Unplug the Bitcoin miner and do us all a favour: Antminer has remote shutdown flaw

A new branded bug (sigh) has landed, specific to an ASIC-based Bitcoin miner: dubbed “Antbleed”, it allows remote shutdown of hardware sold by a company called "Bitmain". Bitmain's Antminer cryptocurrency-mining hardware performs a start-up with a remote server, handing over MAC address, serial number and IP address – but as …

[Tom Paine]

Brrrumm

...pty-tum trrrumpty-te-tum trumppty-tum te dumdum

[Paul Wagenseil]

A big nothing, threatening me

I just don't know what to say.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7tqtA20sZXI

[Anonymous Coward]

DoS is something to be scared of?

Oh, how they laughed at me when I said they should have gone for a "Shaky Maker" or a "Mike Nolan out of Bucks Fizz's Spiffy Bitcoin Miner" instead, but who's laughing now?

[John Brown (no body)]

Is there any value to "mining" bitcoins other than the artificial value of money? ie is it just creating "money" out of thin air or does someone pay for the results of the "mining" and if so, what are they getting for their money?

[Steve the Cynic]

The miner pays real money to his electricity supplier to run the mining hardware. But aside from that, there is no overt cost (in the BitCoin world) of mining coins. The benefit is that you create bitcoins, but as indicated, you create them out of real money that paid for real electricity made from real uranium atoms.

There's also a sort of opportunity cost, in that if miner A creates a coin, then miner B cannot create that coin. It really is a zero-sum game, and if I've understood the operation correctly, there is a finite, fixed supply of possible bitcoins, of which some non-zero number have been permanently lost for a variety of reasons.

EDIT: footnote: *your* electricity might not be made from uranium atoms, but 85% of mine is.

[More Jam]

assuming this is the standard C function

That test would pass "false" or "he screamed in a high falsetto", or anything else with false imbedded in it somewhere. Not the kind of coding that inspires confidence.

Anyone up for a buffer overrun?