts.

I witnessed this pretty much as it happened, and I can tell you that the network carried on running (albeit in the forked state, so running but not really functioning). IIRC, an alert was posted with the emergency alert system in the actual Bitcoin Core client, but that probably wasn't the majority of users even back then. So some people carried on mining and transacting regardless, possibly unaware, possibly seeing whether they might be able to exploit the situation somehow .

Most miners leave their hardware running 24/7 and have to sleep. The smaller miners asleep when the fork happened could have slept through the entire fork and carried on mining it. As you say, the network was not shut down, it was running but not really functioning. There were miners not immediately aware of the problem who kept the network alive.

[coinableS]

What a nerd.



^ @patio11

More than likely a paid disinfo agent for western union or other place similar since he has 15K followers. A real nerd would not be as ignorant about how bitcoin actually works. I think he watched a 60 second special on Fox News and then came to his conclusions.

[iGotSpots]

That whole tweet string rant was pretty ridiculous. Lots of buzzwords without saying anything worth reading

[Melbustus]

As I recall, everyone was told not to make any transactions due to the fork in progress, so I guess it was a shut down of sorts.

I witnessed this pretty much as it happened, and I can tell you that the network carried on running (albeit in the forked state, so running but not really functioning). IIRC, an alert was posted with the emergency alert system in the actual Bitcoin Core client, but that probably wasn't the majority of users even back then. So some people carried on mining and transacting regardless, possibly unaware, possibly seeing whether they might be able to exploit the situation somehow .

Yeah, that was an interesting few hours. The technical scenario which led to the fork was basically bitcoin's consensus disaster scenario; such a version conflict (which is more or less what led to the fork) was theoretically possible, but unlikely and had never happened before. But it was the resolution to it which, in my opinion, contributed to the spring 2013 rally. The community came together and quickly and rationally resolved the problem through community consensus, thereby relieving the ecosystem of one of the more severe theoretical concerns.

In his tweetstorm, @patio11 seems to attack the method by which the fork was resolved. People running the big pools, Gavin and other devs, plus a bunch of industry ppl, etc, agreed that the best resolution for the integrity of the network would be if bitcoind v0.8 was not the majority version. Since BTCGuild has just upgraded to v0.8, Eleutheria agreed to downgrade to v0.7 so that the v0.7 fork would overtake v0.8. Problem solved, completely within the bounds of expected system behavior.

Nothing on the network level was "shut down"; @patio11 is being both careless and hyperbolic with his words.

[fox19891989]

The title is misleading, bitcoin is decentralized thing, how can it be shut down? It's not a company or exchange, you could say bitstamp shut down for 8 hours, but btc is impossible to be shut down.

Do you refer to 51% attack shut down the blockchain running? I don't think so, btc won't be stuck for 8 hours.

[tokeweed]

What a nerd.



^ @patio11

More than likely a paid disinfo agent for western union or other place similar since he has 15K followers. A real nerd would not be as ignorant about how bitcoin actually works. I think he watched a 60 second special on Fox News and then came to his conclusions.

I would call that above in bold a smart guy.  The patio11 character is just a plain nerd.

What a nerd.