Blockchain split of 4 July 2015

[Quickseller]

How do we know if electrum and mycelium servers have been updated?

Some SPV servers were relying on 0.10.x so they were unaffected by the issue, and others were not and were effected. My personal experience with electrum on this incident is that I had a transaction that was sent to me that was showing as unconfirmed for a long time, then all of a sudden it had in excess of 6 confirmations. I am not sure what exact conclusions that I can draw from this except that the particular electrum server that I was connected to at the time was not relying on core 0.10.x as of prior to this indecent.

I also believe that by default, the electrum server that you connect to is random, so it is hard to make the determination if your server is running a "good" version of core or not.

My personal solution is to start a full node, and once the blockchain is downloaded, to run an electrum server that relies on the most recent version of Bitcoin core

[pooya87]

is it over now 

[Funny]

Are blockchain.info web wallets running Bitcoin Core 0.9.5 and later? Just want to know if I should wait for 30 confirmations.

Is this going to be a major problem ? are blockchain.info wallets safe in the moment? thanks a lot

I think... this is just for Bitcoin core, as written on the News above

No, this issue concerns web wallets too.

but its affect only the transactions incoming from a user with bitcoin core? or between webwallets too? thank u

It affects the users who are using Bitcoin Core 0.9.4 or earlier versions, Lightweight (SPV) wallet, Web wallet users. No matter for the receivers or senders, they are both affected!

[JerryCurlzzz]

Any word on whether Blockchain.info wallets are relying on Core, or something else? Silence from their Twitter for the last couple days. I was hoping to see something on their homepage. I have a small hot wallet there.... only use it to hold a couple coins at any time.

Downloading the blockchain as we speak.... (sigh)

[stingers]

Can someone advice me if this split would affect the price of bitcoin anyhow? If yes how?

[Cryddit]

One way to think of this is that a group of Chinese miners just gave over $50K away to other miners, to reward those other miners for checking the block versions before building new blocks.

Terribly nice of them, really.  Though I'm sure they'd prefer to've collected the prize themselves, it's nice of them to "support" those who are doing a better job than they are.

So, for a few hours, if you were mining and actually checking blocks for validity, you were getting about double your usual rate of return.

"SPV mining" is one of those silly ideas like "virtual memory" or "virtual sex" - the real thing is always better.

[ajareselde]

Can someone advice me if this split would affect the price of bitcoin anyhow? If yes how?

As you can see, the price wasn't affected by it at all.

Can someone advice me if this split would affect the price of bitcoin anyhow? If yes how?

The "split" like you call it, was resolved by the network 6 blocks after it happened - which shows how resilient (or anti-fragile) the Bitcoin network has become.  Regarding the price of bitcoin, please go to the speculation section of the forum.

On the other hand, it also shows that the system still has errors that can happen.
Don't get me wrong,i am glad that the "issue" was resolved, but i find that it shouldn't have happened in the first place.

cheers

[Quickseller]

How do we know if electrum and mycelium servers have been updated?

Some SPV servers were relying on 0.10.x so they were unaffected by the issue, and others were not and were effected. My personal experience with electrum on this incident is that I had a transaction that was sent to me that was showing as unconfirmed for a long time, then all of a sudden it had in excess of 6 confirmations. I am not sure what exact conclusions that I can draw from this except that the particular electrum server that I was connected to at the time was not relying on core 0.10.x as of prior to this indecent.

I also believe that by default, the electrum server that you connect to is random, so it is hard to make the determination if your server is running a "good" version of core or not.

My personal solution is to start a full node, and once the blockchain is downloaded, to run an electrum server that relies on the most recent version of Bitcoin core

The Electrum clients connect to Electrum Servers at random.  However, if you have a favorite you can also default to it.  I do.  I personally like electrum.dragonzone.net and electrum.drollette.com.  Why?  They are always present, and they maintain a limit of 10 000 UTXOs (UTXO = Unspent Transactions Outputs)- which implies they are serious about being reliable Electrum-Servers (requires more computing power, memory and bandwidth to maintain a 10 000 limit, compared to a 100 limit).

Electrum-Servers are operating on pure voluntarily will - they have no incentives to do so.  Higher limits show how committed they are to the SPV Electrum cause.  Please support them by sending them a donation (their BTC donation addresses are usually listed in the console tab).   You can select your favorite server by clicking on the Green dot (bottom right) of your Electrum window - uncheck the automatic selection, and select your favorite server.

