The magic story
So. We've been asked multiple times by several people: why don't you just pick a block in the future at which point we'll switch to DGW3? Why all this "seeds down, pick a block, seeds up" stuff?
And they were right.. I would have been easier to fork that way. Everyone could update in advance and it wouldn't create any downtime.
The truth is, we've changed more than we announced. And we have a very good reason for that.
We discovered that the protocol magic in Guldencoin was the same as Litecoin's protocol magic..
The protocol magic is a set of bytes that is sent at the beginning of a message between two nodes. If the protocol magic is correct, the nodes continue to talk with each other. If it is incorrect, the nodes simply disconnect.
Because our magic was equal to Litecoin's magic, an attacker could connect to a NLG node, and send the NLG node an ip address for a LTC node. They would connect and start arguing about blocks and transactions. This would result in one node banning the other node for "misbehaving" (sending incompatible blocks). So an attacker could connect to an exchange's LTC node and send it the addresses for our seeds. The LTC exchange node would connect to the NLG seeds and the seeds would ban the exchanges address, or the other way around.
This could've been abused by an attacker to cause fragmented networks, possibly forks, and miners/exchanges being disconnected from the network.
With 1.3, this has been fixed. We now have a new protocol magic.
The reason we didn't announce this before actually forking is quite simple; we didn't want to give an attacker this information.
Changing the magic does not affect the coin in any other way, it's really only a low-level protocol property.
/GeertJohan
Guldencoin is in great hands. This transition was so smooth it feels like nothing occurred. I don't see one complaint...
Nice workGeertJohan
