Bitcoin Forum

On June 22nd, we 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 not as successful as planned.

See here why the first stress test was not as successful as planned: CLICK (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1094865.msg11700297#msg11700297)

The result was roughly 12 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 ~80 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 setup 32 Bitcoin servers that will send approximately 1 transactions per second each (up from 10 servers sending 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 30.

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 13:00 GMT Monday June 29, the mempool of standard fee transactions will be 10mb By 24:00 GMT Monday June 29nd, the mempool of standard fee transactions will be 130mb By 13:00 GMT Tuesday June 30, 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.

Where does he estimate transaction fees?

Last stress test (Monday, June 22nd) was not successful, because executing tens of thousands of transactions that correctly propagate to the network simultaneously is not as easy as we had expected. 10 servers sending out 2 transactions per second each were used for this test.

For the upcoming test, we will use 32 servers running bitcoind sending out 1 transaction each per second.
This way, we hope to lower the load on the individual server, hoping the bitcoind does not clog up and crash as easily.

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.

Cute, CoinWallet.eu scammers start another PR-campaign. ::)

There's no new insight to be gained from further stress tests. We all know that fees are too low, so all kinds of idiots can spam the blockchain.

For all readers that don't want to waste time by reading the entire announcement, I've produced a tl;dr version:


ya.ya.yo!

Whats in it for you ? I doubt you are doing this only for stress analysis, there has to be a larger point to this.
I found last stress test to be rather interesting, looking forward to second one on monday, i'll just make sure i don't have transactions around then  ::)

cheers

He just says, what transaction fee he is using, not what someone else will use.
You predict, that the transaction fees go up.  We will see, if that is true. But looking at my Mycelium Wallet, I don't think it reacts to how many transactions are already in the mempool.

1. We don't want to cause a noticable blockade*, this is why we are using standard fee (0.0001 per kb). This is a stress test, not an attack.

2. OK, so move on with your life then.

Where did you get this graph from?
Could you show it in a bigger time frame? It doesn't show, if such spikes are unusual.

Looking at this graph, I don't see anything unusual for the time of the stress test.:
https://blockchain.info/charts/transaction-fees
but that, isn't a good graph either.
I'd really love a site with better statistics, if somebody knows any.

The point is to study the effects of a mempool size of >150MB which was never reached so far.

Is pretty interesting to watch the blockhain action when the stress test begins and has is in progress, I'll be watching this one from the beginning.

No, all I am saying is "backlog of transactions will be approximately 241 blocks".

High fee transaction will be business as usual for sure.

This will certainly delay normal transactions. Results from last test show that 0.0001BTC per kb transaction on average took 9 blocks (~90 minutes) to confirm.

For quick confirmations a higher fee is the option.

I would be more open to the test, if in addition to announcing that higher fees are necessary he would reimburse those increased fees to everyone affected.

Imho the only reasons for doing another meaningless "stress test" on the public Bitcoin blockchain (and not on testnet) are attracting public attention for own services offered and/or manipulating market prices. Ask yourselves - why is he announcing the stress test at all? Doesn't that distort the results by people adapting in advance to increased transaction fees?

ya.ya.yo!

Thanks.
I was hoping for a more sophisticated tool. It is really a pain in the ass, to make a depper analysis this way.
Maybe I can hack something together. Still if somebody knows a better tool, that is already written, I would be very thankful for that.

2 hours and 8 minutes to go.

All 32 server are ready and connected.

I am just gonna ask why again?

Looking forward to the results. Bring it coinwallet.eu!

Everybody fasten your seat belts and get your popcorn yeeeaaahhhh  ;D

Can't wait..  ;D


http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-KaB6g1-zZ2M/UAQnOOWN6LI/AAAAAAAAAYE/wDJge2QAfC4/s1600/trollfire.jpg

I really hope that this isn't just some attention grabbing false claim.  I'm looking forward to seeing this, and I hope that you are able to actually keep up the volume and size (in bytes) of transactions that you say you are planning.

