Someone ‘pooed in the jacuzzi’ — Bitcoin users furious after testnet woes
Several Bitcoin developers have left one of Bitcoin’s testnets “sad” by producing three years’ worth of blocks in a week, forcing some developers to shut down applications under test. I’m furious at my fellow Bitcoin user who admitted he missed it.
“Whoever ruined testnest is an idiot,” said Francis Pouliot, founder of Bull Bitcoin, a non-custodial Bitcoin exchange and payments company. “That’s cool bro, you can attack the network without any financial incentive and literally the only harm you do is messing up the testing of the open source Bitcoin application builder and wasting time.”
Pouliot did not realize until later that the person who had identified him as the culprit in a post on decentralized social media platform Nostr the previous day, April 28, was Jameson Lopp, a cypherpunk and founder of digital asset self-storage solution Casa.
Lopp said his deplorable attack generated more than 165,000 blocks (three years’ worth) on the Bitcoin testnet in just one week, costing about $1 worth of electricity.
However, Lopp claimed that the “minor attack”, which required just 20 lines of code, actually highlights the weaknesses of the testnet that he had previously raised.
“I’m an advocate for a cause, and sometimes you have to do more than send an email to get people’s attention.”
According to mempool.space, hash rate and difficulty data from the Bitcoin network testnet showed that the hash rate soared to 2,315 TH/s on April 19 and then returned to 86 TH/s on April 30.
But Pouliot and several others see Lopp’s behavior differently, claiming it was similar to someone “pooping” in a jacuzzi to get people to “move to another spa.” You’re probably referring to testnet4.
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Node synchronization on the Bitcoin testnet was disrupted due to a griefing attack. explained This is Leo Weese, Head of Technical Content at Lightning Labs, the company behind the Bitcoin Layer 2 Lightning Network.
“We may have to say goodbye to permissionless test networks permanently,” Weese said.
Here’s what trying to sync the testnet3 node looks like right now: There are thousands of new blocks per hour, so no matter how fast you sync, you’ll never get to the end. You may have to say goodbye to permissionless test networks permanently. pic.twitter.com/ITdrpNEFHH
— Leo Wiese (@LeoAW) April 29, 2024
One member of the Bitcoin Talk thread said Lopp’s actions had sparked a “testnet war.” People like Lopp have argued that it should be excluded from the Bitcoin testnet, even going so far as to say that Lopp is a “general security risk to Bitcoin as a whole.”
Lopp said he would like to see Bitcoin’s testnet reset to fix the testnet’s “time warp” weakness and restore mining rewards earned on the testnet. He pointed out that currently this compensation is effectively zero.
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