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by errcorrectcode 1600 days ago
Suppose some piece of infrastructure along the way lacks a checksum or ECC, and gets hit by a cosmic ray or a hardware defect. You now have +2^17 USD - txamount more or 2^19 - 2^18 USD + txamount less in said account. Throw FDIC insurance out the window because they're probably a) not going to do it and b) stick you with fees and losses.
2 comments

This seems interesting, but I doubt this would be a vulnerability of any properly redundant digital coin.
Anywhere non-ECC storage or computation occurs before it hits hashing or distributed, it's a SPoF.
…I imagine the whole thing wouldn’t be running off a single server + hard drive. There’s not any conceivable system design where this bit flip would be possible