Bitcoin Double-Spend Detected, Has The ‘Impenetrable’ Crypto Been Hacked?

The latest reports from January 20 state that BitMEX Research has identified a possible double-spend transaction. This transaction was valued at 0.00062063 $BTC or roughly $21 and this time around it does not seem to be an instance of the popular replace-by-fee wallet hack.

BitMEX’s ForkMonitor discovered that many blocks were produced at height 666833 and the Research tweeted:

[1/2] There was a stale Bitcoin block today, at height 666,833. SlushPool has beaten F2Pool in a race.

It appears as if a small double spend of around 0.00062063 $BTC ($21) was detectedhttps://t.co/o8lz9xagYG pic.twitter.com/IEdPu8JEjt

— BitMEX Research (@BitMEXResearch) January 20, 2021

An hour later, the researcher attributed the orphaned block to an RBF transaction. In such an incident, an unconfirmed transaction is replaced by a new transfer that pays a higher fee. Nonetheless, ForkMonitor has since updated its advice stating:

“No (RBF) bumps have been detected.”

One Twitter user who doubles up as BSV’s Australian advocate Eli Afram commented on the “mixed messages” from BitMEX Research. Afram insisted that the double-spent transaction should be a major cause for alarm despite its small value:

“So it appears an actual Double-Spend has occurred on $BTC… Not an RBF (replace-by-fee), but an actual double spend. A mere 22USD… but – this could have been 22million.”

Since its inception in 2009, Satoshi Nakamoto’s Bitcoin Whitepaper is credited with having found an impenetrable solution to the double-spend problem. The problem of ensuring that a decentralized network can autonomously authenticate that the same coins have not been transferred multiple times had stymied previous attempts at digital cash.

Last July, ZenGo crypto-security firm discovered a double-spend exploit that targeted multiple bitcoin wallets.

While the manufacturers of the compromised wallets moved to address this exploit, Bitcoin Cash proponent Hayden Otto said that the weakness might have come from Bitcoin’s replace-by-fee functionality. He had earlier managed to exploit the same vulnerability in a viral video.

Have hackers discovered a way to hack into bitcoin?