Bitcoin Forum

Three days ago, CoinWallet.eu initiated a relatively limited stress test on the Bitcoin blockchain to determine whether or not we alone could have a large impact on the ecosystem as a whole. While our initial tests merely created full blocks for a multiple hour period, transaction confirmation times remained within 6 blocks for most transactions. This test was both limited and basic.

Today we undertook a similar testing initiative once again, this time with a modified methodology. The result was roughly 3 hours of full blocks combined with increased confirmation times for many Bitcoin transactions. By selecting random transactions that were not initiated by our team, we were able to determine that many standard fee transactions were taking 2-5 blocks before receiving a single confirmation.

Bitcoin is at a breaking point, yet the core developers are too wound up in petty arguments to create the required modifications for long term sustainability. If nothing is done, Bitcoin will never be anything more than a costly science project. By stress testing the system, we hope to make a clear case for the increased block size by demonstrating the simplicity of a large scale spam attack on the network.

The plan - We have setup 10 Bitcoin servers that will send approximately 2 transactions per second each - Each of these transactions will be approximately 3kb in size and will each spend to 10-20 addresses - The outputs will then be combined to create large 15-30kb transactions automatically pointing back to the original Bitcoin servers.
Example: https://blockchain.info/tx/888c5ccbe3261dac4ac0ba5a64747777871b7b983e2ca1dd17e9fc8afb962519

•    Certain servers will be configured to include marginally larger than standard fees, thus guaranteeing delays from standard SPV wallets.

The target will be to generate 1mb worth of transaction data every 5 minutes. At a cost of 0.0001 per kb (as per standard fees) this stress test will cost approximately 0.1 BTC every five minutes. Another way to look at the cost is 0.1 BTC per full block that we generate. We have allocated 20 BTC for this test, and therefore will be able to single handedly fill 100 blocks, or 32 hours worth of blocks. However, we will stop pushing transactions after 24 hours at 13:00 GMT Tuesday June 23.

Predictions

•    Our above estimates are based on 1 block being mined every 10 minutes. This is standard, however deviations are likely to create temporary blips in our testing, in particular when there is an hour gap between confirmations.
•    The above calculations are based on each block being exactly 1mb and no other transactions appearing in the blocks. This is obviously unrealistic due to the fact that the average block size without our intervention is approximately 600kb. Furthermore, at least 30% of miners continue to cap blocks at 731kb. Others cap at 976kb.

Conclusions

For the sake of avoiding un-necessary calculations, lets assume that each block is 926kb in size, the average normal Bitcoin transaction volume is 600kb per block, and CoinWallet.eu will be pushing 2mb of transaction data into the network every 10 minutes. Under these conditions, the amount of transaction data being pushed to the network every 10 minutes (or every average block) will be ~2600kb. This will result in a 1674 kb backlog every 10 minutes.

By 14:00 GMT Monday June 22, the mempool of standard fee transactions will be 10mb By 24:00 GMT Monday June 22nd, the mempool of standard fee transactions will be 130mb By 13:00 GMT Tuesday June 22rd, the mempool of standard fee transactions will be 241mb

At this point the backlog of transactions will be approximately 241 blocks, or 1.67 days. When the average new transactions are factored into the equation, the backlog could drag on for 2-3 days. At this point, questions are raised such as whether or not this will cause a "crash landing." It is impossible to know with certainty, however we are anxiously looking forward to Monday.

They aren't in petty arguments. There is consensus among the developers that something needs to be done to increase scalability. They all agree that the block size should be raised, but they disagree how much and how it should be done.

When will the large transactions be sent? How often?
100 blocks is not 32 hours worth of blocks, it is only 16.67 hours. 144 blocks are generated daily, so this number is incorrect.

This is an interesting experiment, but it can and probably will disrupt a lot of trade going on through bitcoin right now. Also, since your transactions are pretty much dust and microtransactions, I think that miners will drop a lot of them and ignore your spam.

Can you show us the results from your other tests?

So if my bitcoin salary is late this month I should blame you guys  ;D

I'm by no means an expert on the tech details so I'm on the fence in regards to the increasing of the block size but sounds like this experiment will provide valuable information in this regard.

Also thanks for this post, gave me a better understanding of what can happen if we do not increase the block size.

Then Bitcoin price should fall during the test. It is necessary to put a buy order.
Or am I wrong?

The conclusions you draw from your premise are based on circular reasoning, while in fact your argument proves that a block size increase is not a proper solution to the problem:

If a large scale spam attack on the network is simple and can be achieved with 10 Bitcoin servers at 1 MB max_blocksize, it will be achievable with 200 Bitcoin servers at 20 MB max_blocksize, which is still a negligible amount of resources.

Spam attacks like yours will only become unviable if transaction fees rise steeply in relation to transaction size. So what we need first and foremost is more fee pressure.

ya.ya.yo!

Seems interesting. Will be looking forward to the results of the stress test.

This is an interesting test, and I'll be waiting for numbers if you actually do it... But I question myself if the chaos that this test will, in theory, provoke will justify the results obtained!

It's clear that we need to raise blocksize, but this test should put to rest this notion of "omg it's the apocalipse if we reach 1mb limit". Let's see what happens June 22 and if nothing happens then that means we are safe to stay with 1mb for longer than expected while the perfect solution is found.
Im also worried about microtransactions but they should go through. Miners can't selectively choose what or not they process afaik.

Idiots. Bitcoin will certainly survive this, but all you will accomplish by this is

#1 you wasted your own money on fees
#2 you are an asshole for everyone trying to spend coins durring that period.

If you want to test something use the testnet or create a model, no sane person does tests on a live system.

Ah so this is why my transactions are taking so long, thanks guys  ::)

But seriously though, thanks for taking the initiative to test this with your own resources, this is great that someone in the bitcoin community wants to spend their own money on research to improve the technology :)

Even though I highly support stress tests because they show real world effects due to the flooding,
I'm not too sure I support lagging the system for 1.5 to 3 days (theoretically).
A backlog of that long has repercussions that could hurt users in unexpected ways (ex. merchants).

Why can this not be done on the testnet? 3 day long backlog is too long for an active used network.

I love all the "WHY CANT U DO THIS ON TESTNET YOU JERKS!" messages.

Can you imagine if an organization who hated Bitcoin like the big banks, a government, or mastercard spent cash to clog up the bitcoin network for weeks? You think they'd care that you called them mean names?

They are paying the necessary fees to use the network, even if you consider it spam. Welcome to the free market.

You think that is free market? To flood the network for maybe a 3 day backlog of unconfirmed transactions?

Yeah, you are right.
Lets also charge billions of penny transactions/per second through the visa/mastercard system and when they shut it down and freeze it due to fraud and ddos, we'll just shake our fist and be like "hey yous.. free market guyz".

Since testnet coins are designed to have zero economic value, any economic experiments with testnet coins should not yield any valid results.

I do agree that bitcoin will continue working just fine while (and after) this test is being done, and yes they are being an asshole to anyone trying to spend bitcoin while they are doing this test, however I would argue that a real world example as to how the fee market would react to consistently full blocks would give us a better idea as to what will eventually happen if the max block size is not increased.

I will however point out that the company that is claimed to be behind the stress test does not actually have an [ann] thread on bitcointalk and a google search for them yields very few results. I would also point out that the domain coinwallet.eu appears to be registered only a little over a month ago. I think there is a fairly good chance that this is actually a somewhat elaborate scam to try to get peope to sign up for their wallet service, deposit money so they can run away with such money

Don't you mean you want to short bitcoin?

Speaking of shorting, check out this reddit post.
http://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/3ahl43/i_believe_we_have_our_first_scammer_organizing_a/ (http://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/3ahl43/i_believe_we_have_our_first_scammer_organizing_a/)
But who really knows. I guess we shall see on Monday.

I don't think there are some wrong with the company since they paid transaction fee and published their stress test process and results.We will aware the potential neck block as the transaction volume increases and understand the benefit brough by the increased blocksize.
  

My concern is that this is not a "real" company/exchange/service, but is rather a scam that is trying to gain publicity by advertising that they are going to do a stress test on Bitcoin.

I would somewhat doubt that the "test" actually happens, I think either the OP is going to "cancel" it because of a negative reaction, or we will hear silence.

IMO he is trolling here and not serious! Bitcoin trading almost happens in the exchanges, which is off chain. That kind of test won't be able to affect the price of it!

Understood! But bitcoiners wouldn't be easily trust this kind of newly launched wallet provider! We all know that there are a lot of scams and hacks around crypto world! We are always cautious about keeping our bitcoin except the new bitcoiners.

Have a look at this:
And two related bitcoin address:
https://blockchain.info/zh-cn/address/1NiFhMbV6cQrw4zZScEfkEQ9kofmWfXjNJ
https://blockchain.info/zh-cn/address/1Q6M9Vyuv5RyeuqpgJfCUCWrM2yrSb45BD
The transacton is as they claimed.These transactions was approximately 3kb in size and will each spend to 10-20 addresses - The outputs will then be combined to create large 15-30kb transactions.They took place continuely on these few days.IMO the test is there!

They are trying to pass themselves off as a service that is more established then they really are. If a potential customer were to think that a service is very well established then they would likely not due as extensive of due diligence as they might otherwise.

Except that their system can probably handle that much better than Bitcoins 3tps. And they can cancel backlogged transactions without consensus.

So if these guys are paying the fee for the transactions, its bad? Who decides what is spam and what isnt? why is this bad, but dice transactions are ok?  

Guys and Gals.. sometimes we need to have real world testing in a live environment to have the best answers to our questions.

I have done this many times before on other networks and even if this is disruptive, the test results received from this is VERY valuable and worth the little disruption it may have caused over the short period it was done.

These guys have been open in warning people in advance that they would be doing these tests.. So that is already something positive, but it could taint their experiment.

I would have done this without prior notice and then published the result publicly for scrutiny to get the best real world results.

There is so much arguments about this, that some proof with facts would end this.

The danger of prior notice, could also open up the opportunity for someone else with bad intentions to jump in and run a simultaneous attack to cloud the results or to crash the system.

