Hackers have emotion. People says the Bitcoin blockchain is hacker-proof. No hacker has ever managed to hack even a bit of the Bitcoin blockchain since its inception in 2009. The cryptographic process was designed to be very expensive to reverse. So expensive that the total world wealth is not enough to pay for the work to reverse the process. Thus, hackers express their frustration by plaguing the Bitcoin blockchain with grafittis.
They creates fake transactions embedded with grafittis. It is so fake that even miners cannot differentiate. Fake transactions do not compromise on the integrity of the blockchain. However, each of them adds long term memory cost to the miners machines. Fake transactions soothe hackers frustration against so many failed attempts to hack the blockchain.
Graffiti in Transaction
What is a fake transaction? Before we answer that question let us understand what a real transaction is. A real transaction produces new coins to addresses. The new coins may come from another addresses, or from miner rewards. When an owner of an address spend his coins a transaction will be created which states to which addresses the coins will go. A fake transaction is created by a hacker-owner of coins by hijacking the out-to address field and replacing it with an arbitrary data which in turn may actually be an unknown real address that already exists, is yet to exist, or will never exist. The hacker-owner does not care about the address even though he will lose his coins in the process. The arbitrary data can be anything he wanted. It is like a digital graffiti.
Celebrating the act, the hackers invites everybody else beyond the hackers-verse to inscribe arbitrary messages into the blockchain. The inscription is eternal. It is like a noble cause which the purists in the Bitcoin Core team disagree. They called it an act of spamming the blockchain. The purists insist that a transaction can only consists of coin-spending without any attachment what-so-ever, not even a reasonable statement on why a coin was spent, just like cash. However, the purists cannot stop the hackers.
A fake transaction marks a coin as probably forever unspent. Miners monitors all unspent coins waiting for them to be spent. All unspent coins are kept in the memories of miners machines for fast retrieval. On-board memories are expensive compared to external storage. Yet, on-board memories are super fast which is a highly important criteria in the races to win miners rewards, where winner takes all. However, forever-unspent coins bloat the memories. Hence, miners complaints.
The Bitcoin core team came out with a compromise asking hackers not to create fake transactions but to use a new method to embed even longer grafittis on the Bitcoin blockchain. The new method addresses the miners complaints to a certain degree. It is now official that messages can be inscribed into the Bitcoin blockchain. We all know that anything written on the blockchain is eternal. Hence, the eternal wall of grafittis emerges.
Graffiti is a playful word. Eternal data is a new class of asset in information technology. Eternal data rises from the unintentional manifestation of blockchain. It is still a young concept. Information technologists are now rushing to develop new processes and methodologies based on eternal data which is accessible anywhere in the world without any central authority. The hype is blockchain.
Hackers will continue faking transactions though. Miners will have to figure it out themselves on how to work around them. Proof-of-work is just getting more intensive.
P.S. Technical details can be found here. Or, search the Internet for null data or OP_RETURN.
They creates fake transactions embedded with grafittis. It is so fake that even miners cannot differentiate. Fake transactions do not compromise on the integrity of the blockchain. However, each of them adds long term memory cost to the miners machines. Fake transactions soothe hackers frustration against so many failed attempts to hack the blockchain.
Graffiti in Transaction
What is a fake transaction? Before we answer that question let us understand what a real transaction is. A real transaction produces new coins to addresses. The new coins may come from another addresses, or from miner rewards. When an owner of an address spend his coins a transaction will be created which states to which addresses the coins will go. A fake transaction is created by a hacker-owner of coins by hijacking the out-to address field and replacing it with an arbitrary data which in turn may actually be an unknown real address that already exists, is yet to exist, or will never exist. The hacker-owner does not care about the address even though he will lose his coins in the process. The arbitrary data can be anything he wanted. It is like a digital graffiti.
Celebrating the act, the hackers invites everybody else beyond the hackers-verse to inscribe arbitrary messages into the blockchain. The inscription is eternal. It is like a noble cause which the purists in the Bitcoin Core team disagree. They called it an act of spamming the blockchain. The purists insist that a transaction can only consists of coin-spending without any attachment what-so-ever, not even a reasonable statement on why a coin was spent, just like cash. However, the purists cannot stop the hackers.
A fake transaction marks a coin as probably forever unspent. Miners monitors all unspent coins waiting for them to be spent. All unspent coins are kept in the memories of miners machines for fast retrieval. On-board memories are expensive compared to external storage. Yet, on-board memories are super fast which is a highly important criteria in the races to win miners rewards, where winner takes all. However, forever-unspent coins bloat the memories. Hence, miners complaints.
The Bitcoin core team came out with a compromise asking hackers not to create fake transactions but to use a new method to embed even longer grafittis on the Bitcoin blockchain. The new method addresses the miners complaints to a certain degree. It is now official that messages can be inscribed into the Bitcoin blockchain. We all know that anything written on the blockchain is eternal. Hence, the eternal wall of grafittis emerges.
Graffiti is a playful word. Eternal data is a new class of asset in information technology. Eternal data rises from the unintentional manifestation of blockchain. It is still a young concept. Information technologists are now rushing to develop new processes and methodologies based on eternal data which is accessible anywhere in the world without any central authority. The hype is blockchain.
Hackers will continue faking transactions though. Miners will have to figure it out themselves on how to work around them. Proof-of-work is just getting more intensive.
P.S. Technical details can be found here. Or, search the Internet for null data or OP_RETURN.
Comments
Post a Comment