Nothing to see here people, they've faked it again.

Cool, I enjoyed the last test, even though it failed.. By announcing, less people get trapped right before the test by sending with too low a fee.

FYI :
1:00 PM Monday, Greenwich Mean Time (GMT) is
2:00 PM Monday, Central European Time (CET)

Current time 2:14 CET

number of unconfirmed transactions is growing

CET is GMT+2 instead.
It is 12:35 GMT (FYR: http://time.is/GMT) at this moment, so the test will start in 25 minute.

Ah you're right. No block has been found for almost 40 minutes now.

Really?  I went on with business as usual during your last pointless DoS attempt by spam, using my standard fee of 0.00002 BTC/kB, one fifth of yours.  All my transactions confirmed with no delays.  This is of course normal non-spammy transactions with normal sized outputs using oldish inputs, so I guess the priority of my transactions were a few orders of magnitude above your spam.  This is true for most non-spammy transactions.  Have a closer look at the delayed transactions.  It is probably just other spam delayed by your spam.  But please spammers, empty your pockets before your gangrene eats the rest of your brains as well.  The miners deserve their fees.

They have a bit of headstart with this backlog. They must have started the test by now. Let's see if everything works out this time

They haven't.

What happened? There's only ~600 unconfirmed transactions.

KingAfurah what's going on?

I see 790 and it keeps rising.
I think the test started.

I would be interested to see how quickly transactions are able to propagate throughout the network as the size of the mempool increases. I would make a hypothesis that transactions would take substantially longer to propitiate as the mempool increases, to what extend however I am not sure.

If it is more then an additional few seconds then a new way to execute double spend transactions could have been discovered. An attacker could flood the network with transactions, then attempt to spend the same inputs twice, each originating from diverse nodes. The victim(s) would not even realize the double spend attack for a long time.

As of  ~1357 GMT, around 1,400 unconfirmed transactions, total fees of ~.39 BTC and the last block was found ~4 minutes ago and 6 blocks were found in the last ~55 minutes.

So, what is going on? Did Coinwallet.eu consider postponing the test? Was the test ever real? Please tell us KingAfurah

Why not use the money to dig a few wells in Africa instead? It adds a little more to the wellness of the world.

Proving that Bitcoin is a broken mess despite how much power it wastes would be a much better net gain for society

Anyone with a modicum of awareness should know that it's not all that viable to continue as it is. No point in wasting further money when we know what'll happen.

Every bitcoin node and miner user should just block your shitty spam servers.

There are a net 1,500 additional transactions in the mempool over the last ~20 minutes and two blocks were found in that time.

I think it is pretty clear that they are still in the process of doing the test.

1500/20 wouldn't be out of the ordinary, also the transactions they are sending out should be easy to spot if you watch blockchain.info or whatever since they are all specifically crafted to use up the most data for the least amount of fees that the network will accept

How can you tell whether the stress test is going on? I think it might be, but I'm not sure. I have seen a couple large transactions going on, but not at the speed I would expect the test to be creating them at.

That is after two blocks were found so the actual number of transactions seen by the network are greater.

It seems that most of the major block explorers are running extremely slow right now so that number may not be accurate (although this could just be my internet - other sites are running fine though)

But running the numbers, you are probably right as that works out to roughly 1.25 tx/second.

My God I totally agree!

Damn, the thing i can think is why doing that?

Come on Coinwallet.eu, why are you not sending out transactions?

Why would you even claim to perform this test if you don't actually conduct it? Is Coinwallet.eu simply trolling?

Only noticed this thread now. Not this again... ::) Although I see nobody clogging the network so far. Let's see where this goes...

It's about 11AM in my timezone as of this post, and as I recall they didn't start last week's stress test until sometime between 2p and 4p I think

TBH this test it's being executed poorly, and it's likely someone lobbying for the block size increase. However, this test could achieve the opposite if well executed, showing how the general infrastructure is not ready for 8Mb blocks, specially with a massively full mempool and nodes and miners crashing randomly.