The zealous bitcoiners need to wake up and smell the coffee: we need to test the network under real circumstances before we can aim at reaching a mainstream audience. Imagine a bad actor with an agenda and lots of resouces tries to flood the network.. they could have done it before if they wanted to, they just don't see a real treat (yet). We need to know what would happen and we need to take the measures before a real enemy attemps a mega flood attack on the chain. And like Kprawn says, they should have done this in a random day without telling anyone to simulate a real attack. Now the results will not be as clear. Remember guys, a real attacker is not going to tell you "do you want this on the testnet or not?"

What shall we learn from this kind of experiment:

1) We need a limit on the block size. This limit has to be
   sufficiently large for day to day transaction amounts but
   sufficiently small to prevent scam to enter the blockchain.

2) There should be some self-adjustment of fees. Clients should be
   able to inquire from the full nodes an estimate for a reasonable
   fee based on the content of the mempool. This would allow for
   moderate fees under usual circumstances but would increase fees in
   times of flooding the blockchain with scam and would turn scamming
   into an expensive exercise.

Could we look at it another way? What if the very idea of a limit on the blocksize is the problem? What if instead, each transaction had a fee based on the size of the transaction? That way no matter how big the block gets, the fees cover it.

1) Ineffective. The attack is meant to fill the entire block thus preventing the daily transaction from getting confirmed fast. Lowering or increasing the size will never solve the problem since spam transactions will still fill the blocks.
2) Ineffective. The attack can cause the fees to increase and discouraging users to make transaction.

BTW FTFY.

A spam attack like this would bring down a bank for days

and result in police fbi etc involvement

for us to be protecting against this kind of attack means

we have become the Government 2.0

No, that's the point. There is no government in bitcoin. Anything goes. So we must make sure that nothing anybody tries breaks the system.

I guess it has got to hurt a little to get a message clear to the current devs. I hope tests like this will show the importance of steps that are to be taken.

Well from the looks of it, this kind of attack on bitcoin would be very inexpensive, at only ~20 BTC per day, this works out to be roughly $5,000 to launch this kind of an attack against bitcoin assuming the max block size stays the same.

An attacker like Western Union, who would have a lot to loose if bitcoin were to become massively adopted by the public, could launch this kind of spam attack and make bitcoin less desirable to most consumers.

This is probably harder to program than it sounds, and when dealing with big transactions the fee would be way too big to benefit from one of the main strong points of Bitcoin, which is moving money with low fees regardless of the amount you are moving.

Not amount, size. As in data size. Which I guess wasn't thought all the way through. Could just lift the limit with the way the system is set up now. Or set it to a hundred times what might be needed on average. Why hasn't this already been done when miners can just limit the sizes they accept anyway?

More indications that this is a publicity stunt and will not happen.  It does not give confidence that the first bitcoinhash post by the author is signed

"Best wishes
Colonel Afurah,
Nigeria Army"

More specifically the maths seems wrong.  One block each 5 minutes for 24 hours is 288 blocks.  It is not clear where the 100 blocks comes from.  

There are other minor indicators that the author is not that familiar with computers, for example the use of mb and kb with lower case b for Megabytes and Kilobytes, rather than mB/MB and kB/KB.

And so it begins: https://blockchain.info/unconfirmed-transactions

CMIIW, isn't it just 12:06 GMT (from http://time.is/GMT) at the moment, so it is still roughly an hour to go?

popcorn

Yes, it should start in an hour. There was no block discovered for 20 minutes, so number of unconfirmed transactions is bigger then ususal.

Is there some convinient web page for monitoring attack and state of network, except blockchain.info?

I think GMT is UTC+1 right now since it is daylight savings time.
It seems to have started anyway, with full force. It seems to have killed statoshi :(
http://statoshi.info/dashboard/db/transactions

Edit:
Seems to work now. Showing ~14 TPS.
http://statoshi.info/dashboard/db/transactions?panelId=6&fullscreen

GMT is equivalent to UTC. Only, it's unused in summer because people switch to BST, which is UTC+1.

Have anyone experienced any problems sofar or are you scared to submit transactions whilst this is going on? So if I understand this correctly, this experiment is going to cost them $5000 US in transaction fees?

I guess it's only the miners who will be smiling after this is done.  :(

Anyone want to wager on the outcome of this? I still feel, to validate this experiment, they should have done it, without prior notice. The notice influence the normal behaviour of the users in this scenario.

Well, I hope we will see some results soon... or a report of what people experienced whilst this was busy.  ???  

Pretty much every space related part goes through extensive mechanical testing.
Also real cars are crashed to see the result.

Testing on a live system is the best test you can do.
Bring it on, test the shit out of it. Bring it to it's knees

We're not really doing this again are we? Will there be another next month, and the month after until the blocksize debate is settled? I'm sure the miners don't mind since last time this happened the fee's per block nearly doubled.

Does anyone know if this has actually started or if this whole thing was a hoax? According to the OP, the test should have started ~20 minutes ago. Blockchain.info is showing ~5300 unconfirmed transactions (which may not be an all inclusive figure), and this is up from ~4000 unconfirmed transactions maybe between 10 and 20 minutes ago, although the fact that no blocks have been found in 30+ minutes is going to cause this number to be somewhat inflated.

Edit: as of 1:39~ two blocks have been found and unconfirmed transactions per bc.i are at ~6,600 and total fees are at 50+ BTC (someone probably made a mistake in generating a transaction).

Where do you see 50+ fees?

https://blockchain.info/unconfirmed-transactions

6587.689453125 (KB)

here:
http://imgur.com/5lpGy5W
http://imgur.com/5lpGy5W

50 BTC..  Man, someone must have sent a huge tx fee!  Lucky miner that gets that one.

Tradeblock showing 10k

https://tradeblock.com/blockchain/ (https://tradeblock.com/blockchain/)

you edited the post just I was commenting, nice chart  :P

Starting to go crazy.

wonder if more miners came online just for this test?  Very fast block times right now.

https://i.imgur.com/iyVbtwl.png

Yep, very close to the highest amount of unconfirmed TX (12k) since my node is running (Oct 2014)

Blocks filled to the max now, 731 or 976kb, depending on miners configuration.

http://www11.pic-upload.de/22.06.15/jj819st2rxbv.png

Blockchain.info not refreshing anymore.
Other people with the same problem?

blockr.io (https://btc.blockr.io/) is another one that is pretty good.  My full node (http://bitcoin-p2pool.com/bitcoin_node_peer_information.html) seems to have about 6 blocks worth of transactions in the memory pool as of right now.  Should be interesting.

This crazy huge fees will make price bitcoin moon ;D
more minner and smooth transaction i like it

Naugh, seems to be a low flying moon...

Predictions is true:

http://www11.pic-upload.de/22.06.15/8awomk16our.png

same thing, operations are much slower

https://i.imgur.com/LzitDUT.png

I don't think this will have any significant increase in the profitability of miners. The OP has a budget of 20 BTC to spend in fees today verses 3,600 BTC in block subsidies per day. That works out to be a ~.55% increase in anticipated mining revenue, probably not enough to justify brining unprofitable miners back online.

I'm wondering why you are doing this. You say that you are a millionaire who's losing patience with Bitcoin, yet you do this stress test. So I wonder what the background really is.

Is this something new or have tests like this been done before?  Either way, looking forward to the final results.

It needs to be figured out if Bitcoin is ready for mass adoptions.
Results will be very important.

This test only cost 20BTC which is about $5000 per day, not much money for USA or Russia or China government.

They could probably even afford much much stronger "stress test" lasting weeks or months.

agreed. even some users here are obviously not happy at all, I like this kinds of tests. Will you share also some output and results which may help with future development?

Whoah, blockchain.info isn't refreshing for me either!  :o You can tell this stress test is going on.

I agree about the importance of such a stress test and the potential impact a really big stresstest could have on the network. So if you are speaking for the comany, I fully understand the (potential) motivation. But I'm more interested to know why you, as a person who lost patience in Bitcoin, are doing this.

They could fuck us up real bad if they wanted to, specially in cooperation. Thats why we need Gavin's 8mb increase + Gmaxwell's LN working pronto.

According to this, and projecting to 24:00 GMT, that could be a fee of 0.0065 to get into the next block.
That is about $1.30 per transaction during a time of load like 130mb backlog.

No it isnt ready.

Now you can end the test and save your money dude  ;)

I applaud your efforts. This test should give folks a very good idea about exactly what will happen on the Bitcoin network in the near future if the block size is not increased.

If the Bitcoin network is not resilient enough to withstand this test, then it is not designed very well.

Thank you and good job!

I don't think that is a big deal. Except for some active traders, average people are actually very flexible when it comes to transaction confirmation time. Since 90% of the bitcoins are used as long term investment, it does not really matter you bought it one day earlier or you sell it one day later

Banks are all closed during the weekend, but that does not drive all the people to 24/7 internet banks. They will patiently wait for the Monday to do business again. Even bible said that you should not work on Sunday  ;D

Not really seeing the massive build up yet. next block is now due and only 4k transactions waiting?

"Average people" haven't even started to adapt Bitcoin. And one argument is that transactions can go through fast. At least faster then with banks. So if a transaction through the Bitcoin network becomes slower for them, Mr. and Mrs. Average will most likely not use it.

Yeah this doesn't appear to be a very big stress test. It looks like just an hour or two of higher-than-average transactions per second, and now back to normal.

I'm wondering if coinwallet.eu failed to carry through with their plan and all we're seeing is other contributers who wanted to add to the movement.

