Not Everyone Wants to Fix Bitcoin’s ‘Time Warp Attack’ – Here’s Why

Bitcoin’s open-source developers don’t agree on many things, but you’d be forgiven if you thought something best known as an “attack” might be one of them.

Still, there’s a divide forming in conversation surrounding bitcoin’s long-standing “timewarp attack” – and for good reason. First and foremost, Blockstream co-founder Mark Friedenbach recently found that the exploit could be harnessed to help bitcoin scale – that is, reach more users and process more transactions faster, if developers embrace and implement the idea.

But since its unveiling last week, the discovery has driven a shift in the conversation around the attack, meant to describe how miners might submit blocks featuring timestamps that are larger than they should be to push down the difficulty of creating new blocks (a trick that could help them to earn and collect more bitcoin rewards).

The result is that prominent thinkers in the bitcoin development community now appear split on an issue that’s been the…