Proofgold 0.1.5

by BlakeKeiller, Sunday, July 19, 2020, 13:39 (504 days ago)

There were a few bugs reported last week, so I released a new version today:

https://proofgold.org/proofgold-0.1.5.tgz

Two of the bugs were easy to fix: 1. There were problems initializing if the database directories hadn't been created yet. 2. The initial sync with litecoin should work forward instead of backward.

The third bug can't be fixed without a hard fork and there's no good reason to fix it. Part of the code (unexpectedly) made it so that pure burns can no longer create blocks since Block 730. It was part of the code anyway to stop pure burns after Block 5000, so the "bug" just retired pure burns after a few weeks instead of a few months. From now on (actually, since July 2), Proofgold blocks can only created by staking Proofgold bars (possibly amplified by a burn of some litecoins).

Unfortunately, this restricts stakers to people who already have Proofgold bars, but I will make a separate post about how newcomers can get some bars. (One way is to submit a bug report!)

Now that the pure burn era has passed, it's worth noting that it could have been "gamed" as follows:

The determination of whether or not a litecoin utxo was eligible to create a block using a pure burn depended on the txid of the utxo. Someone could have repeatedly created new litecoin utxos with new txids (without needing to send the litecoin tx) until obtaining a utxo that would be allowed to do a pure burn. After that, the litecoin tx creating the new utxo could have been sent. Assuming this confirmed in time, the new utxo could be used to do a pure burn. I don't think this attack actually happened, but I haven't looked closely.