11–20 of 45 posts
Isn't this the kind of thing that a decentralized network should be resilient against? Maybe I just don't understand blockchains.
My understanding is it works like this in Ethereum: The miners can run any arbitrary code ("a contract") that you write, and this code is verifiable and trusted by everyone once it's been uploaded to the blockchain. The contracts can read/write arbitrary things in the blockchain and send coins to anyone you want, determined by the code you write. There's a "gas price" that you have to pay for each operation you tell…
Isn't this the kind of thing that a decentralized network should be resilient against? Maybe I just don't understand blockchains.
Isn't this the kind of thing that a decentralized network should be resilient against? Maybe I just don't understand blockchains.
> miners and nodes need to spend a very long time processing some blocks. This is due to the EXTCODESIZE opcode, which has a fairly low gasprice but which requires nodes to read state information from disk;
AIUI, the data in the blockchain isn't just "data". It's actually small bits of code that execute inside a VM, which each node needs to execute in order to "understand" the blockchain. "EXTCODESIZE" would be one of the instructions in this particular VM.
I think that most blockchains either have a complexity limit per record/transaction, or have a complexity "cost", so that complex code is more costly to insert into the blockchain.
However, in this case, it sounds like someone has figured out how to insert some code that is actually more complex than the complexity-measuring code thinks it is, and is therefore causing all miners (all users?) to perform higher-than-expected amounts of computation to parse the blockchain, to the point where they can't keep up with the network.
(Corrections welcome)
Who benefits from this?
Isn't this the kind of thing that a decentralized network should be resilient against? Maybe I just don't understand blockchains.
From the article: > miners and nodes need to spend a very long time processing some blocks. This is due to the EXTCODESIZE opcode, which has a fairly low gasprice but which requires nodes to read state information from disk; AIUI, the data in the blockchain isn't just "data". It's actually small bits of code that execute inside a VM, which each node needs to execute in order to "understand" the blockchain. "EXTCODESI…
Who benefits from this?
Who benefits from this?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's not a network flooding attack, it's a "please each of you do this time-wasting thing" attack.
But that's also a DoS attack. If they're doing the time-wasting thing, they can't do other things... Denying service.
Isn't this the kind of thing that a decentralized network should be resilient against? Maybe I just don't understand blockchains.