Although the Bitcoin alert system, created by Satoshi Nakamoto, was withdrawn in 2016 because it was considered centralized and risky, because the access codes were in the hands of hundreds of people, Bitcoin Core decided to reveal public and private keys on Monday. of this system, both for the main network and for the test network, considering that currently "the network is not at risk".
Bryan Bishop, the developer of Bitcoin Core, who made the announcement on Monday June 3 on the mailing list [bitcoin-dev], also revealed several vulnerabilities of the already discarded alert system:
Developer, Bitcoin Core
Bishop then proceeds to reveal four keys: the public key and the private key, both for the bitcoin main network and for the test network.
The Alert System, deployed throughout the Bitcoin network , was created by Satoshi Nakamoto to inform users about important topics about the network , says the Retirement Alert System document published in Bitcoin.org on November 1, 2016. The system had been used in the past to report on relevant events, such as accidental bifurcations of the blockchain, but several important vulnerabilities were noticed:
Bryan Bishop, who had intervened in the debate around Craig Wright's statements in which he claimed to be Satoshi Nakamoto, said on Twitter that to prove he was right, Wright only had to sign a message with one of the private keys of to which Nakamoto had access, specifically the private alert key.
Watch On Twitter
On June 15, Bishop signed, with the private key of the Bitcoin Alert System, the message: "I am not CSW (Craig Wright). He can not do what I do: sign with the Bitcoin alert key. "
As seen in the tweet, Bishop self-cites with a tweet from the previous day, which states that "It's time to reveal the Bitcoin alert keys. The public warning code was improperly copied by several hundred plagiarists . People, an interesting show is coming "
Why now reveal the alert codes if the respective system has already been removed since version v0.13.x? In this conversation on IRC - the developers of the Core are peculiar even in their chat tools - on June 21, they discuss the topic of the possible revelation of the keys.
The developers argue that even if the dissemination of a " Final Warning " that deactivated all the alerts of the previous system was made , in January of 2017, and that at the beginning of March of 2017 the final alert was coded within the software version of Bitcoin Core v0.14, the disclosure of the keys was a way to close this episode, since the number of nodes that was not updated was very small. Only about 300 nodes of almost 10,000 still have version v.012 or less, the current one is v0.14.x.
The developers considered that with so few non-updated nodes with a version that discards the alert system, and that these nodes also present a lower risk to an attack related to the discontinued alerts system, the publication of the alert keys is safe.
