bitcoin network robustness

[doldgigger]

The Mt. Gox hack and the $500.000 USD wallet steal have gained quite some media attention. And for sure they had some educational effect on the community, regarding the responsibility of maintaining information security when running your own financial infrastructure (which is probably a key point of what bitcoin enables us to do).

But both incidents were attacks on computing infrastructure outside the bitcoin network. So I do wonder: Who has already noticed attacks on the bitcoin network itself? And if so, what were the countermeasures and how well did they work? If not: Is it really realistic that there are no such attempts? Or should the bitcoin software somehow alert the user, or at least those users who choose to get involved in the technical side?

(Just trying to figure out how well bitcoin is prepared for attempts to subvert the network)

[theymos]

There were some major incidents in the past:
https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Incidents

[doldgigger]

There were some major incidents in the past:
https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Incidents

Thanks, this is interesting read!

Looks like bitcoin has a design that allows for quite some resilience. Attacks against nodes could be defended against by constraining the bitcoin process on the peer. And the block length mechanism allows for a self-healing database.

However, I do not understand the last part from "micropayment contamination". How would one rebroadcast transactions that have been forgotten by the network?

[error]

However, I do not understand the last part from "micropayment contamination". How would one rebroadcast transactions that have been forgotten by the network?

Bitcoin does this automatically.