Exploiting Bitcoin Network Flaws

[jackg]

Are there any bitcoin network flaws that can be exploited to gain money without losing other people's money in the process.

[1715210988]

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[cr1776]

Are there any bitcoin network flaws that can be exploited to gain money without losing other people's money in the process.

Query: if there were, would bitcoin be worth anything?

[jackg]

Are there any bitcoin network flaws that can be exploited to gain money without losing other people's money in the process.

Query: if there were, would bitcoin be worth anything?

Yes it would. Many people would not know about these flaws because why would people share them?

However, there may be some small flaws that the bitcoin producers canot fix and have left in the hope that people don't find them!

[Athertle]

Are there any bitcoin network flaws that can be exploited to gain money without losing other people's money in the process.

Query: if there were, would bitcoin be worth anything?

Yes it would. Many people would not know about these flaws because why would people share them?

However, there may be some small flaws that the bitcoin producers canot fix and have left in the hope that people don't find them!

No, it wouldn't. Prices would plummet to cents per bitcoin. Think about it: the method would invariably be leaked out to a number of people. Do you really think that they would all be smart with it? No. They would spam the method to get thousands, even millions of bitcoins, and list the method for sale. I haven't seen any method like that on here or the deep web. If there is a method like that, it's a hoax.

[n2004al]

Are there any bitcoin network flaws that can be exploited to gain money without losing other people's money in the process.

Maybe there can be flaws in bitcoin (it is yet a new thing) but don't think that there are exploitatable by you and me. There are videos in internet that "produce" tons of bitcoin by the owners. Try to find them. Maybe they want to sell their invention.  And after you wouldn't have place where to put all your produced bitcoins.

[Jeremycoin]

No there is not, as long as the miners still mining Bitcoin to verified all of the transactions.

[coinableS]

Is OP talking about double-spends?  You can temporarily "gain" money this way.
Or is OP asking if there's a way to create bitcoins out of thin air? Not anymore, that flaw was patched

[tommorisonwebdesign]

If there were a way to crack into the blockchain and do something to create fake coins or commit doublespends like what he is talking about, the price of Bitcoin would plummit. Thankfully, we have quality MIT and Caltech league Computer Scientists working on this project, and would quickly foresee any kind of exploit inquired by the OP. Script kiddies won't be able to beat that.

[Wapinter]

Are there any bitcoin network flaws that can be exploited to gain money without losing other people's money in the process.

Query: if there were, would bitcoin be worth anything?

Yes it would. Many people would not know about these flaws because why would people share them?

However, there may be some small flaws that the bitcoin producers canot fix and have left in the hope that people don't find them!

How can you be so sure? Nothing is perfect there may be flaws in bitcoin too but not any is known presently

[jackg]

If there were a way to crack into the blockchain and do something to create fake coins or commit doublespends like what he is talking about, the price of Bitcoin would plummit. Thankfully, we have quality MIT and Caltech league Computer Scientists working on this project, and would quickly foresee any kind of exploit inquired by the OP. Script kiddies won't be able to beat that.

Seems as if you are saying that MIT and Caltech are perfect and there is no point in making new things if they are so perfect! And in doing so, implying that MIT and Caltech don't exploit loopholes in bitcoin for themselves where they could earn millions of pounds.

[achow101]

If there were a way to crack into the blockchain and do something to create fake coins or commit doublespends like what he is talking about, the price of Bitcoin would plummit. Thankfully, we have quality MIT and Caltech league Computer Scientists working on this project, and would quickly foresee any kind of exploit inquired by the OP. Script kiddies won't be able to beat that.

Seems as if you are saying that MIT and Caltech are perfect and there is no point in making new things if they are so perfect! And in doing so, implying that MIT and Caltech don't exploit loopholes in bitcoin for themselves where they could earn millions of pounds.

He is saying that they are top notch researchers and computer scientists who would probably find the problem first and fix it before others figure it out. Since the people who would be researching that probably depend on Bitcoin and wish to see its success, they probably wouldn't exploit those vulnerabilities since doing so could completely crash and destroy Bitcoin. Also, they would be millions of DOLLARS not pounds since those institutions are in the US.

[jackg]

I thought bitcoin was decentralised and gbp is worth more than usd so it would make sense for these researchers to withdraw their btc into gbp than usd.

[BCEmporium]

Any vulnerability would crumble BTC price to cents or even flat zero.
And no, there wouldn't be a way for it to pass unnoticed, way too many people is constantly checking the blockchain and its transactions. Anything suspicious would immediately ring the bells.

The currency to trade to value's have nothing to do with nothing. GBP worth more per unit, but you would get less GBP units per BTC.

[achow101]

I thought bitcoin was decentralised and gbp is worth more than usd so it would make sense for these researchers to withdraw their btc into gbp than usd.

Bitcoin is decentralized.

If US researches want money they can spend, they would withdraw their BTC to USD. While GBP may be worth more than USD, converting from BTC to USD will still give them the same amount of value as BTC to GBP. Besides, they would want to spend USD in the US since US stores don't accept GBP.

[cr1776]

1. This seems very off-topic for this sub-forum.

2. You can see if anyone is (or has been) exploiting flaws but writing a quick tool to count and trace all the bitcoins in existence and see if it matches up with the total it should be mathematically.  That will answer the question as to whether flaws have been exploited in the past definitively.

3. There is no way to "gain money without losing other people's money in the process".  If you inflate the currency through creating bitcoin out of thin air everyone else's coin's values drop proportionally.  E.g. if there are 14 million bitcoins in existence and I create 14 million more, what will happen to the price?  I don't believe it would be stable or increase.

[Sergio_Demian_Lerner]

Are there any bitcoin network flaws that can be exploited to gain money without losing other people's money in the process.

Yes, but probably you can't get much money out of them.

For instance Selfish mining is one (if you interpret that the remaining miners are not "loosing money", but just earning less money).

Certain design failures in the Bitcoin mining algorithm (double SHA-256 of the header) also allow non-obvious speedups that miners may be exploiting or may exploit in the future to obtain a small advantage. All commercial Bitcoin ASIC designs are confidential.

And some critical things don't leak so easily. As a comparison, Pieter Wuille held information about a critical bug in Bitcoin for a year until it was finally solved.

I think that the incentive to exploit weaknesses is low for many different reasons: low monetary gain, high initial cost to setup the exploit, high economic penalty if exploit discovered, personal reputation at stake, legal concerns, etc.

Bitcoin is fantastic for a lot of reasons, but it is not perfect.