Unless they are holding some bitcoins for the long term, which is the major usage right now  ;)

The idea behind this test is good. If a large entity can spam the network with large amount of transactions (Banks for example, could throw in million dollar without difficulty, if they feel that bitcoin is competing with their business), then the best way to defend is to raise the block size 100 times: With larger block size, to spam the network would require much more resources, and it will be much easier for miners to see the spam nodes (with huge amount of transactions) and block them

It seems the network is back to normal now, maybe OP's nodes are all blocked right now  :D

me too, that is a perfect "in situation" datas to permit to developpers to view if they can change somes approch of the developping process of Bitcoin network.

https://getaddr.bitnodes.io/dashboard/

And exchange rate was not affected by this test, showing that real economy activities have nothing to do with exchange rate, which is mainly decided at exchange

This is true for fiat money too, their exchange rate is maintained by central banks with huge amount of currency reserve, have nothing to do with real economy. In fact, banks affect economy through manipulating exchange rates

My transaction has been waiting for confirmations for approximately 3 hours now.  I wish I had seen the warning on this test.  And I wish these kinds of experiments were being carried out on testnet.  Sheesh, it's not that fun when you're the one who got disrupted by the experimentation.

I forgot about this. Now i shall wait a bit more because of this.

Well look at the bright side. Now the "do not raise the blocksize limit above 1mb" crowd will learn the hard way. People don't want to solve problems until those problems are felt by themselves.

Ok, I'm trying to look at the bright side rather than the annoying side, but FWIW, I wasn't part of the "themeselves" that needed to feel this.  I had no issue raising blocksize limit and I stil wish these dudes would perpetrate elsewhere. 

Lol...waiting long? What about higher fees? ;D ;D

You can fill up any block size limit with this kind of scam.
It is not a question of the value of the actual block size limit itself but a
question of the price you have to pay for scam.

 What shall we learn from this kind of experiment:

1) We need a limit on the block size. This limit has to be
   sufficiently large for day to day transaction amounts but
   sufficiently small to prevent scam to enter the blockchain.

2) There should be some self-adjustment of fees. Clients should be
   able to inquire from the full nodes an estimate for a reasonable
   fee based on the current content of the mempool. This would allow for
   moderate fees under usual circumstances but would increase fees in
   times of flooding the blockchain with scam and would turn scamming
   into an expensive exercise.

Wow, these guys were spot on with this test.

https://i.imgur.com/FdihZSj.png

I wonder if $500K in BTC was set aside.

Just normal calculation would tell me transactions would take days! If not weeks.

This is a serious problem.

Interesting, viewing an address is failing on blockchain sporadically.

Receiving this error - "Maximum concurrent requests for this endpoint reached. Please try again shortly."

^^ This.

If my client had warned me about the situation I would not have sent my BTC this morning.  'If my client had said "you're going to need to pay an exorbitant amount in fees if you hope to have your transaction confirmed anytime today thanks to a "stress test" that is currently being perpetrated on mainnet.' I would have appreciated the warning and cancelled the send.

I was going to play a game for 30 minutes or so before work.  Now, 4.5 hours later, my BTC is tied up in some unconfirmed transaction.  Hey, OP, uh, thanks!

So what makes my coins so special? Nothing over 2 hours for 6 confirms yet.

According to the original calculation they provided, the unconfirmed tx should be around 55MB by now.
Currently, it is only around 8MB, which is not that bad. Miners seem to be chomping away fine.

So the stress testers either stopped or it was a scam to manipulate something unknown at this time (double spends?).

Currently, this only effects users who did not set a higher fee, to get into next block.
Currently, the average fee for next block seems to float around 0.0003.

pay the real fees ...  ::)

good, normal fee is 0,00001 BTC usually ... and 0,0001 BTC in 2014.  ;D (android wallet)

Well... now current fee is 0.00053, for next block (in theory).

Seems they started again after stopping for 2.5 hours.

Hey, cute eyeball rolling smiley!  If by "the real fees" you're referring to the fee my client suggested for the transaction, that's exactly what I did.  If you missed the context above about a potential client that would warn you about spam-attacks and "stress-tests" and calculate a fee suggestion to get you confirmed, I dunno, today, then ::) back at ya.


Whelp, I paid 0.00002BTC, so I guess I'm double what you consider normal.  Hey, thanks Meuh6879, for the help!

As of ~8:03 PM GMT, there are roughly 9,200 unconfirmed transactions with total Tx fees of ~1.76 btc that are a total of ~10,100 KB in size. Last block was found roughly 35 minutes ago and the 6th last block was found roughly 90 minutes ago.

http://media.giphy.com/media/lMVNl6XxTvXgs/giphy.gif

Raise the limit!

Lol. Isn't that Peter Todd on the right?  ;)

Here is a good site to watch the memepool as a graph, on the right hand side.

Dark Blue are unconfirmed transactions that are old and "were received since the confirmation of the last block".
Light Blue are unconfirmed transactions that are new and "were received since the confirmation of the last block".

You can also see how much the miners are adding into the blocks, when found.

https://tradeblock.com/blockchain/ (https://tradeblock.com/blockchain/)

Lol. Isn't that Peter Todd on the right?  ;)
[/quote]


Hahahaha...great catch!

As I was expecting and wrote a while back on the forums... Although it's an interesting experience, the cost and blockchain delays provoked by such a test outstand the results obtained from it. There isn't a beneficial funds spent/results obtained relation here. Just some spam and confirmation delays for folks wanting to send coins back and forth...

We already know we've got to bump up the block size... :D

Yes ... always full.

http://imagizer.imageshack.us/a/img910/2807/34FByP.jpg

http://media.giphy.com/media/2u11zpzwyMTy8/giphy.gif

Lol. Peter actually said today on reddit to just pay the higher fees.
https://gist.github.com/petertodd/8e87c782bdf342ef18fb (https://gist.github.com/petertodd/8e87c782bdf342ef18fb)

I had to wait an hour and a half for the 1st confirmation earlier which was a bit irritating till i found this thread , but it wasn't really a problem.
I hope someone learned something useful out of this.

That was quite informative, thanks. 

11500 transactions in mempool

I learned that we need bigger blocks literally now. My transaction is still unconfirmed after 3 hours lol.

For curious sake, how much did you pay in fee?
Current unconfirmed is 11000.

Bigger blocks is not the complete answer.  Just making the block bigger, might push a problem out somewhere else.  orphan blocks ect.

just pay another couple pennies to get your transactions confirmed in the next block.

back in the 80s pushing it to the limit with out banks was something not possible, now we are in a new era we are the system we can push it to the limit https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XuaacLc6NZo

Is this happening? OMG this is awesome! And bad.
So, do you guys think they will be raising the limit? Or doing something else like telling everyone to pay up with higher fees? :)

things like this is good for everyone.
things can evolve now.

Pretty good. lol.

Ahh, yes. If only those 10k unconfirmed transactions had paid higher fees they would be confirmed by now.

Yes they will not be confirmed. We need 20 MB blocks to make spamming the network more expensive.

Supply and demand would have decided which ones got including by who was willing to pay the most.

Yes, but if we raised the cap slightly, miners "could" fit more transactions within a block, thus clearing this backlog.
Raising your fee just places you at the top of the list line/queue. But the line is still increasing.

And in theory, if that line continued for weeks, you'd pay eventually 1btc to be at the front of that line.

Edit: changed list to line/queue

I finally understand why my transactions are delayed :P

Good experimentation anyway :-)

That means that there would be 1 thousand other transactions every 10 minutes that were willing to pay 1 btc to have there transactions included as well.

Exquisite, indeed. However, if we are looking for a broader adaption of Bitcoins, this technical explanation means "questionmark" to the "normal user"...

Hmm, makes me think of a different case of politically limited supply.

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2255693/Last-pictures-life-iron-curtain-collapse-USSR.html

It will be interesting to see if this stress test brings about a solution to the block size problem. Hopefully we can find a solution to ensure that the blockchain continues to function without any issues or unnecessary delays.

Yeah.. great for miners, but horrible/impossible for the average user. Thus neutering Bitcoin/bitcoin.

My point is eventually the fees will continue to increase to a point that most users can not afford.
Many new and average users only own way less than 0.10 btc.

What happened to spreading Bitcoin throughout the world?
What are all those poor people in poor states gonna do now?
http://www.coindesk.com/ben-parker-bitcoin-has-potential-in-fragile-states/ (http://www.coindesk.com/ben-parker-bitcoin-has-potential-in-fragile-states/)
Tough shit for them, I guess, eh?

Edit: spelled neutering wrong

That is a false, or at least incomplete, argument.

---

The cost of spamming the network and delaying transactions is, in a simplistic representation, a function of the cost per kB and the size of the block.


This is an important distinction.

Although larger blocks would increase the cost to delay other user's transactions, the exact same result could occur from a functioning fee market.

Increasing EITHER capacity OR the cost per kB would increase cost.

The ultimate result of these two strategies is different, however.

With a larger block size, the long-term cost to the network rises.
Each kB of block chain must be stored by all of the full nodes participating in the network forever, given the current system.
Each kB of transaction stored in the chain has a very real long-term "cost".
The increased cost is permanent.

With a higher fee per kB, the short-term cost to the network rises.
Transaction fees must rise for users, in order to be included in a block, during the spam attack.
The increased cost is temporary.

---

This trade-off should not be underestimated.

This test isn't really going to change anything, or bring any solutions... This is only raising awareness of a problem we already know we have, it isn't proposing anything new. It's an interesting test, but with a predictable outcome for which the solution is already in discussion for quite some time, and there is already code ready to be deployed that helps prevent a situation like this.

You can see how many unconfirmed transactions there are at this link.

https://blockchain.info/unconfirmed-transactions

There were over 10 thousand unconfirmed earlier on when no new block had been found for a long time, now there are about 7200 unconfirmed because a block was found recently.

Maybe the wallets could be updated to scan for spam attacks, and in the event of one suggest paying a higher transaction fee. A message could explain the situation and suggest a higher fee for urgent transactions, or the normal fee for non-urgent transactions.

too many to explored.
this thing will make me stressed for real.
Ultimate Bitcoin Stress Test whatsssss???
ultimate delaying yess

Speaking of this, there will be a -prune option in 0.11 (stable version should be out soon, currently in rc2) that allows you to autoprune the old block data with wallet disabled.
https://github.com/bitcoin/bitcoin/pull/5863

Running a pruned node with wallet won't be included in 0.11 though.
https://github.com/bitcoin/bitcoin/pull/6057

Those scammers CoinWallet.eu guys are really retarded!!! :)

I have been using Bitcoin for 3 years now, and rarely have I send a transaction without fee and almost never volume lower than 0,1 BTC!
Which means, that the 8500+ clogged transactions are only their own, mine and most other peoples transactions went thru with little to no delay.

