Hacker News Reader

Comment by im3w1l | Hacker News Reader

Or they were a whitehat wanting your problems to be caught in testing.

It's possible. We did a cursory look for the destination address to see what was happening. If I were a whitehat looking to educate people I would publish the destination address with a message saying what had happened, and probably send the coins back to one of the testnet faucets. As it was it looked like our coins went to a single-use address and sat there, which seems like more of a black-hat strategy.

I don't remember the address we used, though. Here's [1] a similar one, for "correct horse battery staple" -- the funds were moved (in the same block) from the address to a single-use address where they sat.

[1] https://live.blockcypher.com/btc-testnet/tx/835509e51ab9054e...

> I would publish the destination address with a message saying what had happened

Bitcoin does not support embedding messages in addresses (and embedding messages in transactions is controversial as it will be stored in blockchain forever, so many block explorers do not render such messages to discourage it).

I mean publish in the old fashioned sense - put it on a web page so someone could google it.

If he screwed up their project without permission, that's not totally "white hat".

It was testnet, though, so worthless, and easily obtained (in small amounts) from a testnet faucet (like [1], [2], or [3]). We considered continuing to share, but in the end it was just easier for individual developers to obtain their own and use them for testing rather than managing a central pool.

[1] https://testnet-faucet.mempool.co/

[2] https://bitcoinfaucet.uo1.net/

[3] https://kuttler.eu/en/bitcoin/btc/faucet/

Is testnet just for ... testing?

That's the kind of stuff testnet is for. It's better to have worthless coins stolen during testing than real coins stolen later.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com