Expecting this kind of "experiment" in the very near future with more funding and custom software for crafting and injecting transactions to the network.
That would definitely be interesting.

somethings definitely happening..

https://blockchain.info/unconfirmed-transactions

keeps going up.

This is far from the results predicted by the OP for the first minutes of the "test". So something is likely wrong in their execution.

You are right, I misread the amount of data.


Miners luck goes against OP's luck, this should normalize with some time.

You know this lasts max 32 hours....

Actually seems the blocks have quite low numbers of transactions.

363069 is completely empty, other than coinbase.

That's not going to help.

This stress test can be useful to detect weak places in blockchain.

It could be useful, if it would actually happen..

and it is useful to detect people who cant do proper stress tests.

According to http://statoshi.info/dashboard/db/transactions, there is no noticeable change in either the "transactions per second" or the "bytes per transaction" charts in the past few hours. Is the test really going on?

So they did not conduct this test at all. The question is why?

I'm disappointed  :(

All of Op's server received an error message: "Warning, the frequency of your transaction is abnormal, thus your transaction is automatically disabled from bitcoin network for 24 hours by Gavin's secret code"  ;)

look at the transaction sizes, too small

So 2 failed stress tests in a row?  Who are these guys again?

These "stress tests" are a little dumb, and nothing more than a propaganda stunt.  We all know what the limits of bitcoin are, and the core devs definitely do.

It's like me putting a pot of water on the stove at 150C, and saying, "see, it boils!  the stress test proved itself!".

It defeats the purpose.  Those conducting these tests know exactly what the limits of the network are, so obviously if you push a test over those limits it's going to fail.  Same as if I said I'm going to "stress test" aluminum, put it under a temperature of more than 660C, then say, "see, it melted, hence failed the test!".  Well, I knew from the onset that was going to be the result.

You are right to some point, it will fail, but it will also give some useful information. You see, even tho stress test seams useless, it does at least show :

-how much "damage" can only one entity/organisation do to the network
-it will show costs needed to do such a stunt
-you can use that data to understand what the next move in securing the network should be.

I'm not a fan of these  "tests" either, especially when they come at a time of my weekly debit card top-up  ::) , but bitcoin is at a point where it will be tested in many ways,
just for people to see it's capabilities, because it's not the question of what can bitcoin do and how it can preform now, it's about how it will preform when it starts doing
what it was created to do - to be the worldwide general audience means of transfering and storing of value.

4k+ unconfirmed transactions, so far.
Total Fees   1.04582505 BTC
Total Size   1922.1826171875 (KB)

cheers

There are over 3000 unconfirmed transactions now. Is that the normal number?

http://s2.postimg.org/4xygl6bih/unconfirmed_transactions.jpg

There were quite a few closely spaced blocks but now the gaps are increasing and the last block was almost 1 MB. The tester said the test would run for 24 hours. Is there a chance it might start disrupting the network if it takes longer than normal to find blocks from now on?

http://s16.postimg.org/oj0bmqvit/unconfirmed_transactions2.jpg

Oh, definitely.  I'm more than in support of stress tests themselves, as they're an integral part of any network.  Basically, I'm just questioning the motive of these recent "stress tests" due to the timing.  I'm assuming it's just Gavin and Mike trying to say, "see, bitcoin is broken, move over to XT", although I could be wrong.

I don't think it is Gavin and company (or the other devs).
During the last test, the "testers" discovered that when they pushed so many transactions, bitcoind crashed.
That is what happens normally. A custom setup or etc should be used for such a test and frankly, if the network was "attacked" by some nefarious group (governments, bankers, hackers, etc) they would being using custom progs to damage the network.

So, since the testers didn't know that bitcoind could handle it the first time, makes me believe it isn't any of the devs.

Bitcoin is both core version and xt, bitcoin is not broken. The only question is; is it needed to increase it's block size , and i agree it is.
It makes much more sense to do the "upgrade" while it's still doing the job, rather than wait for it to be too late., don't you think so ?

cheers

They said on Reddit that the test is happening tomorrow. Can we believe them this time?

