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by rdl·4y ago·view on hn ↗
This is great research and if anything understates the case for alarm; Bitcoin is one of the more-decentralized projects, and PoW generally has some incentives for diverse hosting (if not network layer). PoS systems often end up on AWS specifically, and sometimes depend on some of the more niche AWS services -- an outage (engineered or accidental) in those could cause easy degradation and facilitate takeover.
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Actually, no. It isn't that great. A lot of people are correcting specific points here in the comments.

> More than one in five Bitcoin nodes are running an old version of the Bitcoin core client that is known to be vulnerable.

This is brought out as an issue, but it really doesn't matter. Being a large decentralized systems means that having nodes which are at all sorts of different versions, can still work. This is like saying that everyone has to be at the same web browser version for websites to work.

The thing that matters is that the nodes that are used for forming blocks (ie: the nodes the pools are running), are updated.