50. Major Flaw Discovered

50

Major Flaw Discovered

A MAJOR FLAW was discovered in the Bitcoin software/protocol that allowed a sender to send invalid transactions, one where the sender creates new bitcoins. By the time it was fixed, several millions of invalid bitcoins had been created. They were later erased from the block chain.

*** ALERT *** Upgrade to 0.3.6

Posted by satoshi, July 29, 2010, 07:13:06 PM

Please upgrade to 0.3.6 ASAP! We fixed an implementation bug where it was possible that bogus transactions could be displayed as accepted. Do not accept Bitcoin transactions as payment until you upgrade to version 0.3.6!

If you can’t upgrade to 0.3.6 right away, it’s best to shut down your Bitcoin node until you do.

Also in 0.3.6, faster hashing:

• midstate cache optimisation thanks to tcatm

• Crypto++ ASM SHA-256 thanks to BlackEye

Total generating speedup 2.4x faster.

Download: http://sourceforge.net/projects/bitcoin/files/Bitcoin/bitcoin-0.3.6/

Windows and Linux users: if you got 0.3.5 you still need to upgrade to 0.3.6.