Who gives a shit any more? I don't know what they hoped to gain from the first one, let alone all the other blanks they've fired.

I give a shit

I agree with this.  I think this sort of thinking ahead is very important at this stage.

Yes, it's a "normal" number. If blocks take longer, the impact would be bigger, as it would take more time for confirms to happen in relation to if blocks were found each and every 10 minutes... But it's worse when blocks don't include any transactions.

no....
its like a bunch of grumpy maids saying that the pot of water wont boil until 2000 people breath on it and generate enough heat and prove there is a 2000 strong demand for hot water to make coffee...

the stress tests are that if one person making just 1 transaction a second, can cause other peoples tx's to be bottle-necked and delayed.... then waiting for a year until the demand actually forces a upgrade is just waiting for the problem before looking for the best solution...

it is like letting someone sodomize you in your own bed.. before setting rules to not let anal lovers follow you home.


did you know that something like this happened before..
many core coders didnt want to strengthen and expand bitcoin to cope with change.. and it took satoshidice to spam the network for the coders to then stop sitting on their hands and implement code to decrease the spam..

most coders think they are gods. that their code is perfect and does not need changing.. it always takes outsiders to prove them wrong..

to me coders are like people who wont lock their doors and allow themselves to be violated a few times before thinking about whats needed to secure things.

It is very interesting to see how people reacts to the situation

When a bank is closed during weekend, would people change to mobile bank or just wait until Monday to do transaction again? What if that wait will be one week/month? Or you just pay a little bit more to get your transaction through? Usually people are willing to pay a little bit more to get faster delivery

Greece just had a capital control today and the maximum money you can take out from any ATM is 60 euro, and we all saw that does not affect Euro's value that much, in fact Euro even rose

Agreed. The first time was a cute trick. But if this is your new hobby then you should be testing on the "test net". Perhaps you can glean it's use from the name "TEST NET".

What is the purpose of these blocktrain stress tests? You have a newbie account so I assume you are not part of the bitcoin dev team (I could be wrong ofc...).
Is the test for >>Academic study<< for some kinda a univericity thesis or paper?

Exactly, when governments do bank stress tests they don't disrupt real bank transactions whilst doing so!
I had thought that they should just make an Alt bitcoin, then test that, but yes, Test net seems more suitable really.

It is crazy to think that the entire transaction network can be disturbed by so little money, imagine if someone important really had a grudge, seems like they could take down bitcoin easily!

I don't agree with these stress tests since they should be carried out on testnet rather than cost real users money. In any case, if you do want to be able to view what's going on during the test in terms of fees, you can check out

http://bitcoinexchangerate.org/fees

I'm capturing these images to make animations so if someone can tell me when whatever test starts and finishes (PM please) then I can put together a gif.

Thread here: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1101202

That's the truth. P2P network are not able to scale well with large amount of communications

In traditional payment network, there is very little transaction done between participants, most of the transactions are cleared inside one financial institution, and settled between institutions. Similar to trading on an exchange, you never really buy or sell anything, you just play with numbers that represent those things in their database. This makes it very scalable, because everyone is accessing the same database at the same place

However, on P2P network, all the databases are spread across the globe, you have to broadcast transactions throughout the network to update each of them, and those communication will increase exponentially with the increase of network size. So maybe raising the block size is not a long term sustainable solution, but at least it is most simple to implement right now

the purpose of these stress supposed tests is to create fear mongering among members who don't really understand the repercussions of acting in haste and fear.
to change the system "upgrade" and allow endless blockchain spam for very low fees is a very bad idea for bitcoin. 

market forces and side chains/alt coins should provide the transactions per second necessary to be in the crypto world. 

(for dummies) you don't have to use your btc in starbucks if you can buy a starbucks gift card. also its not for storing pictures or websites or code.

We're nowhere close:

https://blockchain.info/charts/avg-block-size

I think everyone agrees a solution needs to be found, but we're not in "panic mode" right now, which is what some people seem to assume for some reason, and others are trying to take advantage of that assumption.

