Bitcoin was at risk of collapsing after a bug was spotted in the cryptocurrency’s underlying software. However, developers were able to quickly arrest the situation and fix the issue before hackers could exploit it and bring the whole Bitcoin network down. The issue was made public after it was brought under control.
According to the developers, the attack on the Bitcoin network could have been carried out by any miner who had 12.5 Bitcoins or $80,000 to spare as that’s what it would have cost to successfully carry out the attack.
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An anonymous developer on Github wrote, “A denial-of-service vulnerability (CVE-2018-17144) exploitable by miners has been discovered in Bitcoin Core versions 0.14.0 up to 0.16.2,”
“It is recommended to upgrade any of the vulnerable versions to 0.16.3 as soon as possible.”
According to reports, the bug has been around since March 2017, but it seemed no one noticed it and no one was willing to exploit it.
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Developers have cautioned miners to upgrade to the new software to reduce putting the Bitcoin network at risk of an attack which could cause the network to crash.