Electrum-Servers also have to operate a full Bitcoin-core node - it would be great if they would advertise in their console msg the Bitcoin-core version they are using!

If you have a Trezor, SatoshiLabs  already indicated that their backend node was already updated to the latest version 0.10.2 if you are using their mytrezor.com Chrome interface - see here

Like I said, I am in the process of starting my own electrum server that I know I can personally trust. As of now, I am in the process of downloading the blockchain for my full node, and some level of research needs to be done before I can create my electrum server that relies on my full node (I had found a thread advising how to create an electrum server, however it seems that it either contains some mistake or I am doing something wrong - I am very much a newbie when it comes to linux/ubuntu, so it could easily be either one).

[EternalWingsofGod]

Can someone advice me if this split would affect the price of bitcoin anyhow? If yes how?

The "split" like you call it, was resolved by the network 6 blocks after it happened - which shows how resilient (or anti-fragile) the Bitcoin network has become.  Regarding the price of bitcoin, please go to the speculation section of the forum.

That's good to hear I read July 4 Fork and was a bit concerned that something happened there
I'm glad to hear its been sorted out.

[Possum577]

Is it possible that a successful fork could increase confidence in the Bitcoin infrastructure, thereby causing incentive to buy more?

[Amph]

My wallet is with blockchain.Info. if I am expecting an incoming transaction does this still apply?

Are you talking about certain types of transactions from unknown sources? 

every transaction was affected, but was regarding old version of core, 0.1 should be safe, blockchain info should be reliable

like it was said if you do not trust any source simply wait 30 confs

[Borisz]

Is it possible that a successful fork could increase confidence in the Bitcoin infrastructure, thereby causing incentive to buy more?

You mean that despite a glitch, fork, the network continued on the right chain? I don't think this would matter too much. For the media to explain this it would be too complicated and for existing bitcoin users only matters a little. Maybe gives a bit of confidence, but also points out issues.

[RealBitcoin]

Is it possible that a successful fork could increase confidence in the Bitcoin infrastructure, thereby causing incentive to buy more?

You mean that despite a glitch, fork, the network continued on the right chain? I don't think this would matter too much. For the media to explain this it would be too complicated and for existing bitcoin users only matters a little. Maybe gives a bit of confidence, but also points out issues.

Yep i agree the media always spins things, but this time this is way above the laymen terms, they cant even do a report on this because its so tech-savy that the average tv watcher person will just switch to another channel watching soap operas instead.

[turvarya]

How do we know if electrum and mycelium servers have been updated?

Some SPV servers were relying on 0.10.x so they were unaffected by the issue, and others were not and were effected. My personal experience with electrum on this incident is that I had a transaction that was sent to me that was showing as unconfirmed for a long time, then all of a sudden it had in excess of 6 confirmations. I am not sure what exact conclusions that I can draw from this except that the particular electrum server that I was connected to at the time was not relying on core 0.10.x as of prior to this indecent.

I also believe that by default, the electrum server that you connect to is random, so it is hard to make the determination if your server is running a "good" version of core or not.

My personal solution is to start a full node, and once the blockchain is downloaded, to run an electrum server that relies on the most recent version of Bitcoin core

The Electrum clients connect to Electrum Servers at random.  However, if you have a favorite you can also default to it.  I do.  I personally like electrum.dragonzone.net and electrum.drollette.com.  Why?  They are always present, and they maintain a limit of 10 000 UTXOs (UTXO = Unspent Transactions Outputs)- which implies they are serious about being reliable Electrum-Servers (requires more computing power, memory and bandwidth to maintain a 10 000 limit, compared to a 100 limit).

Electrum-Servers are operating on pure voluntarily will - they have no incentives to do so.  Higher limits show how committed they are to the SPV Electrum cause.  Please support them by sending them a donation (their BTC donation addresses are usually listed in the console tab).   You can select your favorite server by clicking on the Green dot (bottom right) of your Electrum window - uncheck the automatic selection, and select your favorite server.

Electrum-Servers also have to operate a full Bitcoin-core node - it would be great if they would advertise in their console msg the Bitcoin-core version they are using!

