Alert: chain fork caused by pre-0.8 clients dealing badly with large blocks

[Luke-Jr]

Let no one say that pooled mining is bad for bitcoin now, given how quickly the pool operators corrected this potential disaster and coordinated its recovery... It would have taken a lot longer for thousands of solo miners to have corrected it.

It's not that simple. If everyone was solo mining about equivalent, it wouldn't have been as troublesome!

Side note: p2pool is broken by this. Keep up with forrestv's updates if you use it.

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[PawShaker]

Apology: I did not read the whole thread before replying. But I agree it needs explanation.

I think what everyone wants to know is, are my coins safe? or am I holding useless 0.8 forked chain coins?

This needs to be answered please.

1) There will be no official announcement, because there is no authority for Bitcoin.

2) Nothing mayor has happened, your Bitcoins has been and are safe. All transactions already have been reprocessed on new fork. In fact the very first few blocks on new branch should contain all transactions in old branch. The main difference is who will get fees for these transactions and 25BTC mining profit. Otherwise the whole event has no impact. The threat of double spending is theoretical, because when fork occurred there were miners working on both branches.

3) The ramifications are and will be purely psychological. The main one is loss of confidence in the brand name. This may cause lowering of exchange rates and this in turn may trigger stop loss orders. The end result is panic on exchanges. We have seen something like this over year ago and Bitcoin is still kicking.

[mjh5054]

Apology: I did not read the whole thread before replying. But I agree it needs explanation.

I think what everyone wants to know is, are my coins safe? or am I holding useless 0.8 forked chain coins?

This needs to be answered please.

1) There will be no official announcement, because there is no authority for Bitcoin.

2) Nothing mayor has happened, your Bitcoins has been and are safe. All transactions already have been reprocessed on new fork. In fact the very first few blocks on new branch should contain all transactions in old branch. The main difference is who will get fees for these transactions and 25BTC mining profit. Otherwise the whole event has no impact. The threat of double spending is theoretical, because when fork occurred there were miners working on both branches.

3) The ramifications are and will be purely psychological. The main one is loss of confidence in the brand name. This may cause lowering of exchange rates and this in turn may trigger stop loss orders. The end result is panic on exchanges. We have seen something like this over year ago and Bitcoin is still kicking.

Very well said.  That's exactly it--I'm about to go to bed for the night and I'm sure tomorrow morning, the price will be the only indicator that anything even happened.  I'm sure there are going to be a TON of bitcoin users who won't have any clue as to what went on here.

[ChanceCoats123]

Does anyone have an idea when the next bitcoin version will be announced, so that this can all be behind us?

[etotheipi]

Very well said.  That's exactly it--I'm about to go to bed for the night and I'm sure tomorrow morning, the price will be the only indicator that anything even happened.  I'm sure there are going to be a TON of bitcoin users who won't have any clue as to what went on here.

I think the exchange rate isn't going to go too nuts, becuase there's plenty of people who realize how much of a non-issue this is and are buying cheap coins as fast as the people freaking out are selling them.  The price will drop, but not to $5.  

[tvbcof]

...
It's like finding a vulnarability in XP and then asking Vista users to downgrade to it.  

Most users I know of would have been delighted to do so.  Sorry for the OT.

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Bringing things back on-topic, I personally am surprised and delighted that we move in this direction (back to the universal fork as trunk) rather than force an upgrade.  I've a sense that it will spur a correction which will ease into an upward trending block size though, and since I don't agree with this I find it unfortunate.

---

Although at least one person has probably already pointed this out, it bears repeating that Bitcoin is still and experimental system, and has only just started to begin the climb to where it could end up.  Nobody should be totally shocked at this type of glitch, and everyone who understands systems of this nature should expect more where this one came from.  Hopefully none of them will represent a terminal event for the solution, but it is certainly possible.

[J.Socal]

I'm @ 225441 29 coin unconfirmed still catching up.Started @ around 225436 been a few hours.No green bar, but its spinning..Looks  it dropped $10 in less then a day.I think its good as its moving just taking a longer time..

[bitcoinbeliever]

Let no one say that pooled mining is bad for bitcoin now, given how quickly the pool operators corrected this potential disaster and coordinated its recovery... It would have taken a lot longer for thousands of solo miners to have corrected it.

