Several Bitcoin developers are furious at a fellow Bitcoiner who admitted to “griefing” one of Bitcoin’s testnets by generating three years worth of blocks in a single week, forcing some developers to halt the applications they were testing.
“Whoever has been fucking with testnest is a douchebag looser,” said Francis Pouliot, a founder at noncustodial Bitcoin (BTC) exchange and payments firm Bull Bitcoin. “Cool bro you’re able to attack a network with no economic incentives and literally the only damage done is fucking with the tests of open-source Bitcoin application builders and wasting their time,” he added.
Pouliot didn’t realize until later that it was Jameson Lopp, a cypherpunk and a founder at digital asset self-custody solution Casa, who had identified himself as the culprit the day before in an April 28 post on decentralized social media platform Nostr.
Lopp said his griefing attack resulted in over 165,000 blocks (three years worth) generated on Bitcoin’s testnet in a single week, which only cost about $1 worth of electricity.
However, Lopp argued that the “trivial exploit” — which required just 20 lines of code — highlights a weakness of the testnet that he raised before.
“I’m championing a cause, and sometimes you have to do more than send an email to get people’s attention.”
Hash rate and difficulty data on the Bitcoin network testnet showed hash rate spiking to 2,315 terahashes per second (TH/s) on April 19 before returning to 86 TH/s on April 30, according to mempool.space.
However, Pouliot and a few others see Lopp’s actions differently, arguing it’s akin to someone “taking a shit” in a jacuzzi just to get people to “move to another spa” — likely referring to testnet4.
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The griefing attack interrupted node syncing on the Bitcoin testnet, explained Leo Weese, technical content lead at the Lightning Labs — the company behind the Bitcoin layer-2 Lightning Network.
“We may have to permanently say goodbye to permission-less testing networks,” Weese said.
This is what it looks like trying to sync a testnet3 node right now. There are thousands of new blocks per hour, so no matter how fast you sync, you can never reach the tip. We may have to permanently say goodbye to permission-less testing networks. pic.twitter.com/ITdrpNEFHH
— Leo Weese (@LeoAW) April 29, 2024
A member in the Bitcoin Talk Thread said Lopp’s actions have ignited a “testnet war,” arguing that people like Lopp should be excluded from Bitcoin’s testnet and even went as saying Lopp is a “general security risk for Bitcoin as a whole.”
Lopp said he wants to see Bitcoin’s testnet reset to fix the testnet “timewarp” weakness and to restore mining rewards earned from the testnet, which he noted is practically zero now.
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