Following hacking @ DEVCON1,  Martin Swende is Nr. 1 on the leaderboard of the Ethereum Bounty Program. The bounty program is ongoing and the final bounty awarded amounted to five BTC. This system is open to anybody. With BTC Relay preparing for launch on Ethereum and its significance for a lot of DApps, we wish to spotlight its ongoing safety audit by together with it within the Ethereum Bounty Program.

BTC Relay is an Ethereum contract that implements Bitcoin SPV: https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Thin_Client_Security

The chief function of BTC Relay is to move alongside any sufficiently confirmed Bitcoin transaction, to a specified Ethereum contract. If somebody makes a Bitcoin cost, or any arbitrary transaction on the canonical Bitcoin blockchain, the relay ought to have the ability to ship it to any specified Ethereum contract. Extra particulars within the spec.

The purpose is to establish safety points reminiscent of accepting invalid blockheaders, false proofs, or invalid Bitcoin transactions. Equally, if there’s a legitimate Bitcoin transaction which BTC Relay doesn’t absolutely relay, that will even be eligible for bounties.

Please observe that since BTC Relay has a separate open-source grant for bounties, main bugs can be rewarded as much as 1 BTC.  A lot increased rewards are doable (as much as 5 BTC) in case of very extreme vulnerabilities. Rewards are eligible for everybody besides bounty program judges and builders of BTC Relay.

The scope is on the contract, the 5 “.se” information within the root listing of:

https://github.com/ethereum/btcrelay/tree/1466934855225b1e4a87031d299c1209ba12d503

(This can be a commit on https://github.com/ethereum/btcrelay develop department).

Not in scope is full SPV consumer performance (for instance Bitcoin block timestamps should not checked to avoid wasting gasoline prices). Higher mechanisms for incentivization, gasoline value and different algorithm optimization should not in scope. That stated, any such suggestions will nonetheless be gladly thought of.

With BTC Relay now included within the Ethereum bounty program, many of the guidelines on http://bounty.ethdev.com apply. For examples, web sites should not a part of the bounty program and first come, first serve — points which have already been submitted by one other person or are already recognized to the group should not eligible for bounty rewards. However, this additionally implies that past financial rewards, each bounty can also be eligible for:

• Itemizing on the the Ethereum bounty leaderboard with factors accumulating over the course of this system.
• Private inscription within the Ethereum namereg as soon as it is dwell.
• An unique, restricted version Ethereum Bountyhunter t-shirt

In the event you’d like to hitch the channel for BTC Relay, it’s open to all at https://gitter.im/ethereum/btcrelay.  The bounty program will run for a couple of weeks earlier than launching BTC Relay to Frontier.  Listed below are some objects to debate with the group and open questions for the Frontier launch:

• what ought to be the primary block in BTC Relay?
  
  • for technical and sensible causes, the earliest block that may be saved in BTC Relay is block 2016 (first problem retarget).  BTC Relay’s first block should be on an issue retarget, ie a block divisible by 2016.

• how doubtless are you to confirm Bitcoin transactions from some time in the past?
• how helpful would it not be if BTC Relay began with the block two problem retargets in the past?
  
  • presently, that will be block 389088

• there’s a script that anybody can run to submit block headers to BTC Relay and what do you assume its default charge, which verifiers of a Bitcoin transaction pay in ETH, ought to be?
  
  • script’s present charge is 0
  • it often prices lower than 0.01 ETH to submit a block header.  ought to the default charge be 0.01 ETH?
  • this default charge could be overridden to no matter submitter needs, though the motivation mechanism makes it in order that setting the charge excessively is unlikely to be rewarding

Lastly, the BTC Relay Bounty Program was added in “information & updates” to bounty.ethdev.com a few weeks in the past, and has already attracted 1 bounty submission!