Bitcoin: System error since 2017 would have made fraud possible

Experts regularly warn against possible fraud with crypto currencies, although the currencies are becoming increasingly secure. However, industry experts do not currently refer to malware, but to a bug in the system itself that could have been exploited by criminals.

Technology experts track bug back to September 2017

At the beginning of the month the specialists of the specialist portal Heise pointed out a Bitcoin bug, which would have come as if they had known about the error in the blockchain of the Bitcoin for users with corresponding criminal energy. According to current reports, the bug has existed since September 2017. The consequences could have been quite serious if the problem had become public. This would have made a so-called double donation possible, as the experts report. This means the following: The error allowed credit to be paid out two times instead of once. In the usual scenario within the blockchain, this is prevented by the different nodes that communicate with each other.

Double withdrawal option was only part of the problem

The bug was in the verification code of the crypto currency, so that misunderstandings were theoretically possible in the context of the regular routine checks of the block-chain-internal transactions and thus double payouts. However, by no means every user could have made a criminal profit from it – the miners and mining farms operating worldwide, on the other hand, would have been very well able to manipulate blocks with corresponding effort. According to Heise, however, the dilemma was less the potential loss of capital. Rather, it was the option to create illegal blocks that would have been permanently part of the block chain. Because corrections afterwards are not practicable because of the connection to the previous block of the chain.

Error sources will be corrected step by step

For many insiders the bug could have even become an existential threat for the still most important token Bitcoin. Despite the continuous subjunctive, this shows one thing above all: There is still potential for optimizations to make crypto currencies such as the dash or, in this special case, the Bitcoin more secure for users. It is pleasing to note that the bug was only noticed now and that major interventions by criminals did not seem to have occurred. Many complications have already been overcome by developers in recent years.