Roger Ver Agrees To Sell BTC For BTU At 1:1 Ratio

Roger Ver, the bitcoin broker/asset manager and Bitcoin Unlimited supporter, has agreed to a one-to-one trade of Bitcoin Unlimited (BU) for bitcoin, signaling his confidence in Bitcoin Unlimited. The offer is for at least 60,000 bitcoins and as much as 130,000 bitcoins. with a bitcoin split pending.

Someone has apparently offered to exchange his BTU for Ver’s BTC at a one-to-one rate. The bitcoin address on blockchain.info associated with the offer holds 40,000 BTC.

The person also made the offer to another party, Jihan Wu: “Consider it primarily as a vote of no confidence in the Bitcoin Unlimited software and development team as it currently stands,” the post read. “I’ll add the contingency that the deal is null and void if there ar major changes to either.”

Ver responded: “This sounds like a great deal for both of us. I look forward to ironing out the exact details and terms. I’m super busy for the next 48 hours, but would love to connect after that.”

“I will sell my coins on the slow, expensive Core chain and use the proceeds from that… I would sell those coins and use the proceeds to buy more BU useful,” Ver said in a recent Youtube video posted by MadBitcoins. “Bitcoin Unlimited coins will be so much more useful because you’ll actually be able to sit and receive them with people, unlike the Bitcoin Core coins on this congested network that will be congested and last forever.”

‘Speechless’ Over Offer

The post drew significant comment on Reddit.

“I am speechless to see the account holding 40k bitcoin, who owns those kind of money!!!” a Reddit post noted. “If there is a split which is highly likely with the uncertain things going on with the rumors and things regarding it, i am not sure how things will go and the price is recovering even at this level. Good luck making the deal.”

One post noted that Ver is putting his money where his mouth is, providing the offer is not a bluff.

Another post said Ver will find an excuse not to make the public deal since he is only bluffing.

Still another post questioned why Ver would do a one-for-one trade when the market rate on Bitfinex for BTU (Bitcoin Unlimited) is 0.2102 and the rate for BCC (Bitcoin Core) is 0.758. To be a fair trade, one would need to offer Ver 3.6 BTU for every 1 BCC.

The offer naturally drew comment on the chances of success for Bitcoin Unlimited. Ver has been a proponent of a block size increase and supports Bitcoin Unlimited as a solution.

Another post said for Bitcoin Unlimited to exist, it requires more proof-of-work than BTC.

Also read: Bitcoin Core developers attack Bitcoin Unlimited

Bitcoin Unlimited Still Controversial

The Ver offer demonstrates that Bitcoin Unlimited remains controversial. Those in favor of it argue that it would quickly increase transaction capacity, addressing delays and lowering fees. Those against it state that the Segregated Witness solution would increase capacity far higher through layer two protocols.

Both sides say the other’s solution will centralize bitcoin. Those against Bitcoin Unlimited say an increased blocksize would increase costs, lowering the number of nodes. In response, BU supporters say that sharding would address these concerns and lead to centralized hubs due to the economies of scale. To which Segregated Witness supporters say the protocol is designed to be decentralized.

Featured image from YouTube/Torsten Hoffmann.

Bitcoin Core Developers Attack Bitcoin Unlimited

Editor’s Note: The article has been amended to remove references to Bitcoin Core contributor Eric Lombrozo, who has confirmed to CCN that he is not related to ‘ciphera‘, as reported erroneously at the time of publishing.

The empire strikes back. As the people rise and gain the majority of miners who have decided, Bitcoin Core developers have gone on the attack.

A bug on the overlay xThin client has been exploited, rather than professionally and rationally revealed, to send Bitcoin Unlimited nodes down crashing. Miners are not affected as far as I am aware, but non-mining nodes are coming down like a rock.

The story is developing. Bitcoin Unlimited developers are far too busy addressing the matter and coming up with a solution to answer us or the public at this point in time, but we wrote just hours before this attack that Bitcoin Core supporters were threatening with bug exploits. Specifically, a person who goes by the handle of “ciphera” stated:

“Running my fuzzer on the diffs BU have from Core, and have already some crashes. Hopefully some of them are exploitable. Going to collect as many zero-days to release at the most opportune time possible.”

After four years, we now have Bitcoin Core developers – who have increased transaction fees to be uncompetitive with even PayPal, who have created transaction delays that cause high frustration for users – unashamedly attack the people’s money.

Bitcoin Core, you behave worse than standing armies. You wish to imprison us. You wish to chain us. You ban us, you censor us, you attack us. You wish to centralize bitcoin in your own hands where you can use the bugs you yourselves have probably sneaked in the bitcoin clients as a means of control.