If you have a Trezor, SatoshiLabs  already indicated that their backend node was already updated to the latest version 0.10.2 if you are using their mytrezor.com Chrome interface - see here

Like I said, I am in the process of starting my own electrum server that I know I can personally trust. As of now, I am in the process of downloading the blockchain for my full node, and some level of research needs to be done before I can create my electrum server that relies on my full node (I had found a thread advising how to create an electrum server, however it seems that it either contains some mistake or I am doing something wrong - I am very much a newbie when it comes to linux/ubuntu, so it could easily be either one).

I wonder, if other user think the same as you, and if so, the amount of full nodes will raise in the next days.

[drakoin]

Is it conceivable to add a service network which announces "block XYZ was invalid"?

A service that miners could subscribe to;
or organize themselves, even on one of their machines only?

Could make sense if those instances are rare.

Then SPV miners start hashing with what they assume (but not check) is a valid block,
and when a few seconds later an "invalid block" alert is broadcast, they simply restart.

Possible? Wrong approach? Then sorry - I do not understand enough of this yet.

But the other thing ... miners deliberately mining empty blocks, that sounds ruthless, no?

[stingers]

Can someone advice me if this split would affect the price of bitcoin anyhow? If yes how?

As you can see, the price wasn't affected by it at all.

Can someone advice me if this split would affect the price of bitcoin anyhow? If yes how?

The "split" like you call it, was resolved by the network 6 blocks after it happened - which shows how resilient (or anti-fragile) the Bitcoin network has become.  Regarding the price of bitcoin, please go to the speculation section of the forum.

On the other hand, it also shows that the system still has errors that can happen.
Don't get me wrong,i am glad that the "issue" was resolved, but i find that it shouldn't have happened in the first place.

cheers

Good to see that the price wasn't affected, but I guess it would have plunged down if the issue would have taken a day or two to resolve.
Also, in this kinda tech, issues will surely arise, you cannot expect them not to happen.

[turvarya]

Can someone advice me if this split would affect the price of bitcoin anyhow? If yes how?

The "split" like you call it, was resolved by the network 6 blocks after it happened - which shows how resilient (or anti-fragile) the Bitcoin network has become.  Regarding the price of bitcoin, please go to the speculation section of the forum.

It requires manual intervention, so anti fragile my ass!
Also where is the 6 blocks figure from? Your ass?

It just requires you to keep your software up to date.
It's like having a website and complain to be hacked, just because you didn't install security patches.
Do you also want the dev team to wipe your ass?

[redsn0w]

Can someone advice me if this split would affect the price of bitcoin anyhow? If yes how?

As you can see, the price wasn't affected by it at all.

Can someone advice me if this split would affect the price of bitcoin anyhow? If yes how?

The "split" like you call it, was resolved by the network 6 blocks after it happened - which shows how resilient (or anti-fragile) the Bitcoin network has become.  Regarding the price of bitcoin, please go to the speculation section of the forum.

On the other hand, it also shows that the system still has errors that can happen.
Don't get me wrong,i am glad that the "issue" was resolved, but i find that it shouldn't have happened in the first place.

cheers

Good to see that the price wasn't affected, but I guess it would have plunged down if the issue would have taken a day or two to resolve.
Also, in this kinda tech, issues will surely arise, you cannot expect them not to happen.

Why the price should be affected? The 'era' of bug or forked chain(s) that can affect the price doesn't exist anymore... it is only a pure speculation .

[notbatman]

Can somebody from blockchain.info explain what happened between June 16th and the 23rd, there's a .06 difference between my mycelium hot wallet and what blockchain.info says my address has. The payout amounts and date/times are also different.

I'm running core 0.10 and mycelium's servers are running 0.10 On the 28th I saw the notice that 51% of users were running v14 of p2pool and switched. v14 has had the top link to blockchain.info removed so I'm not the only one seeing this.

did somebody mine a v3 block on the 16th before the 4th of July?

My payout was 200% of normal as my miner was being especially lucky. After I upgraded to v14 it had dropped to 50%. (It's back to normal now)

The conspiracy part of my brain thinks the 1% group forced my luck down but the only option to do that was by screwing everybody else in the process.

Use the test-net next time, black hat FUDsters.

[freedoge.co]

hey, i'd like to help bitcoin and setup electrum full node, i have 4GB-RAM 4GBvRAM VPS is it capable to run full node with 10k history limit?
Any guide or help welcome for ubuntu 12.04