26 Nov 2013 / ZDNET – Price fluctuations and hackers aren’t the only challenge facing the virtual currency Bitcoin, with developers pooling funds for a virtual bounty offered to anyone who can fix a bug they fear could hemper take up.
Bitcoin developers and their counterparts backing the younger, rival virtual currency Litecoin have thrown together a virtual bounty worth around $10,000 for anyone who can figure out what’s causing a data corruption issue in certain Bitcoin and Litecoin wallets on Macs.
As some first noted several months ago, the introduction of the LevelDB key store database into the Bitcoin-qt client versions 0.8.x (currently at 0.8.5) coincided with a data corruption bug affecting Bitcoin users on Mac OS X machines.
The mystery bug impacts an important component of the wallet since LevelDB is used to store the Bitcoin blockchain, the public ledger of all transactions on the Bitcoin network. It’s a pain for users because rebuilding the database can take hours. And since the issue is common to wallets on Mac OS X for both currencies, developers from each camp — who have yet to solve the problem themselves — are hoping to crowdsource an answer……. Read more
