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Illegality of inflation bugs.
375 sats \ 6 comments \ @dickiegreenlead 12 Aug bitcoin
Say I find an inflation bug in the Bitcoin protocol and generate miself a nice stash of coins. Exchanges will accept them... If I'd start to dump those coins would that be legally considered a hack of public infrastructure or a hack of ETFs etc.
What do you guys think would the legal implications for such an exploit be? (Of course there shouldn't be any legal implications, but I doubt the fiat bros think that way).
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5 sats \ 3 replies \ @Scoresby 12 Aug
It'd have to be one heck of a bug: there are a lot of people paying attention to new transactions and this illegal bug transaction of yours would have to somehow look like all the other bitcoin transactions even though it's creating coins out of thin air. Just because we assume there is a bug that allows this to happen, doesn't mean it would look normal to human observers.
I don't think you'd be able to successfully exploit such a bug to the level of depositing the coins in an exchange. I think they'd likely get noticed before they were even confirmed in a block.
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0 sats \ 2 replies \ @dickiegreenlead OP 12 Aug
the bug would look odd to the human eye but assume nodes would consider the tx valid.
What would the legal implications be at this stage, given that so much in the world already depends on Bitcoin?
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0 sats \ 1 reply \ @Scoresby 12 Aug
I'm no lawyer, so who knows, but my point was that I'm not sure such a transaction would ever get confirmed, even if it was accepted by most nodes. Maybe it sneaks through without anyone noticing, but more likely is people say What the heck is this? I suppose maybe I'm overestimating how closely the mempools are watched, but still...
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202 sats \ 0 replies \ @optimism 21h
Check the Core code for MAX_MONEY comparisons, as that was a lesson learned since iirc the integer overflow bug in 2010 (before my time.)
However, this only L1. Someone can perhaps inflate paper bitcoin and probably get away with it. I remember something about most of the wrapped BTC on various chains being tokens of tokens of tokens; the further a paper bitcoin is from L1, the higher the chance for bugs.
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5 sats \ 1 reply \ @OT 12 Aug
I guess it would depend on which jurisdiction you're in. You should definitely milk that if you can. Let us know what happens too!
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0 sats \ 0 replies \ @dickiegreenlead OP 23h
:D
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