I am pro going to 1MB Size blocks, but it is too early to speak about that.

Didn't take part in it, but current test made very long queue. People waited over 3 hours for 1 confirmation.
Limit of block size must be increased ASAP.

Dude, I am still waiting for a confirmation from over 7 hours ago.  I sent a 551byte transaction with a 2KSat fee and I must be at the bottom of the queue or something.  I see on blockchain.info that we seem to have stabilized at about 5000 unconfimred transactions but to be honest I have no idea how this compares to historical averages because it's never been an issue getting confirmations before.

I think average is around 800 to 1300 unconfirmed transactions during normal situations. Maybe even less.

Yes, the test is meaningless - it's an annoyance aiming at price manipulation.

The solution to stop spam attacks like this is certainly not a max_blocksize increase, because even at 20x times the blocksize the resources needed to perform such an attack are still extremely small for any serious attacker.

The practical solution for now is: Prioritize your transaction by sending it with an adequate fee.

The general solution is: Increase fees for spam transactions, i.e. fees should rise non-linearly (maybe exponentially) for small-value transactions with big data size.

ya.ya.yo!

Thanks that helps.  I also took a look at the number of transactions in the last few blocks and saw that they were in the hundreds (not thousands) and that also made me realize there must still be an above average queue going on here.  I see that at the moment of this post we're down to 3970 so at least things are headed in the right direction (although I'm still without a confirmation, wow).

I guess I can thank the OP's experiment for teaching me something about how many transactions are usually in a block.  And for teaching me a lesson to look up the number of waiting transactions before sending any bitcoin to make sure there's not some kind of "stress test" nonsense happening.

That will lead to a huge decline in bitcoin... as for if it's so hard to spend, why use it at all? :-/

And I finally got a confirmation on my transaction sent with a standard fee, a total of 9 hours and 15 minutes after sending it.  Thanks stress test!

And yes, now that I know these kinds of shenanigans are being perpetrated, I'm going to be adjusting my usage accordingly.  I'm not sure that was the intended result of the stress-testers, but that's what I'm doing.  So I guess the stress-testers have achieved something in making bitcoin that much harder to use.

Granted, you may be using a different client, but it is already possible to query the bitcoin core client (and maybe some others) to get a fee estimate (bitcoin-cli estimate fee NUMBLOCKS - where NUMBLOCKS is how many blocks you want the transactions to get one confirmation within).  I haven't really used it much, other than to put it on my node stats (http://bitcoin-p2pool.com/bitcoin_node_peer_information.html) page, so I won't vouch for the accuracy, but the numbers look reasonable from what I have seen reported on my node.

Considering the devs cannot anticipate when an event like this will occur to put out an alert, nor do I believe it was a serious enough event to really warrant much attention, I think this is pretty fair.  Even if it was a full fledged, state sponsored attack on the network by way of flooding transactions, the core client and network seem to be working as designed.  Now, whether and how that design can be improved, there are no shortage of opinions and theories.  It's no secret that bitcoin is not ready to scale to a global sized economy yet, if ever.

That is very true. The blockchain is already quite big as well and the storage required keeps rising. A temporary rise in fees could be interesting but would result in a more permanent rise as the number of bitcoin transactions grows with increased use I would imagine. Wasn't the idea of the "spam attack" that it was trying to simulate possible real world bitcoin activity later on in bitcoin's life?

Glad you liked it. It was deleted by a mod for being off-topic. How can Dr. Evil be off-topic in an Ultimate Bitcoin Stress Test thread!?

Uh.. NO. If they wanted to manipulate the price, they wouldn't have announced this; then people might start panicking not knowing who is attacking the system. That will manipulate the price.

The "test", as it was originally intended, was supposed to last longer and cause a backlog for 3 days.
Seems it only lasted 24 hours and the backlog is pretty much clear now.
Until they release their "report" on their "findings", I'm not really sure what actually happened today.

They had claimed that they had budgeted for roughly 32 hours worth of transactions, however would stop pushing new transactions after 24 hours.

They were suppose to continue to push transactions into the network at a consistent rate, however from the looks of it, they pushed transactions onto the network for a few hours when the "test" first started, then stopped for several hours and then resumed pushing transactions again. The test was suppose to create a backlog of transactions worth several hundred MB, however this clearly did not happen.....as of now it appears that the backlog of unconfirmed transactions is pretty much clear.

I think it is pretty clear that they did not use up their entire claimed budget for this test.

Was there also some stress test on 16th this month? I had a transaction that got first confirmation only after about 6 hours, and was sent with standard fee.
The size of the block was 912.46875 KB, and number of unconfirmed transaction at the time ranged from 2500-3000 (+)

cheers

Yes there was something on the 16th.
But no one knew if it was related to the btc price rising (235ish to 250ish) and causing more tx or it was actual testing.

If there was indeed a malicious agenda, that agenda would more likely be to persuade users to support the proposed block increase changes.

1. Spam chain to cause problems with poorly implemented wallet solutions/clients.
2. Users of above clients have trouble transacting.
3. Convince those users that only the block size increase can solve their problems.

---

The real short-term solution to these tests?

Implement better fee estimation in the client software.
Choose wallet software that allows for more intelligent fee estimation.

two things:

1. Perhaps it was because of the backlash they received here, because they were concerned for innocent bitcoiners as well, that they did not do a full 24 hours as they had originally promised.


2. increasing fees isn't a solution; it'll cause less people to use bitcoin which is detrimental.

Storing data is not "free".

The marginal cost of a transaction is a very real metric; especially in a system that expects that data to be stored by all participants for an extended period of time.

Ignoring this fact, does not make it go away.

The Bitcoin "ledger" and block chain is a globally replicated database.
Expecting to store your transaction data in it for little or no fees is irresponsible and selfish.

Seven days until a repeat attempt...


CoinWallet.eu Stress Test Complete (https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/3as4qr/coinwalleteu_stress_test_complete/)

 8)

See everybody in one week, i guess. Lol.

Yep, I got this last night " Maximum concurrent requests for this endpoint reached. Please try again shortly. "

I have to say, my test transaction confirmed pretty quickly, and it was even quicker than my normal day to day confirmations. What is the possibility that miners who stopped mining, switched on their rigs, just to cash in on the extra transaction fees, generated through this experiment?

I still say... If you want to have untainted results, run this test, when nobody knows about it.  :(

Wow, reading through this thread, so many whiny users. This is exactly what should happen, yes on the live network. I can't imagine all the crying that would occur if a truly malicious entity with a budget of 5000 BTC instead of 20 BTC went to town on the network. The problem is exacerbated by the fact that the average bitcoin user does not even think about the transaction fee, so it is all the more easy to disrupt people's business because you only have to spam the network with a few extra satoshis in fees, and then people freak out over their transactions taking forever and they don't know how much of a fee they need to use to get their txns processed in a timely manner. Better for the entire bitcoin userbase, and third party app developers, to become aware of this sooner than later, and to see how the network actually behaves when network volume exceeds the blocksize limit.

It seems to me that large-scale spam attacks designed to cripple all/most network activity may be unsustainable due to the eventual increase in fees per transaction needed to keep it up. However if an attacker merely wishes to be a nuisance and spam-out only the lowest fee transactions and fill up the blocks, that could happen on a sustainable basis with a relatively low budget.

Yes, it's over ...  8)

http://imagizer.imageshack.us/a/img912/7898/DWnMPk.jpg

And ignoring the fact that as a currency, fees should be sufficiently low does not make it go away. I thought bitcoin wants to succeed as a currency, not just a database storage system?

You actually make a pretty good point with the above mentioned. Maybe it was some sort of weak fud thread experiment. 20BTC gone in the wind to miners today...lol

I don't know, who made this test and I quite frankly don't care, but claiming, that it must have been "Gavin and his buddies" just shows, how low people can fall to "prove" their point.
Badmouthing other people makes you look bad, not the person you badmouth. It's really a shame, how many ridiculous people are on the internet, especially on this forum.

I guess there will be a report on the findings of the stress test in a few days.
It looks like an interesting experiment and someone spent their own resources to test it out a nice use for 20 Bitcoins, it does show though that adding fees to the standard txt will prioritize transactions as a self-adjusting mechanism.

(https://gist.github.com/petertodd/8e87c782bdf342ef18fb)

Good link on background info found a few pages back for those that aren't skimming the thread.

(Part 2 well this well be fun)
https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/3as4qr/coinwalleteu_stress_test_complete/

Sorry, but that post just made it worse.
There is no evidence, that this "stress test" has anything to do with XT. On the contrary, I don't think, it was made by anyone, who is a longtime developer in the Bitcoin world, since it was carried out very poorly.

The last bold part, just shows, that you don't really have read into how the block limit came into being. Instead of making stupid conspiracy theories, you should look into that.

Interesting speculation.

As already mentioned, we are competing for a space in the next block, which is for auction. The higher the bid (fee) the more chance you have of getting included.

I make it simple: Look at
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1347.msg15366#msg15366
and tell me again, that Satoshi wanted the block size limit never to be raised.

Once again, your logic is proving difficult to follow.  If this short term period of disruption is "inconsiderate", "malicious" and "selfish", how is risking the network frequently running in such a fashion by imposing an artificial bottleneck somehow a reasonable option in your opinion?  Obviously these weren't important transactions because it was a test, so it's inconsequential that they weren't able to continue transacting.  But there will likely come a time when more people start to use Bitcoin for normal transactions.  If the userbase is sufficiently large enough, what we've seen in this test would be the tip of the iceberg.  It will be regular users that are forced to stop sending transactions because of delays or unexpected rises in cost and this will be far more damaging to Bitcoin's longevity than any supposedly malicious test.  If Bitcoin doesn't scale, the users that can't be accommodated comfortably will simply switch to a more convenient payment method.  One that doesn't have varying fees and unexpected delays.