You can’t win. Bitcoin will pass this test. Bitcoin will withstand this attack. This artificial wall will be brought down, whether in bitcoin itself or through another, perhaps better, digital currency. These chains will be broken. Liberty, if history has any say, will triumph.

Disclaimer: The views expressed in the article are solely that of the author and do not represent those of, nor should they be attributed to BANC.

Image from Shutterstock.

Bitcoin Core Supporter Threatens Zero Day Exploit if Bitcoin Unlimited Hardforks

Editor’s note: The article has been updated to remove references to Bitcoin Core contributor Eric Lombrozo, who has confirmed to CCN that he is not related to ‘ciphera‘, as reported erroneously at the time of publishing.

Tempers seem to be flaring in bitcoin land as some Bitcoin Core supporters threaten to attack the currency if the economic majority decides to increase transaction capacity through a hard-fork.

A person going by the handle of “ciphera” publicly stated in a thread started by Chris Belcher, a bitcoin developer and strong supporter of Bitcoin Core:

“Running my fuzzer on the diffs BU have from Core, and have already some crashes. Hopefully some of them are exploitable. Going to collect as many zero-days to release at the most opportune time possible.”

He was replying to another user who stated “I will personally exploit any flaw in [Bitcoin Unlimited] and not disclose.”

Bug exploits threatened if Bitcoin Unlimited hardforks – image from reddit

The threat comes just days after another strong Bitcoin Core supporter, James Hilliard, aka Lightsword, operator of BitClub – a small pool with around 4% hardware share – used the mining hardware to attack the bitcoin network through transaction malleability.

Emin Gün Sirer‏, Cornell professor, commenting on the BitClub attack told CCN at the time:

“It’s disheartening to see attacks by miners on Bitcoin. Historically, miners have acted as guardians of the ecosystem, and have, with very very rare exceptions, refrained from engaging in activities that benefit themselves at the expense of others. This change portends of worse attacks to come, especially if there is a fork.”

Who is Ciphera?

This article wouldn’t have been newsworthy if two factors were not present. Firstly, in a leaked conversation back in 2013 between Peter Todd and John Dillon, the latter stated:

“Every time anyone tried mining with [an alternative client], I’d use my knowledge of all the ways they are incompatible to fork them, making it clear they can’t be trusted for mining…. all I would have to do to keep them marginalized and the majority of hashing power using the approved official implementation is slip the odd consensus bug into their code.”

Ciphera’s Reddit handle was created around the same time and seems mainly focused on the blocksize question. Looking at his comment history, Ciphera appears to be a very strong supporter of Bitcoin Core, as is Ciphrex.

There is, however, no concrete evidence linking the two. Moreover, Ciphera’s github account names himselfas Karen Jorgenson, but there doesn’t appear to be any indication that any person with such name is openly involved in bitcoin.

Regardless, as an open source project with a bounty in billions open to any hacker across the globe, if the bitcoin clients have any bugs, it is a question of if, rather than when, they will be exploited.

A zero-day exploit would further handsomely enrich the hacker if he/she doesn’t get caught, so if one can be found despite the project being open source with many eyes on the code as well as many Bitcoin Unlimited developers – including current or former software engineers from internet/tech giants – then, again, it’s only a matter of time.

The attitude, however, suggests that instead of serving the bitcoin community by fixing any bugs, some appear to be taking a very confrontational view. If bitcoin can withstand it, then it can only strengthen the currency.

Image from Shutterstock.

What Caused the Bitcoin Unlimited Node Crash?

Bitcoin Unlimited nodes went down like a rock yesterday as a vulnerability was exploited. They now appear to have recovered, but the speed with which nodes fell is unprecedented.

The cause appears to be the use of “asserts” in production. This will get a bit technical, but we asked a pseudo-anonymous Bitcoin Unlimited developer who would rather not be named to provide an explanation for a non-technical audience. He told CCN:

“Assertions are used to capture programming errors, i.e. to check whether a condition that the programmer *believes* should hold true at a particular point in the program, actually holds true. If an assertion is triggered (by the expected condition not holding true) then they usually result in a short message and aborting the program.

They are not intended for handling user or run-time errors (e.g. invalid input data), and are therefore generally disabled after a program exits its debugging phase. An assert(0) in C/C++ program code, if hit, will abort the program with certainty.

In bitcoind code (BU as well as Core), assertions are ENABLED in the production builds for reasons that are perhaps a bit too complex to go into here.

What happened: BU developers left an assert(0) in a code path that could be reached due to input data (Xthin protocol request) not being adequately checked. This left a door open to someone who wanted to trigger that assert(0) to craft a special message which would make the BU software enter that code path.”

In more simplified terms, it is a method coders use in testing, but generally this method is automatically disabled once the client is launched for users to download. In bitcoin, however, that’s not the case. This method remains enabled. Thus, if asserts are not removed, that allows anyone with some skill to remote crash the nodes.

