Bitcoin's open-source developers don't agree on many things, but you'd be forgiven if you thought something best known as an "attack" might be one of them.
Still, there's a divide forming in conversation surrounding bitcoin's long-standing "timewarp attack" – and for good reason. First and foremost, Blockstream co-founder Mark Friedenbach recently found that the exploit could be harnessed to help bitcoin scale – that is, reach more users and process more transactions faster, if developers embrace and implement the idea.
But since its unveiling last week, the discovery has driven a shift in the conversation around the attack, meant to describe how miners might submit blocks featuring timestamps that are larger than they should be to push down the difficulty of creating new blocks (a trick that could help them to earn and collect more bitcoin rewards).
The result is that prominent thinkers in the bitcoin development community now appear split on an issue that's been the subject of discussion since 2012..
Greg Maxwell, a Blockstream co-founder and one of bitcoin's most prominent developers, for example, recently called for a fix to the long-standing bitcoin attack on the bitcoin mailing list, the leading gathering point for development conversation globally. Maxwell has been silent on Friedenbach's proposal specifically, but the call did occur after chatter began about the research, formally called "forward blocks."
As a result, this divide might be likely to continue.
Friedenbach's research, after all, proposes an idea that developers seeking to secure the protocol find enticing: It allows bitcoin's block size to be increased without asking all of those operating the software to upgrade. (Seeing as this minor parameter has been a hot point of contention among the community for so long, some see it as a sort of "breakthrough.")
That said, some argue Friedenbach's new research makes fixing the attack even more pressing.
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https://www.coindesk.com/not-everyone-wants-to-fix-bitcoins-time-warp-attack-heres-why/