Firstly, "hacker"?  Seriously?  Your attempts to discredit anyone who disagrees with you are laughable.  Secondly, anyone with eyes can see that the blocksize limit is an issue, otherwise there wouldn't be so many threads discussing it.  Not everything is some bizarre conspiracy.  



Just understand that once there are more users, it won't just be spam or dust transactions, it was be all transactions that are subject to these conditions.  You will be paying the extra fees when the network is busy and if people pay a higher fee than you, it's your transactions that might be delayed.  We've never run the network in that fashion before, but if you want to attempt that, then it's your decision to vote that way if you mine or run a node.

Nope, got it completely backwards again.  If there were no block reward right now, miners would have little incentive to secure the network with the amount of fees currently collected.  

If, hypothetically, there was no block reward right now, based on the transaction volume we are getting now, how much fee would need to be paid on each transaction to give at least the current average level of fees plus the 25 BTC reward?  Last time I bothered to do the math, we were averaging about 750 transactions per block.  By my figures, each transaction would have to have a fee of about .034 BTC just to cover the 25 BTC reward, plus a bit extra for the current fees that are already being paid (so there's no loss of mining revenue).  How many people are going to pay about $8 or $9 USD in fees for every single transaction?  Most would switch to an altcoin in a heartbeat if Bitcoin became that expensive.  If people aren't willing to pay that much, there will be even fewer transactions and that cost will then rise even further.  But increase the number of transactions in the block, rather than limiting it, then you can spread that cost over a greater number of users, making it more affordable.  Obviously we can squeeze in a few more than the 750 we're averaging at the moment, but we genuinely do need more users than the system will currently support to make this thing sustainable in future.  Unless you foresee Bitcoin becoming a niche, elitist, isolated haven for wealthy one-percenters, there is simply no other option than to accommodate more users.  More users equals more fees for miners, not less.

Categorically 100% false.  The 1MB limit is currently a hard limit, so by it's very definition, it limits that number of transactions the network can process.  If, for example, there were 20MB worth of transactions waiting, even if everyone paid over $10 dollars in fees, the network is unable to process them all in one go.  It would take 20 blocks to clear them with a 1MB blocksize.  That's likely to be over 3 hours for some of those transactions.  Would you not be annoyed if you paid a fee and still found you had to wait 3 hours because other people had paid a higher fee?  However, with an 8MB blocksize, you will still pay a fee to prioritise your transaction, but we could clear that queue in three blocks.  On average you'd be waiting 30 minutes at most.  This is the part most people don't seem to comprehend.  As the userbase grows, the blocksize must grow to accommodate it.

Exactly, this was obviously never going to affect the price whatsoever. And I highly doubt it would if it was unannounced :D


My thoughts exactly.


As for their reddit post... Another test in 7 days? Wasn't this enough? What are these people trying to achieve? They are ruining their own business ::)

And I'll be waiting for that data in the next few hours, it better be good in order to "compensate" for the slow transactions... :D

The fee is based on network data usage, not the amount of bitcoin, so it will always benefit the large transactions. To hold the promise of cheap fee for small transactions, block size must be expanded

Does anyone know who is really behind their business?

Their website is registered anonymously and their company address is also registered through a service that hides the true owners identity. The company is only a few months old and nobody had heard of it before the stress test. The whole company could be a front for someone with an agenda.

I can assure you there is no flaw in what I've said, I've simply described how the protocol works.  You're the one who fails to understand it correctly.  The confirmation time for some of the transactions will be on average 10 minutes.  But if there are more than 1MB worth of transactions waiting, even if every single one of those transaction has a fee included, some of those transactions will have to wait for another block with space available if we stick with a 1MB limit.  If that still doesn't make sense to you, then I'm afraid I can't take your arguments seriously.  It's no wonder you're unduly panicked by the whole situation if you haven't taken the time and effort to understand why the fork is being proposed.  If you continue to post unsubstantiated accusations, wild conspiracy theories and outright fallacious statements, it's unlikely anyone else will take you seriously either.

Please stop presenting your speculations as fact and please stop pretending like you are one of the chosen ones, who understand Satoshis thoughts.
It's because of people like you, that some people see us Bitcoin users as cult.
If you would do some research, you would actually understand, that Satoshi was not godlike. Read his posts on this forum and you see, that he was making stuff up, while going along.  There is no reason, why he should have "known things, but didn't tell us". Read his posts and see, that he talked freely about his ideas and was very open minded to ideas from others.

He said "on average"
So, If you have to wait for a day to have your transaction confirmed, viewed from a years perspective all transactions will be 10 minutes on average.
Not sure if he meant it like this, but it's true, not?

Eventually spammers will run out of ammo and everything comes back to normal.
Sure, temporarily you have a problem, but it will solve itself in the long run.
Especially when price has to rise due to increase of transaction costs.
Price have to rise because spammers have to buy back their coins when they're out of ammo.


Edit:
Although I don't necessarily like to wait for a day to have my transaction confirmed, I don't see it as a big problem either.
I think native bitcoin will never be used to buy yourself a coffee

We should make clear, that there are 2 different things, we are talking about: Time to find a block, and the time till a transactions goes into a block. The average 10 min are the time it takes for a block to be found not the time till a transactions goes into a block.

And more importantly: You might not care if it takes a day, for your transaction to be confirmed, but a vendor does. There is a limit how long a unconfirmed transaction remains in the mem pool, after that, it gets deleted and the vendor doesn't get his money.

If users had to wait a day to have their transaction confirmed, do you really think they'd continue to use Bitcoin after that?  What's the incentive for a user to continue using Bitcoin if there's another coin that will confirm their transaction faster and with a lower fee?  At the moment, Bitcoin has a reputation for being fast, reliable and cheap.  Are people really willing to jeopardise those three fantastic qualities?  If people start to think of Bitcoin as expensive, unreliable and slow, do you not think there would be less volume on the network and even less fees paid to miners?  No one can say with any certainty how it will play out, but I don't think people will stick to Bitcoin out of loyalty alone if another coin can offer a better service.  In a free market, Bitcoin has to remain competitive to retain its top spot.  

Also, try not to conflate spam and dust transactions with the blocksize issue.  Even if those transactions are forced off the blockchain, there will come a time where the userbase grows to a level where we can easily fill a 1MB block with legitimate, fee-paying transactions.  That's when legitimate transactions start getting delayed and people flock to this forum and other social media to whine and complain about it.  If the users are unhappy, consider how unhappy the merchants will be when they have a business to run and their income is delayed.  Then everyone realises the mistake and tries to rush through a fork at the last minute anyway.  That's not a sustainable path in my view.  It's much less disruptive to get the fork out of the way, before the complaints start to flood in and Bitcoin's reputation takes a massive hit in the process.  The blocksize increase is inevitable, it's just a matter of how painless you'd like the transition to be.

I can now see why the blocksize issue is a major part in todays talks and issues with bitcoin, took my time reading part of everyone responses and a lot of people are now seeing the light to the blocksize incrementation, I know not everyone was part of the stress test but even with this it shows we could wait a while to get a confirmation.

I see bitcoin as a payment system for long physical distance transfer.
If I buy something from China I usually have to wait 2 or 3 weeks to get my item.
I don't care if it'll take another extra day.
The vendor can prepare the shipment and wait for the confirmation. If it gets removed from the mempool he can send me another payment request.
I assume the vendor usually collects his orders and send them next day.
So then an incidental hickup in the network is not a big deal.

Like I said, I don't see bitcoin being used for day to day local grocery payment.

I'm not trying to hijack this thread :) but I am curious: If it costs $5000 to perform this test on bitcoin, how much would it cost for an equivalent stress test on litecoin?

Pragmatism and cost, simply by being un-ignorable, will always out-weight semantic definitions.

You are pretty arrogant.
This "Stress Test" simulates an adoption of Bitcoin by 10% of the world population. If 10% of the world population uses Bitcoin, than you are screwed with low fees.
I have no problem with low fees. If your pament is not superduperhyperurgent, i can wait 12 hours for it to be confirmed.
This does not imply that my personal transactions are dust, or your tiny peace of BTC are dust.
Despite this "spamming" or "stress test" on a live system is a good test to show vulnerabilites which are hard to perform on a testsystem, BTC devs voted for an enlargement of the blockchain size. Please remember, BTC is adopted by geeks and people who have a strong interest in keepnig their transactions anonymous, this "stress test" shows one vulnerability of many regarding BTC.
If one entity has more than 51% of the mining power and starts making several transactions as this "stress test" (which failed but will be repeated next monday), BTC will fall apart...
Bitcoin community should rethink the Blocksize change and honor this test or you use XMR Monero (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=583449.0) where you will not face this kind of problem and the other ones that BTC has  ;D 8)

On monday, CoinWallet.eu conducted a stress test of the Bitcoin blockchain. Not only was our plan to see the outcome, but also to see how easy it would be for a malicious entity or government to create havoc for the Bitcoin community. As you will see from the analysis below, delayed transactions are not the only issue that Bitcoin users experienced.

Surprisingly, executing tens of thousands of transactions that correctly propagate to the network simultaneously is not as easy as we had expected. One of the methods that was used to increase the kb size of our transactions was to send transactions consisting of numerous small outputs (usually 0.0001) to make a single transaction of 0.01. A simple transaction is usually 225-500 bytes, while many of our transactions were 18 kb (A number which limits the blockchain to 5 transactions per minute). In our preliminary testing this was effective, however in practice it caused our servers to crash. Throughout the day and evening, our strategy and methodology changed multiple times.

Initially the plan was to spend 20 BTC on transaction fees to flood the network with as many transactions as possible. Due to technical complications the test was concluded early, with less than 2 BTC spent on fees. The events of yesterday were accomplished with less than €500.

