As a result, miners lost over USD 200,000 in revenue and nodes crashed, bringing the node count of Bitcoin Unlimited down from 800 to roughly 300. Still, this particular attack did not have a major impact on the Bitcoin network.
Nevertheless, the incident feed criticisms towards Bitcoin Unlimited team, as it is Bitcoin Unlimited’s second bug exploitation in 2017. One major criticism towards it was that the bug itself wasn’t discovered by the Bitcoin Unlimited development team.
Most members of the Bitcoin community, including industry leaders and experts such as Coinbase Director of Engineering Charlie Lee, former BTCC COO Samson Mow, Abra CEO Bill Barhydt as well as the CEO of SatoshiLabs - parent company of hardware Bitcoin wallet manufacturer Trezor - and Slush criticized Bitcoin Unlimited for the exploitation of an internal bug, according to CoinTelegraph.
Recently, the community has also suggested another Bitcoin privacy and scalability solution called SegWit. Therefore, it will be interesting to see how the miners react to the Bitcoin Unlimited bug exploitation and if Segregated Witness (SegWit) support will grow as a result.
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