In two days, on Wednesday April 8th, a few Bitcoin Core developers will be performing a demonstration of “resurrection blocks” aimed at taking an excessive amount of time to verify on Signet.
The show will take place at 10 AM EST (2 PM UTC). Anyone who wants to participate can run a Bitcoin Core node on Signet and watch blocks being mined and processed with their points in real time.
Tips can be found Here node spinning and tracking (including how to check your node’s logs to see block confirmation times).
The demo will not show the most serious problem of the attack (the documents and events required are not made public so as not to give the attackers too much of the plot), but it will produce blocks that take longer to verify than your block.
The purpose of this display is to show users the severity of one of the four main problems that The Great Consensus Cleanup aims to address BIP 54.
Two more shows will be held at 6 PM EST (10 PM UTC) on April 8, and 5 AM EST (9 AM UTC) on April 9, to allow Bitcoin users in different locations around the world to participate directly.
The Signet blockchain is currently around 32-33 GB, so if you have any device with enough space, go ahead and circle the Signet token to participate.
To note the following patch was quickly assembled for this demo and is not fully tested (even with a terminal-based-GUI). If you’re running around the new Signet node just by showing this on a cashless machine, you should be fine even if you’re like me.
For those who don’t want to just look at the log files, AJ Towns provided a a patch to the “bitcoin-tui” project, a Terminal based GUI for Bitcoin Core to display blocks of attacks on the display. The developer of the project is working on the output in the demo time, but you can also create it yourself.
Run these commands on Linux (the git command will work on other OSes, and you should find similar CLI commands for your OS easily online):
git clone https://github.com/ajtowns/bitcoin-tui.git
cd bitcoin-tui
git switch 202604-bip54blocksFrom there you just need to follow the instructions for building the database Here. Once done, make sure your bitcoind has “server=1” set in the configuration file, and start bitcoin-tui. You should find the “Slow Blocks” tab on the right side of the top bar.
