Live Bitcoin attack block demonstration on Signet today

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0xShardMember
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#1Nov 24, 2024, 04:34 AM
I’m kinda surprised this hasn’t come up here yet, so I figured I’d kick off the discussion. The Bitcoin Core devs are doing a live demonstration of "attack blocks" on Signet TODAY. The first session is in about 1.5 hours (at 14:00 UTC). If you want to catch it, there's still time to join. Here’s the schedule for the three demonstrations: • 14:00 UTC today jump in if you can • 22:00 UTC today • 09:00 UTC tomorrow You’ll need a synced Bitcoin Core node on Signet. You can find the full instructions here: https://delvingbitcoin.org/t/consensus-cleanup-demo-of-slow-blocks-on-signet/2367 So what’s this all about? This demo is showcasing "attack blocks" which are specially designed blocks that take way longer to validate compared to regular ones. The aim is to highlight one of the four consensus weaknesses that BIP-54 (Great Consensus Cleanup) is looking to address: 1. Timewarp attack miners with a majority hashrate can mess with block timestamps to artificially decrease difficulty. 2. Slow validation attack certain transactions can take over 10 minutes to validate on a fast machine, and up to 10 hours on a Raspberry Pi. A miner could use this to slow down their competition. 3. 64-byte Merkle tree ambiguity a transaction that’s exactly 64 bytes can be confusing between a Merkle leaf and an internal node, which weakens inclusion proofs. 4. Legacy BIP-30 checks this is an old duplicate TxID protection that’s almost obsolete since BIP-34 but still needs to be part of consensus. The details of the script are being kept under wraps to prevent attackers from getting a playbook. Who else is planning on joining the demo?
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