Could 0xBTC be attacked?
The most defensive and conservative neutral token contract in the Ethereum EVM, except perhaps WETH. What are its defenses? Possible weak points?
Note: This token has no relation to any existing version of ‘Bitcoin’, it is not pegged or associated. It is effectively a new mineable version, like a fork with no history. Intended for the EVM+DeFi specifically.
- The contract has no owner. Ownership was burned in 2018 for brevity, but the only method that the Owner could call had allowed the owner to extract tokens from the contract that had been accidentally Transferred to the contract address by a user. This was utilized to manually refund the tokens to the sender. Now any tokens sent to the contract address are effectively burned. Do not send tokens to the contract address!
- The only non-standard ERC20 method that can affect the contract state is Mint(). (The others are read-only.) The Mint() method requires a Proof-Of-Work challenge to be satisfied or else it will revert (fail.) Furthermore, the only input is the solution to the challenge, rotating each mint.
An attacker could not abuse this method since they do not have any ‘attack vector’ via the single input parameter. The nonce. They can either submit a valid Nonce or it will revert. This means that the method is so intensely simple that it leaves nothing to be manipulated.
One risk, shared with Bitcoin and all major Banks, is: if the SHA256 algorithm is cracked in the future and trivially-solvable, anyone could call the Mint() method in rapid succession and effectively bypass the PoW gate. However, supply would still be hard-capped at 21M and this event is thought to be extremely unlikely in the foreseeable future. Such an attack would also compromise Bitcoin and almost every online banking/money service in the world.
3. All other methods are standard ERC20 token contract methods which have been time-tested and proven safe in tens of thousands of other ERC20 tokens. Differently however, the deployer of 0xBTC started with zero tokens in order to establish the token as ‘neutral’ and so that the owner is ‘nobody special’. They are just another commoner, like you. Desperately trying to mine and buy 0xBTC as it is the first and largest PoW coin that works natively in DeFi in such a defensible manner with zero dependencies / trust.
