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Re:A successful Bitcoin double spend – USD 10000 by jimrandomh on Thursday March 14, 2013 @10:38AM (#5375209)
I can't find what you mean by block validation inheriting OpenSSL's quirks. Could you explain what you mean? A quick google search suggests that Bitcoin uses OpenSSL only by passing it messages and fixed-size ECDSA keys for validation.

The BDB problem is not mysterious like you suggest, and the whole thing could've been converted from a fork to a DoS by changing a 'return false' to an 'assert'.

Re:A successful Bitcoin double spend – USD 10000 by makomk on Friday March 15, 2013 @09:07PM (#5383922)
I forget the exact problem with OpenSSL, but it accepts particular invalid representations of signatures that the applicable standards say it shouldn't accept, because it doesn't treat the sign bit as a sign bit. This isn't generally a problem because those numbers should never actually be negative, but it's an issue for Bitcoin because everyone needs to agree on which signatures are valid.