Hi everybody. So this is a panel on preventing attacks on Bitcoin and we have a nice group
of people here with us. Luke Jr., the infamous core dev, Brian Bishop, the former CTO of
the bank, as he calls it, and Jameson Lopp from CASA.
The real Peter Todd.
No, okay, okay. We'll stick with Peter Todd. Infamous troll. So I guess, you know, to start,
we're going to talk a little bit about the development process of Bitcoin core, obviously
as the foundation keeping all of this running and working. There is potential for shenanigans
there and arguably past examples with things like Gavin Andreessen, Mike Kern, and the
whole Bitcoin XT block size wars that culminated in 2017. So I guess to start, I guess go this
way and what are each of your thoughts on a way where you could see somebody involved
in the development process kind of trying to pull a fast one and, you know, make things
go wrong?
We saw it last year when the Bitcoin community had decided to go with BitBake to deploy TapRoot
and then some developers decided, no, we're going to do a speedy trial instead and basically
ignore what the community had come to consensus on.
So if that wasn't clearly audible to anybody, you're talking about the speedy trial deployment
with TapRoot last year and the complete refusal to consider BIP aid in the deployment?
So kind of like arguably developers stepping away from community consensus arguably and
kind of doing their own thing in defiance of that?
Brian, what's your best brainstorm on how to kill Bitcoin?
Well in the development process specifically, I'm quite interested in deterministic builds
and build signing and things like that. I think that's a really interesting area for
preventing some attacks on Bitcoin, certainly not all, but essentially the idea is that
if you are a user of Bitcoin, you have to download the Bitcoin software somewhere.
How do you verify that you're actually getting the real Bitcoin software?
How do you verify that this is the one that everyone else is using?
If you just download something from the first ad you see on Google, you might be getting
something quite different from what everyone else is getting.
So with both deterministic builds and also build signing, and specifically it's multi-party
build signing, you're able to verify through techniques such as Web of Trust and others
whether the code you are running is actually the one that you think you are running.
I think that's a really interesting method. If you don't do that, there are all sorts
of interesting attacks that can be done against you.
For example, you travel to a country, not the United States, you have a hotel, you have
Wi-Fi, and you're downloading Bitcoin software.
Well, if you are not using HTTPS, if you are not verifying hashes and signatures on the
binaries that you're downloading, it is possible for attackers to intercept your connection
and replace it with a version of Bitcoin that maybe steals your coins or does other nefarious
things such as spy on you or something less drastic than stealing your coins, which are
still problems.
So that's one of the attacks I find on the development process particularly interesting.
Yeah, and the whole point of deterministic builds is just you have each developer independently
build from the source code what they assert is the latest build, and everybody just cross-compares
that and signs it so that you have all the independent machines used to build that software
cross-compare.
And if anybody has a result that deviates or something, it's not just trusting one
source or claim to something.
The fun part about that is knocking out areas of non-determinism in your build process because
if you have something that changes based off of the environment that you're building on,
for example, a different operating system or something, then the binary that you're
going to generate at the end of the build process is going to be different.
So you need to eliminate all the sources of variability in the build environment.
Peter Todd, how would you kill Bitcoin?
Well, I'll tell you how I'd kill Bitcoin.
I'm so discontent throughout the community, throughout the GitHub repositories.
I would be so angry about every little thing that I would make people afraid to suggest
even the slightest change.
And then we would have to ossify, and we could no longer upgrade any of the protocols.
So it would take a very long time, but Bitcoin would not be able to improve anymore.
And therefore, it would become stagnant, and people would move on.
Ossification, good or bad.
But that's defending Bitcoin.
That's not attacking Bitcoin, Peter, that's defending it.
No.
That is why it's the perfect attack, is because many people consider it to be a defense.
That kind of ties into Luke's concerns with Speedy Trial last year with the entire Tap
Read activation.
How do you really ascertain in a situation where you have dissents, disagreement, and
confrontation in the development process?
The difference between an attack on Bitcoin and just legitimate disagreement.
Where do you draw that line?
How do you assess that?
And more importantly, how do you react to that?
If you can't really ascertain whether something is an intentionally malicious action, then
you're kind of stuck in a rock and a hard place.
You engage in good faith and try to settle something that could be a dispute, or in your
reaction, maybe actually inadvertently become the attacker yourself.
Can you steel man why you're saying Speedy Trial was an attack for Luke?
Well, I mean, Luke, if you want to take that one, I'm just supposed to be moderating.
For the first part, it gives miners the ability to veto a software, which has presumably already
come to consensus within the community.
And secondly, the community had already decided to move forward with Taproot with a 58 deployment.
And the developers who were pushing Speedy Trial decided to essentially disregard what
the community had already determined and come to consensus on and just go forward with something
else without even getting the community buying it.
That's right.
We didn't actually start with a debate for Taproot, did we?
No.
No, I mean, that's the entire process was really just arguing over activation once everything
was finalized and nobody could agree.
And I mean, you know, to kind of throw the idea out here and how to mitigate that, if
you view something like Speedy Trial as an attack, the potential for user-activated soft
works and the viability of actually coordinating that and hitting enough of a level of adoption
that that's actually going to affect something.
