The Bitcoin Attack You Haven’t Heard About

PortlandHODL explains Bitcoin’s most dangerous vulnerability: poison blocks. These malicious blocks can freeze nodes for 11+ hours on Raspberry Pi devices and 25 minutes on enterprise hardware, creating profitable attack opportunities for miners while exposing how relay policy acts as an accidental guardian of the network.

Notes:

• Poison Blocks (denial of service)

• Raspberry Pi validation: 11 hours for poison blocks

• Enterprise hardware: 25 minutes validation time  

• Attack gives 20% effective hash rate boost

• Fix exists in Great Consensus Cleanup

• Bitcoin fees currently under $1

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