Ep. 35 The Most Permissive Mempool

In this episode of The Unhashed Podcast: I am not here today because well I slept through the recording. Will my cohosts fire me forever or just relegate me to writing and performing these intros for eternity? Bitcoin cash experienced a scheduled hard fork, but a not so scheduled $1.3 million double spend attack. With a mempool this permissive, is this the chain for low-tech libertines? And...facebook is planning on releasing its own shitcoin. Will this be good or bad for bitcoin?

Weekly News Wrap Up:

  1. Bitcoin Cash experienced a hard fork, that appears to have double spent $1.3M worth of transactions.  According to BITMEX blog, there were 3 interrelated events that occurred shortly after the planned hard fork

    1. Memory pool conditions were more permissive than TX validity conditions.  This allowed the attacker to flood the mempool with invalid TXs that could not be included on the chain.  This resulted in miners mining empty blocks

    2. The asymmetric chainspilt -  Not a clean hard fork because the new software (ABC 0.19.0) would follow the old chain if it had the most work.

    3. The coordinated two block re-organisation - successful 2 block double spend appears to have occurred with respect to 25 transactions. The output value of these 25 transactions summed up to over 3,300 BCH, as the below table indicates. This could have been “honest miners” returning funds sent to segwit addresses to rightful owners.

  2. Samson Mow, the CSO of Blockstream, has also been serving as founder and CEO of the gaming company Pixelmatic since 2011. The new plan will see Pixelmatic use Blockstream’s new token platform for launching security tokens on bitcoin via its sidechain Liquid.  By way of that platform, Pixelmatic will issue tokenized securities for its upcoming game Infinite Fleet. The security token sale is private, with a few “bitcoin OGs” participating so far. With this token, Infinite Fleet is aiming to raise $16 million by the end of the year, when they expect more exchanges to be processing security tokens.

  3. According to Bitcoin Magazine, the Dutch Financial Intelligence and Investigation Service (FIOD) has shut down cryptomixing site Bestmixer.io.  Dutch authorities moved to shut down the site on May 22, 2019, as part of a joint operation. How do you see moves like this from law enforcement affecting wallets with coinjoin like wasabi?

  4. Rumors are starting to solidify about Social media giant Facebook’s plans to roll out its own cryptocurrency dubbed “GlobalCoin” in 2020.  Sources spoke to both the BBC and the FT about the plans. We all know this isn’t going to be a “real” cryptocurrency, but will it be good or bad for Bitcoin?  

  5. Bitcoin is hitting new ATHs in Argentina due to high inflation of the Argentinian Peso.  The Peso’s inflation has been as much as 50% for the last year.  Inflation has fueled lately by fears of a devaluation due to election uncertainty..  Does this demonstrate a significant use case for bitcoin or are bitcoiners just pointing at places with high inflation, where everything is hitting new all time highs, and seeing a use case where there is only tragedy?  

  6. Matt Corallo controversy

  7. bitcoin-only purity test "controversy".  Thread in BTCPayServer GitHub

  8. (Bryan) I tried lolli.com for the first time today.  

Listener Questions:

Mailbag question: I would love to hear you guys talk about setting up a full node. Advice etc. Especially for someone who isn't very technical, but wants to use it as learning experience.

Matt (@mattpmccormack)

Clearing up misconceptions on twitter: What is the difference between block weight and block size?

One Final Note:

Make sure you are storing your crypto on something secure like aLedger and backing it up on something sturdy like aBillfodl. If you buy these items through the links above, we do take a cut of the profits but it also helps support the show - a win/win for all involved.

Colin aulds