Timeline

    11:57 GMT - Transaction servers initiated. Thousands of 700 kb transactions completed within the first 20 minutes. Transactions were used to break coins into small 0.0001 outputs.
    12:30 GMT - Servers begin sending larger 18kb transactions.
    14:10 GMT - Mempool size increases dramatically. Blockchain.info breaks.
    14:20 GMT - Our servers begin to crash. It becomes apparent that BitcoinD is not well suited to crafting transactions of this size.
    14:30 GMT - Our test transactions are halted while alternate solutions are created. The mempool is at 12 mb.
    17:00 GMT - Alternate transaction sending methods are started. Servers are rebooted. Mempool has fallen to 4mb.
    21:00 GMT - The stress test is stronger than ever. Mempool reaches 15 mb and more than 14000 transactions are backlogged. The situation is made worse by F2Pool selfishly mining two 0kb blocks in a row.
    23:59 GMT - 12 hours after starting, the test is concluded. Less than 2 BTC (€434) is spent on the test in total.

The following graph depicts the entire test from start to finish: https://anduck.net/bitcoin/mempool.png

Observations

Delayed confirmation times and large mempool buildups were not the only observation that came from our testing. Many more services were impacted than we had initially envisioned.

Blockchain.info

Over the past few months, Blockchain.info has become increasingly unreliable, however we are confident that yesterday's stress test had an impact on their website being offline or broken for 1/3 of the day. During periods where we sent excessive transactions, Blockchain.info consistently froze. It appeared as though their nodes were overwhelmed and simply crashed. Each time this occurred, the site would re-emerge 10-30 minutes later only to fail again shortly thereafter. Users of the blockchain wallet were unable to send transactions, login or even view balances during the downtimes. In response to our heavy Bitcoin usage, blockchain.info began to exclude certain transactions from their block explorer. This issue is explored further by the creators of Multibit, who can confirm that some transactions sent from their software were ignored by Blockchain, but were picked up by Blockr.

Bitcoin ATMs

Many ATMs operate as full nodes, however some ATMs rely on third party wallet services to send and receive transactions. The most prominent Bitcoin ATM of this type is Lamassu, which uses the blockchain.info API to push outgoing transactions from a blockchain.info wallet. Due to the blockchain.info issues, all Lamassu ATMs that use blockchain.info's wallet service were unavailable for the day.

MultiBit

Both versions of MultiBit suffered delayed transactions due to the test. Gary and Jim from MultiBit have created a full analysis from Multibit's perspective which can be read at https://multibit.org/blog/2015/06/23/bitcoin-network-stress-test.html

The outcome was that transactions with the standard fee in Multibit HD took as many as 80 blocks to confirm (Approximately 13 hours). Standard 10000 satoshi fee transactions took an average of 9 blocks to get confirmed. Multibit has stated that they will be making modifications to the software to better cope with this type of event in the future.

Tradeblock

With Blockchain.info broken, we frequently referred to Tradeblock to track the backlog. Unfortunately Tradeblock was less than perfectly reliable and often failed to update when a new block had been mined. Regardless, at one point 15,000 unconfirmed transactions were outstanding.

Bitpay

Users reported issues with Bitpay not recognizing transactions during the test.

Price

Increase of $2. Contrary to some predictions, we did not short Bitcoin.

Green Address

While this app was not hindered directly by our test, we did send a series of 0.001 payments to a green address wallet. When attempting to craft a transaction from the wallet, an error occurs stating that it is too large. It appears that the coins that were sent to this wallet may be lost.

Conclusions

From a technical perspective, the test was not a success. Our goal of creating a 200mb backlog was not achieved due to miscalculations and challenges with pushing the number of transactions that we had desired. We believe that future tests may easily achieve this goal by learning from our mistakes. There are also numerous vulnerable services that could be exploited as part of a test, including Bitcoin casinos, on-chain gambling websites, wallets (Coinbase specifically pointed out that a malicious user could take advantage of their hosted wallet to contribute to the flooding), exchanges, and many others. Users could also contribute by sending small amounts to common brain wallets.

We also learned that the situation could have been made worse by sending transactions with larger fees. We sent all transactions with the standard fee of 10000 satoshis per kb. If we had sent with 20000 satoshis per kb, normal transactions would have experienced larger delays. In our future stress tests, these lessons will be used to maximize the impact.

Thanks for your analyses.
Do you already know, when you will do some other tests?
Some people have stated that such a test schould not be announced. What do you think about that?

When I tried to access blockchain.info I got a cloudflare error stating the blockchain.info itself was offline, and that he problem was nothing to do with the cloudflare service. I tried again after a few minutes and blockchain.info was back online again. Their service was intermittently disrupted by the stress test which must have created problems for the customers.

Will you be doing another test in 7 days or a different time frame?

We are currently evaluating how to execute tens of thousands of transactions simultaneously propagating the network, since this was the biggest issue we had. For the next test, we will certainly raise the number of servers and upload bandwidth. We are thinking about doing another stress test coming monday again, if issues can be resolved.

We don't think that an unannounced test will yield different results from unannounced testing.
Therefore, future tests will be announced in advance again.

with 2 focking BTC you can do this madness for 12 hours? so, some bank, gov. are group of stupids may literally make bitcoin unusable? omg, I'm little bit disappointed and scared now.(

What more identification you need?

Wow, impressive! I didn't expect that "well used" 2 BTC can do this much.
However, the network "moved on", which is good. Some (known!) time frame for the services to be fixed / improved until the next stress test would be good.

He said terrorism, quick, send the troops. For democracy

http://i40.tinypic.com/6gbq7k.jpg

1. You can contact via mail, email or telephone, contact info on website.

2. We are mentioning 6 services related to bitcoin, you can hardly call this "almost every service was crippled". Our partners at MultiBit released their own report here: https://multibit.org/blog/2015/06/23/bitcoin-network-stress-test.html

3. We are not claiming the market was affected. Over the course of the stress test the bitcoin value increased by $2 which is statistically insignificant.

4. You don't need to fear transactions. One thing learned from the latest stress test is that the Bitcoin network self adjusts rather quickly, once the stress test was finished.

What are you guys all afraid of?!
Be nice to these people at coinwallet.eu
They show you the vulnerability in public costing nuts 2BTC
A Multimillion $ industrie can go down with 20BTC spend for days, weeks, months if the bitcoin developers do not react to this.
Better call, email and shout at your friendly bitcoin dev to change the code, so this "stress test" (attack) can not affect BTC!

Else, use XMR Monero -> find it in my Signature  ;D

i find this test rather interesting. i believe if it can find any flaws and then the developers can fix them to prevent any similar attacks, then they have contributed to bitcoin which is good.

i wonder if mining pools are going to do anything about this or they are just happy that they are getting so much bitcoin as fees.

Exactly  ;D
Find this
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=322748.20 (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=322748.20)
https://coinreport.net/what-the-block-size-debate-says-about-bitcoin/ (https://coinreport.net/what-the-block-size-debate-says-about-bitcoin/)
https://www.cryptocoinsnews.com/bitcoin-core-developer-commits-20mb-block-size-march-2016/ (https://www.cryptocoinsnews.com/bitcoin-core-developer-commits-20mb-block-size-march-2016/)
http://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/2pvhs3/we_are_moving_towards_1mb_average_block_size_very/ (http://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/2pvhs3/we_are_moving_towards_1mb_average_block_size_very/)
https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Blocksize_debate (https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Blocksize_debate)
http://bitcoin.stackexchange.com/questions/1747/bitcoin-block-size-what-are-the-rules (http://bitcoin.stackexchange.com/questions/1747/bitcoin-block-size-what-are-the-rules)

Now everybody is shaking about their infrastructure in the BTC environment  :D
Hope now the blocksize is raised  :o 8)

Although I find this test interesting, I still would love to know a bit more about ther person(s) in the background.

When KingAfurah writes about "Our partners at MultiBit", I'd like to know what partnership they have with the persons behind coinwallet.eu.

ALso, and this has been asked before: KingAfurah wrote in the past that he is a millionaire and that he is slowly fed up by Bitcoin. So why has he changed his mind? What are his intentions?

Wow.

You sir, seem to be the epitome of the saying "better to keep your mouth shut and be thought a fool, rather than opening your mouth and removing all doubt".  As such, thankfully you will enter my Ignore list from here on.  

However, before you go, although it will probably be akin to yelling at the wall, I offer this view.

Thankfully there exists a fork process to be able to make necessary changes, able to surpass individuals and gain majority consensus.  I don't necessarily agree with the process that was used in the beginning to affect this change, it unfortunately detracted from a discussion of needed, proper changes, but it is what it is at this point.

Your idea that raising the block size will weaken Bitcoin I argue is quite foolish and misguided thinking.  All one needs to do is see, or know, someone who is willing to drive 5 extra miles to find a gas station that is selling at one or two cents cheaper per gallon.  They have fooled themselves into thinking they are "saving" 40 cents on a 20 gallon fillup, meanwhile they have just wasted $1 in gas to go that extra mileage.  

Similarly, not raising the block size has a greater chance of weakening or harming Bitcoin.  I'll explain why (although reading the preview before hitting post it's rather circular and long-winded, but I had a lot to talk about... I hope y'all will stay with me).

Everyone seems to keep talking about the pools and the extra cost associated with a larger block size.  I can fully understand that.  I operate a full node hosted in a datacenter, which hosts miners on P2Pool.  I see the daily effects of Bitcoin from an infrastructure point of view, I see how much computing resources are required to maintain it.  I fully understand what it will require as the block size grows as with the latest proposals.  This does not faze me in the least.  Today's desktop computers are fully capable of running a full node without breaking a sweat, and can still handle it well into the future.  Bandwith is not a major concern to most civilized areas, as the general public now has access to 100Mbit fiber to the home.  Today.  They're already talking Gigabit to the majority of homes, hell Google has deployed and is selling it already - https://fiber.google.com/cities/kansascity/plans/ .  The server I have is nothing special, an older HP model with a good amount of RAM and a small RAID-array (only 300GB... only).  I will not need to upgrade that server for at least 4-5 more years, even with the increase in storage the larger blocks may take up.  

I cry zero tears for the pools in China who are complaining about bandwith for the increased block sizes.  Change your government policies, or die off.  Just like the rest of the Bitcoin network, pool placement will evolve and self-adjust to keep the ecosystem running.  The miners won't care, they will re-point to another pool elsewhere and keep on going.

