Bitcoin has forked, markets are fucked, massive sell-off, ship is sinking.
Major software flaw with bitcoin is tearing the protocol, and the markets, apart. From Hackernews
Ok, here’s what happened and what it means. Bitcoin is built on a chain of blocks, each of which contains a set of transactions, the hash of the previous block, and a cryptographic proof-of-work which takes a lot of computing power to construct. Whichever block-chain is highest (that is, has the most total computing power invested in it) is considered valid, and has more blocks added to it by miners. People “mine” by taking outstanding transactions, writing them into a block together with the hash of the current highest-numbered block, performing cryptographic proof-of-work and publishing their new block.
A block was mined (by the Slush mining pool) which is accepted as valid by 0.8 clients, but rejected by 0.7 clients. More than half of the mining power was on 0.8, so the longest chain includes this block – but the 0.7 clients reject it, and have built a side-chain. The developers have asked all miners and mining pools to switch from 0.8 to 0.7, so that the 0.7 chain will grow to be longer than the 0.8 chain; once this happens, all Bitcoin clients will agree that it is the real one. In the meantime, however, merchants running Bitcoin 0.8 may be targeted by double-spend attacks: if they receive money in a transaction that exists only in the 0.8 blockchain, the same money is spent in a different way on the 0.7 blockchain so the transaction can’t just be copied over, and they act on the receipt of money by sending goods before the situation is resolved, then they could lose money. This is why MtGox has suspended Bitcoin deposits. (This can only happen if the coins were sent by someone who is using malicious, nonstandard software; transactions made by honest users will be copied to the 0.7 fork and mined without any issue.)
The height of the two chains can be monitored at https://coinbase.com/network/blocks . Currently the 0.7 chain is 13 blocks behind, which (since the normal mining rate is 6 blocks per hour) sets a lower bound of about two hours on resolution – assuming everyone switches their mining power immediately – but realistically it will probably be more like 6-12 hours.
Gooby pls
developing …
buttcoin.org:Bitcoin has forked, massive sell-off, ship is sinking. « The Bitcoin Channel
March 11, 2013 @ 10:28 pm
[…] READ MORE […]
BladeMcCool
March 11, 2013 @ 11:49 pm
Fortunately we put our butts together and came up with a solution to work around the bug. Full steam ahead and trading back up to $45 so far.
LJ superstar 2004
March 12, 2013 @ 11:44 am
Your “solution” was “force everyone to use the buggy software.” This seems hilariously appropriate.
BladeMcCool
March 12, 2013 @ 12:54 pm
Nobody was forced to. They were asked to, and they agreed it was the best course of action. Simply doing nothing would have probably worked out in the end as well, although a little messier, as the 0.8 chain was growing faster. 0.7 and before would have been “forced” to upgrade to continue to participate in bitcoin in that event.
SatoshiDice is killing Bitcoin - Buttcoin - The P2P cyrpto-currency for butts. - Buttcoin - It's Bitcoins with Butts! - Buttcoin.org
March 12, 2013 @ 3:14 pm
[…] content of the blocks generated now and its transactions filling blocks helped contribute to the blockchain fork, which caused chaos and allowed someone to perform the infamous double-spend […]
Victor
March 19, 2013 @ 2:25 pm
You must be furious now that BTC is $57. Had you invested in Bitcoin in 2011 instead of pouring your emotional problems into this butt blog, you could be millionaires by now.
Fluxity
March 19, 2013 @ 3:10 pm
Yes, I am very furious. A 20% swing in price in 2 days is perfectly normal in a very healthy, growing economy.
Chet Long
March 21, 2013 @ 6:24 pm
And the sky is falling… wait it isn’t and neither was there a massive sell off. If you understood economics worth a shit you’d know not to look at a 3 hour increment chart to call something a sell off… it hadn’t even came close to going below the 52 wk moving average.
Rob
November 19, 2013 @ 11:03 pm
You must feel very foolish right now – high of 900$ today
David
April 23, 2015 @ 1:03 pm
Pfft.