It's not just going to be a few people in the corner that everyone ignores.
What are your guys' thoughts on that going forward versus what happened in 2017?
Well, I mean, from your perspective, does an attack require malicious intent?
Because I think in hindsight, you can certainly say that certain things were attacks on various
principles that most of us hold dear when it comes to Bitcoin.
But really, the problem was that just some of those attackers simply didn't hold those
same principles.
Well, I mean, that's a sticky question.
Look at Gavin Andresen.
I mean, was he an intentionally malicious actor or just had a very different idea of
where Bitcoin should go?
Well, has he disavowed the signature that he claimed was real?
Has that happened or not?
I'm actually not sure.
A lot of people just kind of quietly stopped mentioning that and didn't really come out
and say they were wrong.
Well, that was an interesting attack.
And if you take the story at face value, the attack here was someone said that, hey, I
can produce the signature for a certain key, and I'm going to prove it to you.
And we're going to go to the store first and buy some hardware, and we're going to pick
out a box on the shelf, and you're going to help there.
Actually, I think part of the attack was that he was not there.
It was just, hey, here's a new box of a new computer, a new laptop, and we're going to
put in some software to do signature verification, and this is going to prove that I am in control
of this key.
Now, apparently, what happened was there was software that was installed on the laptop
that actually, I believe it had a bug, a very subtle bug that when you look at the code
and you're glancing at it, you're like, yeah, this is signature verification.
But anyway, because of the way the bug in this code worked, the signature verification
was always going to say, yes, it is about signature.
And so that was a very interesting attack, and we haven't heard much since from that
particular individual.
Yeah, I mean, I do believe that Thomas from Electrum actually checked the download bugs
from his server and found no downloads of genuine Electrum software when Craig supposedly
showed the signature to Gavin.
Interesting.
I didn't know he kept logs.
Good to know.
Yeah.
But I don't know, I think from a class of attack standpoint, it seems like social slash
mimetic slash narrative have much greater potential, or at the very least, it's more
difficult for me to reason about how to defend against them.
It's a much bigger gray area, whereas we can talk about all types of technical attacks,
and usually the defenses against various technical attacks are very logical and straightforward,
but this much more fuzzy social attack vector is something you just sort of have to deal
with as it comes.
I was recently in Austin, Texas, going to some Bitcoin conferences related to South
by and everything, and I have to say, I was really impressed by the number of new developers
that I met there that introduced themselves to me as anonymous developers.
They gave me their pseudonym, and I asked them, oh, do you just use that?
And they said, yeah, and the reason for that is as a Bitcoin developer, maybe that's the
optimal strategy.
If people don't really know who you are and maybe you don't even attend conferences, maybe
that helps protect you, maybe that helps protect Bitcoin.
Yeah.
That is something I hope to see a lot more of going forward.
I mean, I know you wanted to kind of touch on this, but the insane litigation from people
like Craig Wright, directed at a bunch of core developers, and the legal defense fund
that Jack graciously set up recently, that is without some kind of mechanism to finance
legal defense against things like that, that could very easily just burn out and push developers
out of this space, because are you going to want to be here and contribute to Bitcoin
if you just have to burn money constantly to defend yourself against ridiculous litigation?
That's an interesting point, because I think the litigation against COBRA shows that even
being anonymous is not necessarily protection against a legal attack.
Well, I suppose COBRA could have stayed out of the whole thing, never touched any of the
court orders or hearings or whatever, but at some point, I guess because they're operating
a website, that is a property that could be seized or otherwise confiscated.
There's a name tied to it somewhere in the registrar, even if it's not public.
That is a huge way that I think you could slowly erode Bitcoin's ability to deal with
the shortcomings that it has, like actually solve problems like privacy scalability if
developers don't want to work on it because you have to worry about the crazy egomaniac
just throwing millions of dollars at you in court, that's by a thousand cuts.
That's partly the conundrum, which is Bitcoin.org is someone's property, and it's where people
go to learn about Bitcoin, but at the same time though, maybe there shouldn't be a single
place called Bitcoin.org where people can go learn about Bitcoin.
But when you do that, the conundrum is suddenly there's all this room for fraudsters to attack
people by saying, no, my website's the main Bitcoin one.
Maybe I call it Bitcoin.com, for example.
All I know is Bitcoin.page is the one and only official Bitcoin website.
Is that yours?
Could be anybody's.
I mean, all of this just keeps slowly sliding in the direction of the social mimetic attack.
Let's wild card this and just shake things up.
I'm gonna ask you guys a question and hear your thoughts on whether or not this constitutes
an attack, and if it does, how do you think it should be dealt with?
This growing narrative over maybe the last two, three years of Bitcoin isn't money.
It's not competing with the dollar.
It's just a financial asset or a collateral, and that's how people should look at it instead
of looking at it as money.
Is pushing a narrative like that an attack on Bitcoin?
Trying to just push and brainwash people into not directly using it as a native value transfer
network and trying to just keep framing this narrative and get people thinking, no, no,
you just park this somewhere with a custodian and get a loan against it in dollars, or don't
think about competing directly as a money or a payment rail.
