A timewarp attack on Bitcoin allows malicious miners to game the timestamp system to allow them to increase the rate of block generation beyond what the blockchain meant it to be. This attack has been possible since 2012 and was demonstrated on the testnet.

This was dismissed as an unimportant issue for the past few years as it requires the majority of hashrate and is easily blocked once someone starts using it.

Several fixes are currently being discussed by Bitcoin developers, some requiring a soft fork with minimal changes to the code. This was already fixed on multiple blockchains like LTC and BCH but their solution is also vulnerable to an attack called powLimit.

Although relatively unimportant, patching this error is a necessary thing to do for the Bitcoin Blockchain to be safer against different attacks. We’re looking forward to seeing further efforts to fix this.

Resources

• Discussion
• powLimit