Bitcoin’s price remained stable as news surfaced of a bug in Bitcoin Unlimited (BU) shutting down half of its nodes.
On Tuesday, BU’s node numbers dropped suddenly from around 800 to 400, with developer Andrew Stone and investor Roger Ver subsequently confirming that an attacker exploited a bug in the protocol.
Stone wrote on Tuesday:
“We are seeing an abnormal, hard-to-create input result in a negative outcome so we are classifying this as a network attack.”
The events unleashed a frenzy of social media activity which even engulfed some of cryptocurrency’s best-known names.
Core developer Peter Todd took to Twitter to deny any involvement in the bug, about which he tweeted an hour after the malicious episode began.
Responding to Todd, tech blogger Avatar X alleged that fellow developer Greg Maxwell had said that two further bugs were present in BU which had “yet to be fixed.”
Ver, meanwhile, received hostility. One BU node operator accused him and other responsible parties of “plain incompetence” as panic gripped a community to whom Ver had only last week unveiled a brand new mining pool.
Litecoin creator Charlie Lee added to the criticism of BU, stating that the bug “proves that users cannot trust Bitcoin’s $20B network in the hands of BU developers.”
Lee also quoted suspicions that Stone’s description of BU “vulnerability” did not mathematically add up.
Only Andreas Antonopoulos, commentating that “individual incompetence” was not the root cause of the problem, appeared to remain neutral on Wednesday.
“It's about a process with diverse and laborious review, which catches bugs before production,” he continued in a series of tweets, while nonetheless praising Bitcoin Core’s development structure.
“Blaming this on "incompetence" of BU devs misses the point & undervalues the invisible but highly effective QA process that Core offers.”