Hi Zapread community,
I was reading this article, and it states that since 2016, the 0.14 Bitcoin Core Client has a critical bug involving the ability for miners to spend the same 12.5 BTC twice. I don't understand why 12.5 BTC and I also don't understand is how that can crash 90% of the core nodes online. This critical bug was patched with the 0.16.3 patch release, but why haven't we seen this vulnerability exploited? I believe 12.5 BTC is a lot of money, but I don't think 12.5 bitcoin is a lot of coin for some early adopters.
The new version of bitcoin core can be downloaded here, it is recommended to upgrade any machines running an older version of the client. Here is another forum discussing the update.
How important is it for the network to be run on one singular consensus client? Should we have multiple clients running on the network to process transactions in case another critical bug is found?
How can the lightning network prevent future collapse of the network if an instance like this occurs? Could the lightning network provide enough liquid channels for users to operate day to day or hour to hour until a patch can be released?
Thanks for posting this @camo0067.
It's a fairly serious bug and could result in an accidental fork. Some already forked chains would also be affected in a similar way (BCH client ABC is affected).
There is now also mention of a compounding issue which could allow miners to inflate bitcoin in relation to this bug. yikes! Hopefully, we don't see anyone actually try to create this fork. I doubt anyone would given the cost and damage it would cause. As long as the majority of nodes upgrade we'll be good. ZapRead will update tonight.
> How important is it for the network to be run on one singular consensus client?
We should have a variety of clients verifying and mining so that any accidental fork on a single client would not affect the network as a whole.
> How can the lightning network prevent future collapse of the network if an instance like this occurs? Could the lightning network provide enough liquid channels for users to operate day to day or hour to hour until a patch can be released?
No need to worry. The channel close transaction within a "bad" block or fork would not mean a loss of funds on the main chain. The channel would still close as normal on the main chain through a non-affected miner.