A successful Bitcoin double spend – USD 10000

Re:A successful Bitcoin double spend – USD 10000 by michaelt on Thursday March 14, 2013 @05:31AM (#5373959)

  You would need to find a very localized, specific 
  class of bug in a piece of software that has been 
  highly scrutinized over many years by cryptography 
  and security experts

Couldn't you monitor the version control system trunk for patches fixing bugs in the critical section of the code, work out the bug based on the fix, and exploit it before everyone had their systems patched?

  everyone voluntarily chooses which software to run.

In things like operating systems heterogeneous software is often seen as a defence against bugs - but in this instance, wasn't it the differences between the 0.7 and 0.8 clients that triggered the split in the blockchain?

Surely the most secure thing is to be on the most widely used client?

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Re:A successful Bitcoin double spend – USD 10000 by johnsoft on Thursday March 14, 2013 @01:40PM (#5376478)

Clients emit a warning in the GUI (and IIRC disable the RPC interface, which would be the fail-safe for merchants) when this kind of issue is detected (namely, conflicting blockchains of significant length received from different peers). So the most secure thing would be to be connected to a high diversity of peer nodes, and to pause transaction processing and check the news when you get a warning.

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