However, no one seems to be talking about it from the miners' angle.

In addition to hosting a full node, I also am a miner.  As a miner, I am salivating at the thought of increased block sizes.

As this test shows, the number of transactions was too great to get confirmations done quickly enough, and a backlog occurred.  You say "eh, no biggie, I can wait".  In general I'd probably agree with you, I'm personally generally in no hurry with my transactions, and can probably wait without much consequence.

But as a miner, I don't want to wait.  I don't want to have to run my miner for 8 hours when I have the possibility of gaining the same income in only 1 hour with an 8MB blocksize instead of a 1MB blocksize.

Being I play both node operator and miner, I can tell you with certainty that mining is the harder of the two to do and be profitable at.  The infrastructure costs for mining are magnitudes greater than running a node.  This will not change, and will only get worse as the block halving happens.  We need as much extra income as possible to help us offset the costs of running a miner.

I get the ideology of Bitcoin.  I get the ideology of "well, just raise the fees and your transactions will get approved quicker".  Hell, I even get the argument you and others have been preaching about "the 1MB limit is fine, I don't care if my transactions take longer, I'll just pay a fee if I want it quicker, let everyone else rot".  I get it, however I obviously don't agree with it.

Getting out of ideology, and into the real world, the fact is that Bitcoin is being propped to grow.  Big.  By large efforts from individuals and companies alike.  No matter the motivation, if Bitcoin survives and thrives as is being currently intended by the community at large, the number of transactions will increase, and it will be due to adoption by "normal folk".  These normal folk are going to hear about the benefits of Bitcoin as a payment system, namely "Reliable, Fast, Cheap".  It's funny that in the IT world (at least), the mantra is "Good, Fast, Cheap, pick two".  Which, is pretty much the argument afforded by most here objecting to the changes.  If it's Good and Cheap, it can't be fast, etc.  Unfortunately, most understand that outside of the educated few, that mantra is ignored, and the majority will demand all three.

I'll go back to my gas station analogy now.

Unfortunately the people outlined in the analogy represent the majority, and I don't mean in just terms of getting gas.  The psyche of us humans today is to minimize cost wherever possible, and maximize returns.  Unfortunately most are incapable of looking inside and realizing logic contrary to quick, popular thought, as in the case of realizing they should just pay the higher price, instead of continuing to hunt (or wait, in our case) for bargains.  

So, after all this long dissertation, where does this leave us, and why are we talking about gas stations instead of Bitcoin?

Because the masses will not want to wait for their transactions to take that long.  They hear "Good, Fast, Cheap" and possible or not, they want all three.  In order for Bitcoin to survive and thrive, it will need to do its best to match these qualities.  In order to do so, the blocksize will need to adjust so attempt to compensate for the additional volume, while attempting to adhere to the mantra.  They will want to put their transactions in for the default small fees, and they will want them processed just as quickly as everyone else's.  Right or wrong, and I am on the "they're wrong and should just understand it and pay the fees" side, this is ideology vs. real world.  Real world wins.

In my view it is far better to have thousands or tens of thousands of extra smaller transactions included in each block, to be able to reward the miners and keep them profitable, as I fully believe that will be more profitable than maintaining a smaller number of transactions with higher fees.  Law of averages.

And, lest I forget part of the main argument - the weakening of the network.

I circle back to above where I mention the costs of mining compared to costs of running a node.

My argument is simple - if the miners are unable to sustain costs and at least break even, they will die off.  Even the large farms will be unable to sustain, as they are not individuals doing this for a hobby, they are there to make a profit and pay back investors and workers' salaries, etc.

As miners die off, the diff will adjust lower.  With all the excess hardware that's out there, it will be trivial for a large corporation or country to buy up mass equipment, and wait for the time to strike.  Once low enough it would be possible for a 51% attack to be launched pretty easily, and then they garner control of the network.  Game over, done.

The miners are in control, and need to be, they are the heart of the network.  This change helps the miners going forward maintain the possibility of survival and profit.  It has always been seen that transactions are supposed to assume the role of providing income to miners and be the incentive for them continuing to run.  I just believe that more transactions, no matter how small, will be better to achieve that goal.

Finally, back on topic.

I appreciate the efforts of the folks running the tests.  It is good to be able to show now where deficiencies may lie in the network, before greater, general adoption.  You always try to stress things before you launch live, however there is nothing ever that will be able to properly simulate the real world usage of a fully live to-the-public application.  Sometimes you need to break things in production to be able to fix them.

Amen  ;D

@TheAnalogKid

You are one hell of a ignorant bastard who has no idea how stuff works in real world.

Why thank you for such an amazing, well thought out rebuttal.  I am dazzled by your ability to debate with well reasoned, thoughtful arguments to the matter at hand.   Your grasp of the English language and the ability to form proper sentences is also astounding, and I aspire to be as eloquent as you appear to be.

 :)

I think the fee should be a function of the number of unconfirmed tx at the time of sending. Would this work? Clients need to be more intelligent.

You know, a similar idea might work.

Consider instead of auto-calculating the fee and charging it, might it instead be an idea to offer up a choice of fees?

For example say you're about to submit a transaction, and you have an "estimate delivery time" ability in your client.  It could show you the current backlog, and present you with fee options based on estimated time to pickup?  Similar to many sites today that use shipping calculators to estimate your shipping cost and based upon that how long before it'll get to you.

The problem I see is that most people either won't fully understand how to estimate fees properly, or won't care to spend the time to do so.  They just want to know the basics of "how much will it cost and how long will it take" by clicking a button and being done with it.

The transaction fee is totally optional. If you don't want to get enough priority and can wait for the age to be higher so it can be accepted without fees or with a low value, it's OK.

Please read: https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Transaction_fees

yes, yes of course. What I'm proposing is that in addition to the tx size, the client should also consider the size of the mempool when "proposing" a fee.

Well, the actual clients don't propose fees, they only have a fixed value on them.

Depends on your client.  I read somewhere (maybe upthread here, I can't recall, there's been a bunch of similar discussions on this) that the latest Multibit allows the user to set the transaction fee to anywhere between 1kSat and 10kSat per KB.

@DarkHyudrA: I think that it would be very good to see clients looking at the size of mempool when suggesting a fee and allowing a user to change that based on the importance of a quick confirmation for the transaction at hand.  If I'm eating at a restaurant and paying to a coinbase address, I don't really care if it confirms in 10 minutes or tomorrow, the restaurant is going to get paid and coinbase will eventually my money.  But if I'm buying into a poker game that starts in an hour and I need 2 confirmations to the join the game, that's a completely different situation.

I personally don't need any evidence besides my personal experience: I tried to access blockchain.info website several times, it wouldn't show up. My transactions got frozen and confirmation times took ages.

Also, any eccentric millionaire could target an attack on BTC for the sake of it with a worse result than what we say today. Any eccentric billionaire could keep the network bloated 24/7 for as long as we wants to waste money at.. that was only something controlled. When the day of a real attack comes, there will be no one to complain.
Time to do something about this.

ahh really? why the fuck in this thread are some stupids asking for names, reasons, companies and similar bullshit? they tested network. for free. they also published results for free...and now is devs. turn to analyze and implement what is necessary.

is totally irrelevant who is behind and because it cost only 2BTC for 12 hours, some rich bored smart ass can start it right now and run it until end of his life..without single announcement or thread like this one. deal with it.

I understand your point of view, but is the nature of the community to always wanted to have that extra detail of who did what and when, the point here is a lot of people saw the difference of what this test showed in the result and during testing it has value for them and when you have value you want to give it a name.

There are conspiracy theories running around that this was:
(1) To cause the market to drop, and the "testers" would profit since they had millions in short positions set. (market didn't drop).
(2) That this was done by people within the pro 1MB Raising Camp of Devs/close supporters, to show stress.
(3) That this was done by people within the anti 1MB Raising Camp of Devs/close supporters pretending to be pro, but showed higher fees work.
(4) That this was done by miners who were trying to increase fees and show how 1MB Raising isn't currently needed. (they want more fees).
(5) That this was done by miners who were attempting to manipulate the fee market to rise before blocking halving (ex. new fee 0.0005 satos).
(6) That the location that this site (coinwallet.eu) is located is associated with a virtual office that is known to be used by HYIP and Scammers.
(7) That no one has heard of this wallet (coinwallet.eu) before and they used this test to build rep and get advertising.
(8.) whatever etc etc etc

So, some people are suspicious why someone would, that everyone doesn't know,
would blow through 20btc (which I'm not sure they did) to test the network. (Their servers crashed).

At the end of the day, it doesn't really matter, but of course, with this forum and other bitcoin related websites,
people are always fighting. This is just another one of those topics now... "Who really are these guys?"

Edit: added "s" to websites

I guess at certain degree, the block size will stop its fast growth. That is when most of the people who are capable of use bitcoin have all involved

Given bitcoin's no central bank control thus high short term volatility, it will less likely to be used in daily commercial activities (And many countries have developed domestic third party/mobile payment system which can do real time and instant transactions with very low transaction fee, bitcoin does not have advantage in this area)

International remittance and long term anti-inflation storage is two major usage. These usage have a less customer base and less frequent transaction (You send money to another country once a month, saving once a month), so transaction capacity should be manageable for many years to come with a 32MB block size

International trading is another potential area, but due to the high cost of international transport, it might only happen at wholesale level, large transaction volume instead of frequency

Where exactly have they published the results? They wrote that the test ultimately ended without reaching the goal due to server crashes. So show me the _useful_ results.

A lot of useful information has been published around this test, like the one from Peter Todd. But nothing that is absolutely new - otherwise the blocksize discussion wouldn't go on since a long time. And Peter Todd writes:


If the testers would come up with suggestions how to solve the problem, I would happily cheer them - and I still would ask for some background information.

Instead, there is someone claiming to be a millionair who's exiting the Bitcoin community who all the sudden spends money for this test and shows some interest again. Then there is a wallet "company" with a virtual office without giving any information about who's behind it. Then they claim to be partnering with another wallet provider. And so on. I've seen too many scams in the Bitcoin world in the past to not ask some questions.

