Found JiveTonto's Bunnycoin issue
Posted: Tue Jan 09, 2018 4:33 pm
I found the second issue that JiveTonto reported, as a result of a support ticket that involved Bunnycoins.
It turns out that the Bunnycoin daemon has a catastrophic bug that appears to be specific to it and any coins that were forked from it. Bunnycoin is one of the coins that has a proportion of "charity blocks," where some blocks require the coinbase transaction to include additional addresses to be credited in addition to the normal mining reward. We made a decision three years ago not to expend effort on these coins and allow the charity blocks to be orphaned. If the coins are profitable with the charity blocks being orphaned, they can still be mined while other pools get the charity blocks.
In the case of Bunnycoin, however, when the "submitblock" API is called and the error causing the block to be invalid is that the charity addresses are not present, the coin returns a message of "success" and then silently writes an error to the log and discards the block. Huge amounts of money can be lost because the caller is told that the block is valid. It's amazing to me that anyone at all is mining this coin, given that such a disastrous bug is present.
Chris has listed this coin for discontinuation, and we already deployed code to prevent coins where the block number doesn't increase within 15s from being deployed. We are still trying to figure out if there is a third bug, or if JiveTonto's third report is simply a consequence of the two issues we already fixed.
It turns out that the Bunnycoin daemon has a catastrophic bug that appears to be specific to it and any coins that were forked from it. Bunnycoin is one of the coins that has a proportion of "charity blocks," where some blocks require the coinbase transaction to include additional addresses to be credited in addition to the normal mining reward. We made a decision three years ago not to expend effort on these coins and allow the charity blocks to be orphaned. If the coins are profitable with the charity blocks being orphaned, they can still be mined while other pools get the charity blocks.
In the case of Bunnycoin, however, when the "submitblock" API is called and the error causing the block to be invalid is that the charity addresses are not present, the coin returns a message of "success" and then silently writes an error to the log and discards the block. Huge amounts of money can be lost because the caller is told that the block is valid. It's amazing to me that anyone at all is mining this coin, given that such a disastrous bug is present.
Chris has listed this coin for discontinuation, and we already deployed code to prevent coins where the block number doesn't increase within 15s from being deployed. We are still trying to figure out if there is a third bug, or if JiveTonto's third report is simply a consequence of the two issues we already fixed.