Several Bitcoin developers are outraged at a fellow enthusiast who admitted to “griefing” one of Bitcoin’s testnets by generating three years’ worth of blocks in a week.
This caused some developers to pause the applications they were testing, and many of the affected entities expressed their displeasure with the act.
Francis Pouliot, founder of Bull Bitcoin, a non-custodial Bitcoin exchange and payments firm, condemned the individual responsible in a social media post on April 29, 2024. He labelled them a “douchebag loser” for jeopardizing the testing efforts of open-source Bitcoin application developers and wasting their time.
“Cool, you’re able to attack a network with no economic incentives, and literally the only damage done is messing with the tests of open-source Bitcoin application builders and wasting their time,”
he wrote.
The person responsible for the act, Jameson Lopp, a cypherpunk and a founder at digital asset self-custody solution Casa, had identified himself the day before in an April 28 post on the decentralized social media platform Nostr.
Lopp stated that his griefing attack generated over 165,000 blocks (three years’ worth) on Bitcoin’s testnet in a single week, costing only about $1 in electricity.
Lopp defended his actions, arguing that the “trivial exploit” — which required just 20 lines of code — highlights a weakness of the testnet that he had previously pointed out. He noted that such drastic measures were necessary to draw attention to the vulnerability. “I’m championing a cause, and sometimes you have to do more than send an email to get people’s attention.” Lopp wrote.
Despite Lopp’s rationale, Pouliot and others view the actions differently; they liken them to someone “taking a dump” in a jacuzzi just to get people to “move to another spa.”
Leo Weese, technical content lead at Lightning Labs, the company behind the Bitcoin layer-2 Lightning Network, suggested that permanent closure of permission-less testing networks might be necessary. He noted that the griefing attack interrupted node syncing on the Bitcoin testnet.
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A member in the Bitcoin Talk Thread said Lopp’s actions had sparked a “testnet war,” suggesting that people like Lopp should be excluded from Bitcoin’s testnet. The member even went as far as saying Lopp is a “general security risk for Bitcoin as a whole.”
Lopp proposed resetting Bitcoin’s testnet to fix the testnet “timewarp” weakness and to restore mining rewards earned from the testnet, which he noted are practically zero now.
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