On December 31, 2019, Michael Davidson disclosed to us a vulnerability that could be used to cause consensus failure in the network: Nodes would permanently reject blocks based on their timestamps using subjective information. This information could be influenced by an attacker that (partially) isolates the node on the network, potentially tricking a miner or mining pool into rejecting a valid chain. An attacker could have strategically exploited this issue to 51% attack some nodes’ view of the chain and perform double-spending attacks.
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