Potential vulnerabilities to the Bitcoin protocol, code or implementation. Potential weaknesses in the Bitcoin concept are probably better tagged "Economics."
Questions tagged [weaknesses]
53 questions
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Is it possible to brute force bitcoin address creation in order to steal money?
Bitcoin users frequently generate new addresses for each transaction they make, which greatly increases the number of bitcoin addresses being used to receive money.
Would it be possible (and profitable) for someone to find collisions in the bitcoin…
nmat
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58
votes
8 answers
What effects would a scalable Quantum Computer have on Bitcoin?
A scalable quantum computer is a quantum computer that is easy to extend - adding more (q)bits of memory is not a fundamentally hard problem, and will happen. Or, alternatively, that it follows Moore's Law - its memory capacity and speed will…
ripper234
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57
votes
10 answers
What methods could a government use to shutdown Bitcoin?
Let's say that a government decided to shut down the Bitcoin network. What options would they have to achieve this? Would they need to convince other governments? All governments?
Let's set as a precondition that they were able to scare away all the…
David
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53
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14 answers
Will deflation destroy Bitcoin?
With the limited total quantity of bitcoins, and people losing their wallets constantly decreasing that number, won't rampant deflation destroy Bitcoin?
eMansipater
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43
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4 answers
How is block-solution-withholding a threat to mining pools?
If I understand the technical process (for most mining pools) correctly, a participant in a mining pool is given block data to combine with a nonce to try to solve the block. If they get close (but not close enough to give the actual solution) to…
Highly Irregular
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What happens to the bitcoin network when the miners all stop in the future?
What happens to the bitcoin network when the miners all stop, years in the future after all the bitcoins have been mined? How will the network continue to function? Won't bitcoins then be useless? What would be the incentive for an individual to…
Demioprax
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How can I contribute to the open source Bitcoin project?
Generally speaking, how can:
A) A programmer contribute to Bitcoin?
B) A non-programmer contribute to Bitcoin?
Essentially; which areas are in most need of programming work / non-programming work?
Alex Waters
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20
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1 answer
How does the most recently found critical vulnerability (CVE-2018-17144) work?
If you were a miner, what are the steps you would take to create the extra (21,000,012.5th) bitcoin?
Where in the source code is this exactly (link)?
Why can't this be done by a non-miner?
Also, which forks are/were vulnerable?
hedgedandlevered
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Will the amount of electricity used for mining be huge if Bitcoin is widely adopted?
A quick and very rough estimation: If the USD/BTC exchange rate grows to $1000/BTC (not that far-fetched if Bitcoin is actually widely adopted) bitcoins for a value of $300000 would be produced every hour, given the current rate of 50BTC each 10…
D.H.
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1 answer
Would a reduced block generation time make the Finney attack more difficult?
Related Question:
What can be done to mitigate the risk of a Finney attack?
The Finney attack is a form of double-spending attack where the attacker pre-mines a block containing a conflicting transaction and then publishes a transaction. A…
David Schwartz
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14
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2 answers
Does any pool accept higher-fee transactions of a double spend, instead of the earlier one?
Some pools use a modified bitcoind that uses different rules for choosing the transactions to include in a block. Are there any pools that knowing one transaction to be included in a block would discard it if another transaction on the same inputs…
ThePiachu
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13
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8 answers
Could bitcoin be destroyed if an entity cornered the market?
I know the US Government is opposed to competing currencies. It seems that it would be a rather simple solution for them to destroy Bitcoin before it grows too much by merely buying all the currency, which would be rather feasible given today's…
Cory Klein
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13
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7 answers
What would be required to disincentivize mining pools?
Now that mining pools are starting to hit the 51% cusp of total mining power, what would need to happen to the Bitcoin protocol to reduce their success, and encourage distributed mining power over pools?
fbrereto
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What security features are built in to the standard Bitcoin software?
I have read much of the Bitcoin algorithm and its encryption basis, however little has been said of the software's inherent security.
What solutions are already built in to the software, and what is planned?
Problems I see:
At the moment it uses…
Evil Spork
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12
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2 answers
Is Bitcoin inherently dependent on electricity?
Obviously, the computing power necessary to create the blockchain requires access to fast hashing which requires electricity. Given that local power outages do occur, and this can cause a lack of network availability, does this act as the Achilles…
Gary
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