Hi all. Bitcoin is a very interesting phenomenon we have never seen before (or I have missed out some historical spirals
), so it`s the first thing of that kind and may be vulnerable to unpredicted attack concepts. One of them is given below:
Can anybody explain what will happen after such scenario:
- Computer A is mining BTCs
- It has it's system clock adjusted, said, five hours ahead.
- Suddenly this computer generates the 2016'th block on the current difficulty.
- The new block is signed (including generation time && new difficulty) and published to other peers.
Will the new difficulty smaller than it should be? Or Bitcoin system has some mechanism to handle this case?
I've studied project wiki, original article and other sources and did not find any answer.
If such atack is possible, attacker may adjust system time to +1 day, + 2 week and so on, dropping new difficulty in such way.
The probability of such situation is not so low as may seem, because most miners don't like difficulty jumps. So, this people are likely to install hacked bitcoin miners, which will generate blocks with wrong timestamps and thus lower difficulty. But in this case Bitcoin system may be destroyed...