Attack of the Clones: Measuring the Maintainability, Originality and Security of Bitcoin 'Forks' in the Wild

01/21/2022
by   Jusop Choi, et al.
0

Since Bitcoin appeared in 2009, over 6,000 different cryptocurrency projects have followed. The cryptocurrency world may be the only technology where a massive number of competitors offer similar services yet claim unique benefits, including scalability, fast transactions, and security. But are these projects really offering unique features and significant enhancements over their competitors? To answer this question, we conducted a large-scale empirical analysis of code maintenance activities, originality and security across 592 crypto projects. We found that about half of these projects have not been updated for the last six months; over two years, about three-quarters of them disappeared, or were reported as scams or inactive. We also investigated whether 11 security vulnerabilities patched in Bitcoin were also patched in other projects. We found that about 80 projects have at least one unpatched vulnerability, and the mean time taken to fix the vulnerability is 237.8 days. Among those 510 altcoins, we found that at least 157 altcoins are likely to have been forked from Bitcoin, about a third of them containing only slight changes from the Bitcoin version from which they were forked. As case studies, we did a deep dive into 20 altcoins (e.g., Litecoin, FujiCoin, and Feathercoin) similar to the version of Bitcoin used for the fork. About half of them did not make any technically meaningful change - failing to comply with the promises (e.g., about using Proof of Stake) made in their whitepapers.

READ FULL TEXT

page 1

page 2

page 3

page 4

research
05/16/2022

Estimating Patch Propagation Times across (Blockchain) Forks

The wide success of Bitcoin has led to a huge surge of alternative crypt...
research
07/30/2022

BlockScope: Detecting and Investigating Propagated Vulnerabilities in Forked Blockchain Projects

Due to the open-source nature of the blockchain ecosystem, it is common ...
research
06/18/2020

CoinWatch: A Clone-Based Approach For Detecting Vulnerabilities in Cryptocurrencies

Cryptocurrencies have become very popular in recent years. Thousands of ...
research
10/23/2021

Diving Into Blockchain's Weaknesses: An Empirical Study of Blockchain System Vulnerabilities

Blockchain is an emerging technology for its decentralization and the ca...
research
10/30/2020

Towards Understanding and Demystifying Bitcoin Mixing Services

The popularity of Bitcoin benefits a lot from its anonymity. However, th...
research
08/22/2021

Empirical Study of Sustaining the Actualized Value Propositions of Implemented E-Government Projects in Sub-Saharan Africa

Governments in sub-Saharan Africa have implemented e-Government projects...
research
02/12/2018

A first look at the usability of bitcoin key management

Bitcoin users are directly or indirectly forced to deal with public key ...

Please sign up or login with your details

Forgot password? Click here to reset