I plan to continue working on a competing implementation to Bitcoin Core. It was because of Bitcoin Unlimited that this bug was caught, when Awemany noticed it while working on the consensus changes for the November fork in BCH. This tells me that multiple implementations and competing development teams is a good thing.
I'm just disappointed that awemany hasn't received more tips. I personally tipped him .01 BCH. He hasn't even gathered 39 BCH, yet, last time that I checked. I would think the BTC and BCH community would be more grateful and giving. (As well as LTC, BTG etc. etc. communities.)
Given the absolutely
shameful disaster of a post that he wrote on medium, he deserves nothing IMO.
My opinion about all this story is that unfortunately it gives a strong feeling of not encouraging people to report bugs, @awemany is maybe thinking that he should have better sold the exploit to some dubious parties that could have used it
I don't think it's very important to know the total truth, he reported the critical bug and should have desserved a much more important reward (but he could have admitted that beardnboobies, while funny, is a kind of arrogant also), maybe he did not know to what extent it was critical but then his action prevented others from discovering it and using it
What solution among those discussed here is the best for the future? I don't know
But for sure that's always the same story, all decentralized systems failed (except bittorrent) because of the lack of incentive for people to participate (run nodes, participate to code, review, etc), fortunately bitcoin is not a decentralized system today so such situation can be controlled but it should/will be in the future, then what will be this incentive for people (lightning?)?
Simple example: I realized after the vulnerability disclosure that I was running a deviant node version 0.17.99 since I installed it from master (with a lot of difficulties), then I had to patch manually the vulnerability, I should revert to 0.16.3 and have a clean node, now why am I going to spend more time on this?