Bitcoin developers pursue BIP-54 soft fork to fix four consensus rule flaws

Bitcoin developers are pursuing a soft fork proposal, BIP-54, or the Great Consensus Cleanup, to fix four vulnerabilities in consensus rules that have remained since the network’s launch, Crypto Briefing reported. The first issue BIP-54 aims to address is the possibility of a Time-Warp attack in the difficulty adjustment algorithm, a vulnerability that could allow an attacker to manipulate block timestamps and artificially lower mining difficulty. The second is the so-called poison block problem tied to legacy scripts that can take an unusually long time to validate, potentially delaying block validation and opening the door to denial-of-service attacks. The other two involve vulnerabilities related to the Merkle tree and coinbase transactions. The proposal aims to block the possibility that certain 64-byte transactions could exploit a weakness in the Merkle tree structure and reduce the risk of replay attacks arising from duplicate coinbase transactions. Matt Corallo first drafted the proposal in March 2019, and co-author Antoine Poinsot has resumed work on it. Some miners have also begun preparing for the change. MARA Pool and ViaBTC have started generating coinbase transactions compatible with BIP-54 on the Bitcoin mainnet. While this does not mean the soft fork has been activated, it shows some mining operators are preparing for the change. Corallo put the odds of BIP-54 becoming Bitcoin’s next soft fork after Taproot at 80%.