I think the bigger problem is setting a precedent of coordinated action.  That cannot be relied on!  What really would have happened if the chips fell where they may?

[datafish]

The sequence of blocks on blockchain.info currently reads 225449, 225450, 225451, 225441, 225452.

[cypherdoc]

why the hell is Deepbit only on 0.3.21 and Luke on 0.6.0?

[joecooin]

This is being dealt with right now. Tomorrow it will be yet another example of the capability of an OS/P2P network to deal with and solve problems. We will walk out of this being stronger than before and we will have another story to tell our grandkids about the exciting times back then when Bitcoin became big. Priceless .

See it as a stress-test that no bank would survive.

If you don't see it like that and want to get rid of your coins at a low price please feel free to pm me and make me an offer, I will be online another 15 minutes before I go to bed and have a deep sleep even as an 'all-in-person' .

Joe

[mpfrank]

So has a majority hashrate-share of the mining pools finished downgrading yet?  I.e., are we definitely now on the path to adopting the 0.7 blockchain?

[cypherdoc]

The sequence of blocks on blockchain.info currently reads 225449, 225450, 225451, 225441, 225452.

no

[Luke-Jr]

why the hell is Deepbit only on 0.3.21

Tycho has been very resistent to any change.

... and Luke on 0.6.0?

Eligius is actually running both 0.6.0 and 0.8.0 concurrently, but has 0.6.0 prioritized so it trumps 0.8.0 when there's a conflict.
It noticed and began reporting the problem immediately, but I guess wizkid057 was busy with something at the time.

[MysteryMiner]

Atlas warned about database change some time ago. Original discussion here https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=119566.0;all

[dscotese]

I don't know if there are unit tests for the reference client, but I would bet there are.  Not one of them, obviously, tests for transactions as large as the one that forked the blockchain being rejected by old clients, but accepted by the new one.  Someone want to add that?  I would, but I haven't been able to get bitcoin to compile (not enough effort on my part - sorry!).

The problem, if I understand correctly, is that the 0.7 client rejected a good block because it didn't fit in the 0.7 database, and this caused it to ignore the block solution while the 0.8 client accepted it.  To the programmers way back when this code was being written, the assumption was that if one good client rejects a block, then all the good clients will reject it.  That assumption was wrong, so we have a fork.  BUT...

Both clients will continue to use the "blockchain with the highest cumulative difficulty" as the real transaction record.  This means that any transaction on the "other" chain will be re-broadcast until it's in whichever chain is "real" (which might switch back and forth when there are two notions of "real" - one for 0.7 and another for 0..  But the 0.7 client will never see the 0.8 chain as real because it has a too-large block in it.

[datafish]

The sequence of blocks on blockchain.info currently reads 225449, 225450, 225451, 225441, 225452.

no

It looks like that odd block got purged and it now reads in order.

[bg002h]

why the hell is Deepbit only on 0.3.21

Tycho has been very resistent to any change.

... and Luke on 0.6.0?

Eligius is actually running both 0.6.0 and 0.8.0 concurrently, but has 0.6.0 prioritized so it trumps 0.8.0 when there's a conflict.
It noticed and began reporting the problem immediately, but I guess wizkid057 was busy with something at the time.

I love this guy.

Luke -- perhaps this is a good strategy for miners to adopt. Perhaps someone should pay you (the Foundation?) to keep running like this to catch bugs quickly.

[mjh5054]

Back up to $45+ ALREADY??  Could this widespread bug, and it's fairly fast community-assisted response, maybe actually bolster confidence in bitcoins?  Or am I getting ahead of myself?

[cypherdoc]

why the hell is Deepbit only on 0.3.21

Tycho has been very resistent to any change.

... and Luke on 0.6.0?

Eligius is actually running both 0.6.0 and 0.8.0 concurrently, but has 0.6.0 prioritized so it trumps 0.8.0 when there's a conflict.
It noticed and began reporting the problem immediately, but I guess wizkid057 was busy with something at the time.

0.3.21 is ancient considering.  i think from now on we're going to have to make a much more public list of what version different pools are running so that individual miners can make a more informed decision on who to align with.