So if you think they are legit: Do you entrust them your coins? Have you opened a wallet with coinwallet.eu? Would you? Just as a reminder: They want you to send your coins to their hosted wallet but don't give you any information about who they are. So who is stupid at the end of the day? The one who gives them the coins or the one who asks who they are?

But of course: You can call me stupid for asking. This reminds me of system administrators who happily patch their systems for years without asking who delivers the patches....

So ... new test this monday on 8:00AM ?  ;)

 ;D Ah, it's happening ... again.
http://statoshi.info/dashboard/db/transactions

http://imagizer.imageshack.us/a/img537/1646/dZ3VyN.jpg

So we can take bets as to what collapses first: Their servers or the network  ;)

correct address for unconfirmed : https://blockchain.info/unconfirmed-transactions

1,5Mb requiered.

https://tradeblock.com/blockchain/

Time will show, however, I doubt it.

Not normal ... and we are sunday, too.  :-*

http://imagizer.imageshack.us/a/img537/7615/9uS6R8.jpg

There is a new thread today about this address that is sending numerous transactions to itself.

https://blockchain.info/address/1CD523oyvmb9QVyABc1uu9Zt9ovjPzXV7h

Could it belong to the stress testers? Is it being used to trial what their servers can handle before tomorrow, or could it be a copycat attempting his own stress test?

Such transactions should not be allowed IMO. I tested this a while ago on litecoin and surprisingly it worked. Never gave it much thought. Hopefully some r values are reused in that test so we can break it.

Edit: Heres the litecoin test http://www.litechain.info/tx/fda9aa43c77a6dc570981339f1562f2d4ee824c1cafc513adbaf97a8ec11d6be

yes WE NEED BITCOIN POLICE!!!1!.
That will save the world.

These transactions serve no purpose except to spam the blockchain. Can you give me ONE reason why I would send the same coins to the same address and not pay a fee. Im just taking out a dollar and putting it back in my wallet and making everyone pay for it.

I don't know about you, but there is 0.00001 BTC being paid for every transaction in that address.
Let them waste their coins to the miners. They'll take care of it.

i have send to kraken, actual fees is 0,00005 BTC ... to SEND (not receive a withdraw).

There is 2mb of waiting transaction.  :-\

That means 2 block to confirm all without taking the normal transaction.

This is huge. This is why people will soon have to raise fee.

I agree with you. If someone wants to waste their coins by paying a boat load in mining fees for their stunt to test the network then let them. Miner fees went up by 3x during the last stress test, so miners made more by doing the same amount of work, I'm sure they didn't mind.

I don't think this is necessary. The number of transactions per hour that the Bitcoin network will process is not going to vary widely on a hour to hour basis, it will also not change very much on a day to day basis, and probably not even on a week to week basis. The reason why the Bitcoin network will process roughly the same number of transactions per hour throughout the day is because of it's global nature - a peak spending period in one part of the world is going to be a period when most people are asleep (and otherwise spending very few transactions) in another part of the world.

Economies of scale are not going to change very much on a short term basis. People are not going to wake up one day en masse and decide to start using bitcoin for everything they do. People will start to learn about the benefits of using Bitcoin, will use it for a very small number of purchases, tell their friend about it, and over time use it for a greater percentage of their overall spending. The time from when someone does not own any bitcoin to when they spend it whenever they can will be, on average several months, if not longer.

Sure the Bitcoin network will have spikes in transactions for a variety of reasons, although such spikes are, IMO, unlikely to cause great delays in having transactions confirmed, especially delays of more then 6 or 7 blocks.

I would argue that a better solution would be to have a client's default fee policy to be changed (if necessary) each time a new version is released.

Thank you for your test and insights about what happened. You clearly showed how easy it is to cripple Bitcoin and make it move way slower. Since you very much proven your point, I don't see another test as necessary. It would only cost you money, time and patience to prove something that you already managed to prove really well.

But, Quickseller, your argument is clearly incorrect given the recent stress test.  It was very clear that the number of backlogged transactions increased drammatically during a short period of time and if clients took the backlog into account when suggesting a fee, how could that be anything but an improvement?   All clients should allow their users to set their own fee at the end of the day, but suggesting a fee based on more information (rather than less) when that information is freely available to any bitcoin node is clearly a good idea.

Please spam the hell out of bitcoin.
Let it crumble.

I did not join this thing to find out it to be a cripple old man in 4 years.
I want it to be attacked and spammed to the max.

bring it

Sure it is possible for the mempool (aka the backlog of transactions) to grow dramatically in a short period of time. However the latest instance of this happening was not the result of anyone making a rational economic decision. The backlog of transactions was artificial and over the long run it is unlikely that these kind of blimps will show up, nor will be sustained over more then several blocks.

The devs of the various clients have limited resources and I don't think this is an overall good think to invest limited resources into. If you want to invest your own money/resources into creating such a client, then you are free to do so.

Even if you were to ignore my conclusion that the number of transactions per hour does not vary widely over short periods of time, it would really not be a viable feature to have your client estimate the required fee to get a transaction confirmed quickly for a number of reasons.

1 - The various pools, and miners (when solo mining) ultimately create their own policy as to which transactions they confirm when they find a block. This policy could be to include no transactions, only transactions that have been propagated and meet certain criteria, transactions originated by themselves that have not been previously propagated, transactions provided to them by entities that have pre-existing arrangements with them that may or may not have been previously propagated, among a wide range of other potential criteria.

I would not at all be surprised if a number of entities that push a large number of transactions to the network have agreements with various pools that guarantee their transactions be confirmed in blocks found by those pools if they are not already confirmed.

The policy of each pool has the potential to be, and likely is different from other pools.

2 - Blocks are found, on average, once every 10 minutes, but are often found less frequently. It would only take seconds for the mempool (and thus the likely required fee to have your transaction quickly confirmed) to have grown in size dramatically (someone could potentially push several thousand valid transactions to the network all at once). This means that someone could push a transaction with a fee that their client claims will cause it to be quickly confirmed at time n, then at time n+1, someone pushes 10,000 transactions to the network, many with "better" fees, and before the next block is confirmed after time n. This would create a false sense of a guarantee to the end user.

3 - Over the long run, the majority of end users are not going to run clients that are full nodes to spend their bitcoin. This means that they will need to place a certain level of trust in other full nodes when deciding what level of fees to include. This is trust that probably shouldn't be given. Today, if full nodes give incomplete information about unconfirmed transactions or about the blockchain, then any node that it connected it to will get that information from someone else. If that full node gives information about invalid transactions, then such invalid transactions will be ignored by everyone else.

As it is today, the mempool of every full node is potentially different, and often is going to be different from many other full nodes. The node that your client gets the size of it's mempool from may not be an accurate reflection of the network. It is also possible that a pool could have a large number of nodes that artificially increase the reported size of their mempool in order to encourage people to include larger tx fees then is necessary in an effort to increase the overall tx fees they receive. Requiring a node to prove the size of their mempool would open up a whole new can of worms that would simply not be worth it

You can call it "artificial" or "irrational" but its occurrance was an empirical fact.  To suggest that something which just, in fact, happened, doesn't happen is like covering your eyes and saying 'see no evil'.Of course I am free, and I thank you for reminding me of it.  I guess.  Anyway, what we're talking about here is essentially a one-liner in code.  And yes, I may indeed fork the wallets I use in order to implement it.  I can't see any rational reason not to.Each policy can be different but they all follow the rule of preferring transactions with greater fees.  You seem to be forgetting the fact that you don't need to offer any certainty here.  It's quite simple and clear that when the mempool is backed up and you offer a greater fee then you are gaining likelihood of a faster confirmation.  No one is saying you have to estimate to the minute when it would be confirmed.No one should be offering a guarantee, as that would indeed be misleading.  Your argument here seems to fall into the fallacy of the perfect being the enemy of the good.  If I send a transaction at one moment there's clearly nothing I can do about any number of transactions which are sent after me with greater fees.  But if I decide to ignore facts about transactions which have been sent before mine, then that's information which is available to me which I am choosing to ignore.  And your arguments that it's somehow better to ignore this information simply aren't strong ones.Here you say end users are going to trust nodes but they probably shouldn't be doing that?  I just don't follow or I'm missing how this is relevant.  I apologize.  No node is going to have complete information.  Especially if we're talking about the future.  But anyone with access to a network connection can use information available at the moment in which they send their transaction.  The utility of this was demonstrated to me quite empirically when I sent a transaction last monday and waited 11 hours for confirmation.  If I had merely recevied some warning about the mempool status I would have sent with a higher fee or waited to send the next day.  Not having that information presented to me was clearly not as nice as if I had been presented that information.  Knowledge is power and wallets that present information about the current state of affairs to their users are clearly superior to ones that don't. 
Again, no one is suggesting that you need to prove the unprovable.  You seem to be going off a deep end here.  The idea, as I understood it, was merely to present better information to the user at the moment when a transaction is being sent.  Despite all your typing, I still can't see that this would be a bad thing.

I'm looking forward for the test today. Hopefully you guys accomplish the full planned scale this time!

Im hoping the test is brutal and showcases the need of a bigger blocksize when people suffer transaction problems in first person (which seems to be the only way most people understand and react to problems).

I'm curious if it's actually going to go down.  By this time last week the test was already backing up the mempool.  BCI shows 1400 unconfirmed tx at the moment, last time the "partial" test sent the backlock to over 8000K.  I wonder if this week's test is cancelled.

Maybe they don't stress it enough. Last 3 blocks are ~249.05kb

Tastes like a ramp up  ::)

I think everyone agrees that the 1MB block limitation is a problem, the argument is over how best to solve the problem.

Do we allow a single developer to break away from core and fork bitcoin alone using checkpoints (blocking nodes that don't update) and other possible tactics like pulling the "alert key" card out of his sleeve, or do we find a more fair and organized process.

Look as if some kind of stresstest is going on again. Blocksizes increasing to the limit, unconfirmed transactions over 8000...

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1098263.140;topicseen

new test