The BU developer further states that “it is not good practice to leave asserts active in production code because they are NOT designed for handling run-time errors, should use exceptions for that.

Leaving them ENABLED in production code is dangerous. There is an NDEBUG definition (stands for “no debug”). Normally this will disable asserts for the production version, but for “reasons”, the bitcoind codebases don’t do this.”

Bitcoin Unlimited developers are currently quite busy, so we didn’t press for an explanation of the “reasons,” but he says that the practice of leaving asserts enabled has to be carefully re-evaluated. “It is clearly not good programming practice. It makes such incidents possible.” – he continued.

We reached out to Matt Corallo, a Bitcoin Core developer, and others, to ask if an explanation could be provided on why the practice of leaving asserts enabled is used, but have not received a response in time for publishing.

The BU developer tells CCN :

“[There] needs to be a detailed incident report… touching e.g. code review, release of security-critical fixes, and working with security researchers and other Bitcoin client projects on the topic of responsible disclosure of such vulnerabilities.

As a developer, I am certain that there are more bugs in Bitcoin code, not just BU code. So, this issue is bigger than BU.”

It is not yet clear who exactly discovered the bug, but a fix was merged in BU yesterday around midday London time. Shortly after, Peter Todd, a Bitcoin Core developer, tweeted a link to the bug fix prior to new clients being released. The attack followed soon after. Peter Tschipper, a Bitcoin Unlimited developer, stated yesterday:

“The bug fix was merged…and literally within 30 minutes the attack happened. They just have been monitoring our Git…I was actually talking with [Andrea Suisani] at the time about maybe we should be more careful about using Git for these kind of things… and then minutes later the attack happened.”

Just hours before the attack, CCN published an article on Bitcoin Core supporters threatening zero-day exploits.

Around 200 Bitcoin Unlimited nodes withstood the attack. Haipo Yang, founder of viaBTC, a pool that mines Bitcoin Unlimited, told CCN that they were affected by yesterday’s events, but the pool’s node/s uses auto restart, “so the effect was not big.”

BU’s hashrate appears unchanged, now standing at 33% of network’s share.

Image from Shutterstock.

From CCN.COm

Bitcoin Unlimited Suffers Setback After Bug Crashes Software

Bitcoin Unlimited (BU), which has been touted as being the fix to Bitcoin’s blockchain transaction backlog, has suffered a blow after attackers unleashed a new bug that crashed the system.

Just recently, BU was reported to have garnered around 40 percent support over a 24-hour period from the Bitcoin community. While miners such as Antpool, Bitcoin’s biggest mining pool, announced that it was switching over to BU.

However, whether it’s in light of the recent attack, support for BU has dropped to 32.6 percent, according to Coin.Dance, a website which tracks industry data.

Information from the tracking site illustrates that following the attacks, the number of nodes hosting BU fell to 410 from 781 yesterday. This is the lowest level it has dropped to since October last year when it started to steadily increase. It has since crept back up to 690.

Support for BU Lessens

Earlier this month, Bitcoin core developer Gavin Andresen, tweeted ‘run Bitcoin Unlimited. It is a viable, practical solution to destructive transaction congestion.’

However, after the discovery of the bug, BU advocate Roger Ver, said:

Normally, in Bitcoin Unlimited when we find a Core bug we just fix it and move on.

With his comment receiving criticism on social media, this news is unlikely to do much to boost support for BU. With many claiming that those behind BU don’t have the experience to fix the blockchain’s transaction congestion, this is likely to provide fuel for its critics who are against the system.

Only recently, Charlie Lee, creator of Litecoin, said on Twitter that ‘users cannot trust Bitcoin’s $20 billion network in the hands of BU developers.’

Samson Mow, CEO at game creator Pixelmatic, took to social media to question an alleged doctored image about a BU vulnerability after suspicions were raised when the potential vulnerability didn’t add up:

[I] thought it was impossible for Bitcoin Unlimited to be even less credible, but nope, they never stop surprising me.

Whereas, Andreas Antonopoulos, Bitcoin author, said on Twitter:

This time there was little economic impact. During a fork, the damage would have been millions. QA matters. It matters $millions.

Blockchain Still Has a Problem

As blockchain’s transaction issues remain, a solution to fixing the congestion needs to be agreed on. However, how long that will take is yet to be seen.

While the BU bug attack won’t do much to bolster support there are still miners fully committed to sticking with it. Antpool is just one miner.

With both sides raising the stakes as to the most viable choice it doesn’t look as though an answer will occur anytime soon. For now, around 900,000 Bitcoin transactions waiting to be cleared will be stuck on the blockchain as the network runs over capacity.

Featured image from Shutterstock.