Someone ‘noisy in the jacuzzi’ – Bitcoiners testnet angry after grief
A number of developers are angry at a fellow Bitcoiner who admitted he “crashed” one of Bitcoin's testnets by generating three years' worth of blocks in one week, forcing some developers to shut down the apps they were testing.
“The douchebag who developed with testnest is loose,” said Francis Pouliot, founder of the noncustodial Bitcoin (BTC) exchange and payments Bull Bitcoin. “Cool bro, you can attack a network with no economic incentive and the only real damage is a challenge and a waste of time for open source Bitcoin application developers,” he added.
Pouliot did not know until later that Jameson Loup, the founder of the digital asset self-storage solution Casa, had confessed himself guilty in an article published a day earlier on April 28 on the decentralized social media platform Nostr.
Loop claimed that his unfortunate attack generated more than 165,000 blocks (three years' worth) on Bitcoin's testnet in just one week.
However, Lopp argued that the “simple exploit” – requiring only 20 lines of code – highlights the weakness of the testnet that he has previously raised.
“I'm supporting a cause, and sometimes you have to do more than just send an email to get people's attention.”
Hash rate and difficulty data on the Bitcoin network testnet shows a hash rate of 2,315 Terahash per second (TH/s) before falling back to 86 TH/s on April 19, mempool.space reports.
However, Pouliot and a few others see Loop's actions differently, to “move to another spa” with someone in the jacuzzi – perhaps referring to testnet4.
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The sad attack disrupted node synchronization on the Bitcoin testnet, according to Leo Weiss, technical content lead at Lightning Labs — the company behind Bitcoin's layer-2 Lightning network.
“We may have to say goodbye to unlicensed test networks permanently,” Weiss said.
Now trying to sync testnet3 node looks like this. There are thousands of new blocks per hour, so no matter how fast you sync, you'll never catch up. We may have to say goodbye to unlicensed test networks permanently. pic.twitter.com/ITdrpNEFHH
— Leo Weese (@LeoAW) April 29, 2024
A member in the Bitcoin Talk Thread claimed that Loop's actions had sparked a “testnet war,” arguing that people like Loop should be excluded from Bitcoin's testnet, even saying that Loop was “a security threat to Bitcoin as a whole.”
Loup said he would like to see a reset of Bitcoin's testnet to fix the testnet's “timewarp” weakness and restore mining rewards from the testnet, which is now practically zero.
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