Just think of it purely as number go up and that's it.
Is that an attack?
I don't think I would classify it as an attack.
Even if you look at Bitcoin as money, that's just how these people are deciding to use
or not use their money.
Yeah.
I think it makes more sense if you're positive rather than negative about the narratives.
If you want yield generating asset or whatever and that's your use case, then go for it.
But if you start being negative and you're saying, no, you can't use it as a currency
or as a money or whatever, the rest of the users on the network who do want that are
just going to ignore you or perhaps swarm upon you on Twitter depending on if you're
in the small minority.
This is, I guess, the mimetic warfare and why social media can be a very negative place
to hang out if you're trying to push views that are controversial, and they're going
to be controversial if you're trying to tell people how they should be using Bitcoin.
So I won't answer your question, but I would say that Bitcoin has a very impressive social
immune system that has been developed, and if you try to coerce Bitcoiners, try to change
the protocol unilaterally, the immune system will spit you out and reject you, and that's
just a really fascinating social phenomenon.
It's just really interesting to see that in process.
It might actually be one of Bitcoin's great assets really is this layer, this immune system
of people that defend Bitcoin voluntarily, and they're not coordinated at all.
And it's all people who believe in Bitcoin.
Is it an attack on Bitcoin to donate $5 million to Greenpeace with stipulations of exactly
how it must be spent in performing a social narrative?
Yes, I would say so.
That's actually, if you want to get into that real quick, the last couple minutes, I see
the potential for that very quickly to spiral into government lobbying, legal bills, regulations,
and that kind of gets into a sticky territory of mining isn't just a couple GPUs on a rack
somewhere or a laptop.
If jurisdictions really just start dominoing and say the West and enforcing heavy regulation
or attempting to outright ban mining, it's not that simple to just take that off grid
and disappear, to do that in secret.
I think it was a Chinese group of researchers, but I actually saw a paper last year.
We're just looking at the modulation along the power lines from the grid to your house.
They can see that you're running an ASIC just based on the unique signature of that over
the wire.
So how would we react in that type of situation?
I mean, does anyone up here on stage actually think we could pull off a proof of work change,
get consensus on that?
If the situation was dire enough, I think we could do a proof of work change.
If the whole chain is halted, if there's some sort of catastrophe, if SHA-256 is broken,
I think we could come together to figure out a solution, but it's hard, and it's very
unlikely that that would happen.
I mean, you have the problem of even if we wind up with consensus that something's wrong
with SHA-256, then what do we replace it with?
That's the whole next can of worms.
Obviously a quantum proof algorithm that will make everybody happy.
There's going to be challenges over the long term.
I'm sure there will be some insane attacks or just weaknesses that become uncovered over
the decades.
I was joking about the quantum computing stuff, but it is likely that at some point in the
far future we will have to have discussions around what to do with the really, really
early pay-to-pub-key coins, and whether or not they should be somehow protected, or whether
we should just consider it to be a new form of mining if people start to be able to crack
them.
It's an interesting long-term issue.
I might also note that it's not just the very old pay-to-pub-key coins anymore, all of the
captured coins are also similarly affected.
Honestly, I don't think that should be looked at any differently than an exchange hack.
If somebody gets those coins and they're able to confirm them in a block, that's really
a fundamental quality of Bitcoin to go tinkering with just because of being nervous that these
many coins were just acquired by some nefarious actor.
That's fine.
I think when they start publishing their rap videos about how gangster they are, seriously,
check them out.
They're awesome.
That's why it's relevant that it also affects Tapered coins, is that this could potentially
be nearly all the coins on Bitcoin at some point.
Back during the discussion on Tapered design, I was very hesitant when that first got pitched
just the raw pub key, but the reality is when you look at on-chain address reuse and then
also think about the fact that any kind of light wallet, even if you have a wallet you're
connecting to your own full node, there's still some network communication that could
get played with that's just passing the master pub key back and forth in most wallets cases.
In some way or another, most coins already do have their public key exposed, either through
address reuse or just the balance fetching mechanism on the back end.
It's fundamentally different from an exchange hack where it's just a minority of coins.
If you still have your coins in a raw pub key output from 2009, 2010, and you're not
moving them at some point, those coins are lost.
Those people don't have the keys anymore.
Possibly, though you never know what assumptions you may make.
Kind of going back to classes of attacks on Bitcoin and related to this, is it an attack
on Bitcoin if you build a wallet that intentionally does not follow good practices?
There are still wallets out there that are only one single address.
They won't even do deterministic address generations, and thus all the money keeps coming in and
out of the same address, thus exposing the users to this issue.
I would say yeah.
Well, it's definitely an attack on Bitcoin users.
Yeah.
But didn't we decide backstage though, attacking Bitcoin users is attacking Bitcoin?
All right, so I guess we're down to the last 20 seconds.
Anybody have some smart ass comments?
Your one trick to guarantee Bitcoin's invincibility?
Bitcoin is the greatest bug bounty program of all time.
Good luck.
Thank you, everyone!