Crypto-activist Attacked Bitcoin Network

World famous peering payment system Bitcoin was under annoying and bold attack which continued for several days. The offender is an activist from Moscow, Russia. He is a regular participant of bitcointalk forum; according to his words, he committed such an aggressive attack just to prove he is able to perform it.
   Processing time for all transactions increased significantly, and there were difficulties with data processing, so computing machinery experienced extra-load. Though the attack wasn’t destructive or fatal it brought many troubles for Bitcoin system and its users. A single activist initiated very unpleasant for Bitcoin system process which must be repaired now.
   Cryptocurrency can be traded for goods or services: there are dozens of millions users of this peering payment system worldwide interested in stable and reliable operation of Bitcoin network. Popularity of Bitcoin-network increases rapidly because the system is easy-to-use. Cryptothug’s activity complicated interaction between users and Bitcoin crypto-net, messing it up.

  This attack which became possible due to a bug in the protocol of processing transactions, which duplicated transactions creating confusion, muddle and time-delay therefore burdening the entire system. In other words, this protocol allows taking any transaction, naming it, changing its ID, and forwarding it for approval to a row of units. A user creates a transaction and forwards its ID to a recipient, but in the process of sending an attacking script intercepts and changes transaction’s ID. The same way transactions were split off so that in the list of incoming transactions instead of a single transaction there were two transactions with unique IDs. Finally, processing of doubled transactions obviously takes much more time, therefore, processing delays appear.  Data processing can take from several minutes up to several hours. The information is confirmed by bitcoin wiki. System developers have been informed about this unpleasant incident for rather long time and have been working on code changes for over a year in order to correct the situation quickly and efficiently.

   Alister Maclin, the cryptothug who in order to verify transactions’ flexibility performed an attack which continued for couple of days last week, answered questions of a journalist from Vice magazine. The activist demonstrated the process to prove that he was the person who has executed the attack. Maclin simulated the attack by turning it on and off what was reflected in stats of system operation right away.
   Alister informed the journalist that for a professional specialist it is quite easy to perform such an action, the main thing is that a person should be competent and experienced. He didn’t put much time and efforts to write a script-code, the process took around couple of hours.
 Because of such experiments Bitcoin exchange services were not capable of remitting Bitcoin as quickly as usually.
   Cryptonet geek quoted “The Sea Wolf” by Jack London, where the main character has the same name Maclin Alex, as an argument of his actions and confirmed willingly that performed this impudent action just to prove he was able to, not more. Alister noted that he didn’t plan to benefit from the situation or take financial advantage.
   The activist also brought into the view that the key reason of his attack on bitcoin system is related to the amount of time and efforts required for processing transactions. According to Alister the community of bitcoin network puts no efforts to let system operate in better, quicker and more efficient way; the system falls short of users’ expectations and all work related to transactions depends on a small group of developers concerned with software core updates.
   Recently Bitcoin system went through one more stress-test carried out by CoinWallet exchange on June 22 this summer. CoinWallet exchange decided to prove that building units of bitcoin network are not meant for a great number of transactions in unit time. 10 servers with bitcoin wallets sent transactions to a great number of recipients twice per a second. Servers-senders received integrated output of these transactions. The bitcoin system passed this test easy and with no difficulties proving its resistance to this kind of testing, however, CoinWallet’s servers failed under the load.