Surprised I haven't seen this discussed here yet, so I'll start the thread.
Bitcoin Core developers are doing a live demo of "attack blocks" on Signet TODAY. The first run is in about 1.5 hours (14:00 UTC). You can still join.
Three runs total:
• 14:00 UTC today - join now if you can
• 22:00 UTC today
• 09:00 UTC tomorrow
All you need is a Bitcoin Core node synced on Signet . Full instructions here:
https://delvingbitcoin.org/t/consensus-cleanup-demo-of-slow-blocks-on-signet/2367
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What is this about?
The demo shows "attack blocks" - specially crafted blocks that take orders of magnitude longer to validate than normal ones. The goal is to illustrate one of four consensus vulnerabilities that BIP-54 (Great Consensus Cleanup) proposes to fix:
1. Timewarp attack - miners with majority hashrate manipulate block timestamps to artificially lower difficulty.
2. Slow validation attack - crafted transactions take 10+ minutes to validate on a fast machine, up to 10 hours on a Raspberry Pi. A miner can exploit this to delay competitors.
3. 64-byte Merkle tree ambiguity - a transaction of exactly 64 bytes is ambiguous between a Merkle leaf and an internal node, weakening inclusion proofs.
4. Legacy BIP-30 checks - an old duplicate TxID protection that's nearly redundant since BIP-34 but still has to be maintained in consensus.
The script details are being kept private to avoid handing a blueprint to attackers.
Anyone joining the demo?
