Bitcoin [BTC] bug: Litecoin [LTC]’s Charlie Lee explains how Nakamoto Consensus helped the situation

Recently, a massive vulnerability was discovered by a Bitcoin Cash [BCH] developer in Bitcoin Core [BTC]. Here, the bug could have caused a huge chunk of the BTC network to collapse and was recognized to be a DoS [denial-of-service] and inflation vulnerability. However, the bug was fixed in the updated version 0.16.3 of Bitcoin Core. The creator of Litecoin [LTC], Charlie Lee also gave his stance on the matter via a comment on Twitter.

A developer on the social media platform had written:

“Ugh, 87% of the #Bitcoin network is *still* vulnerable to CVE-2018-17144. Every day this goes on, we are trusting miner(s) and lose credibility with the decentralised network claim.”

In response to this, Lee stated that there is no urgency to have all the nodes upgraded to 0.16.3. This is because the majority of hashrate has already been upgraded to ensure that any invalid blocks are orphaned. According to Lee, this is similar to non-upgraded nodes of the 0.13 version and relying on miners to enforce SegWit to avoid incorrect spending.

In fact, it is extremely dangerous to get all the members to immediately upgrade to 0.16.3 as having client diversity is a significant feature for a decentralized network. Lee stated that this is true because there may be fresh bugs in the newer versions, which must be detected before everybody goes for the upgrade. He wrote:

“Having client diversity is very important as there may be new bugs in newer versions. People should take their time to get comfortable with upgrades.”

In his last tweet, he mentioned that all the exchanges and merchant processors have probably upgraded in order to protect themselves. Lee believes that the miners have no incentives to cheat, proving that the Nakamoto consensus game theory of the Bitcoin Core network is designed to avoid abuse by any party.

Last week, the whole statement regarding the risk posed by the bug was released by the developers. The members titled the official post as ‘CVE-2018-17144 Full Disclosure’. Here, the statement talked about the two components of threats that would have come to life in case of bug exploitation. The two recognized risks were denial-of-service and price inflation, although the initial observation could not detect the latter threat until much later.

Luke Dashjr, the same developer who posted the comment in the first place reverted to Lee’s standpoint. He stated:

“There’s a reason Segwit wasn’t even supposed to be activated before a majority of the economy upgraded. Stop trying to turn #Bitcoin into $BCH!”