Coinbase discovers double spending bug

Enthusiast developer Peter Todd made a double payment on Coinbase , which caused a stir in the industry. He took out $10 from the company to buy some reddit coins for Jeremy Gardner 's Augur project. Todd admitted his shocking move through Twitter and GitHub . Gardner said:

“At 2:30am this morning, @petertoddbtc performed a double spend attack on @Coinbase by purchasing Reddit Gold for me , then re-directing the payment method. ” — Jeremy Gardner

When using the doublespend.py tool with default settings , you will only pay a low tax on the high double-spend fees.

— Peter Todd (@petertoddbtc) January 11, 2016

At the time, Gardner said he and Todd were in talks, and Todd decided to "express his views on the security of the industry." Gardner went on to say that his first attempt had been successful and that he could use screenshots to prove the action. Many industry insiders took to Twitter to express their opinions after the announcement. Charlie Lee, founder of Coinbase and Litecoin , also tweeted that "We are willing to let one person steal $4 so that everyone else can enjoy a better user experience. Of course, if it is abused, we will replace it. "

Many in the industry were grateful to Peter Todd for being so honest. Todd tweeted, "It's good to be honest, but we should make sure the public understands what we are doing." Brian Hoffman of OpenBazaar also tweeted, "This is working towards the Joker Olympics." After this tweet carnival, the post was posted to forums like r/bitcoin and r/btc , causing an uproar. After this farce, Peter Todd was banned from reddit, and more crazy behaviors were staged one after another.

“I’m not sure if this is a risk Coinbase is concerned about, but when Peter Todd discusses security vulnerabilities in Bitcoin, it’s worth listening.” — Jeremy Gardner

When this statement was submitted to the subreddit , Peter Todd was indeed banned for unknown reasons. However, the creator of the post wrote:

"Peter Todd has been banned from reddit: For details, please see the link below https://www.reddit.com/user/petertodd

Background: The Bitcoin protocol has been operating on a zero-auth basis for some time, meaning that users can trade for free without authentication if they so choose. Often, sellers do this to improve the user experience — the rationale being: “No one is going to double-spend this transaction for a cup of coffee.” Besides, the cost of ensuring low-priced transactions is not as much as the money left over from identifying the customer. The developers of the QT protocol (including Peter Todd ) want to pay to operate and eliminate zero-auth. The incident: You can read about the whole thing here, but the summary is that Peter Todd double-spends on coinbase. His actions appear to involve scams, and he posted a statement on reddit. You can also see a detailed conversation between him and coinbase here.

As of press time, reddti has restored Todd's account and is up and running. Many people on the r/bitcoin ban thread have stated that Todd's actions have violated some law. No one has figured out which law he has violated, which has led to another heated debate. However, one person wrote: " Peter Todd posted information on how to attack companies' free services, and then he showed it off without contacting Coinbase. I am pretty sure this behavior is illegal and leaked "confidential information." With this latest battle between Bitcoin.org and Coinbase , the heated debate over block size, and everything in between, there is never a dull day in the Bitcoin industry.