This thread is really a display about how people speak about stuff, they don't have any idea about.
Testing in a test environment is sufficient?
Where did you get that idea from? A children picture book?
There are tests you just can't make in an test environment. Everybody who worked in software development for some time, knows that.

Yes, you are correct. I was a bit enraged at first about the whole idea to spam the network. Now after the first test was somewhat successful, but fell a bit short and the 2nd test I did not even notice I am more relaxed. I never had any doubt the network could not endure this stress test, I was just questioning how we humans using it would cope with it. Many people are already antsy when their TX takes 30 minutes. Overall this was a very positive signal for me. Even 3 hours waiting time did not result in many more threads, complaining about it. All in all I still think the test was proving a point that was already well established. We need bigger blocks for bitcoin to grow further. On the other hand it also showed that 1MB can do much more than we might currently give blocks that size credit for.

The test has shown that if one person try to delay other transactions by sending spam, then this spam and other spam gets delayed.  Proving a small block size prevents the network from getting flooded by malicious spam.  None of my normal low fee transactions got delayed.  During her previous malicious spam campaign, I even got a zero-fee transaction confirmed on the first block.  Normal priority transactions will confirm, spam is delayed.

Increasing the block size to store more transaction spam, would be the same as upgrading your email system to store more email spam.  Filtering the spam is considered a much more sensible thing to do by most people.  In this case filtering was easy, and the spam got very low priority.

Why the test failed this time?

It seems not much was done... Maybe the servers failed again?

It's happend ?

http://imagizer.imageshack.us/a/img911/2476/HyC07I.jpg

KingAfurah, will the stress test happen today? What went wrong yesterday?

So the test failed? Or, the test will be run today?
I found the previous test quite interestng and I was expecting to see updates on this test too.
I guess I will have to wait.

it was supposed to happen today, i haven't seen any time on the reddit announcement that i first saw.
a week ago they said it is going to happen yesterday, and then it was postponed 1 more day for today.

And what happens after all the "spam" transactions are delayed and adoption has grown to a point where there still isn't enough room in a 1MB block for more "normal priority" fee paying transactions?  That's right, the normal priority transactions will start to be delayed as well.  What do you propose then?  Or do you honestly believe roughly 10 minutes worth of transactions from all over the globe will continue to fit neatly into something smaller than a floppy disk for the rest of forever?  

So what happened yesterday? There were ~5 000 + unconfirmed transactions at a certain point.
Due to re-scheduling, i would guess that the test was in fact initiated yesterday, as it was originally planned, but due to some issues it was moved for today.
OP was last active yesterday;


but no info or updates since then.

cheers

or ... Bitcoin network ban all his nodes after 10 minutes.
so, it's good, too  ;D

http://imagizer.imageshack.us/a/img537/8547/08sPWm.jpg

Maybe it was all a prank and they never really did anything. They just announced it and watched the chaos that would emerge from people panicking.

They already did made a stress test on 22nd, you can read about results here : https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1094865.msg11700297#msg11700297
There is no incentive for them to create panic if they were not serious and actually pull the stress test itself, since no one would take them seriously.
Judging by the fact that there was increased number of transactions yesterday when they were supposed to start the test, and then it stopped and was re-scheduled for today, i would say something went wrong with it.

cheers

i think we have to wait and see at this point , maybe there are some difficulties like the last time that their server crashed.
i am really interested to see what they will achieve , and prove with this test.

So this time it only lasted for about 15 minutes. KingAfurah, will you continue with the test? What happened this time?

I think it is actually a very valuable endeavor.

Edit: Transactions are increasing again! Let's hope they reach full capacity.

No word from OP still, but uncomfirmed transactions are increasing again as if the stress-testing is re-launched.

Total Fees   1.34750694 BTC
Total Size   6693.7958984375 (KB)

Almost at 6 000 unconfirmed transactions so far, i think this is it.

cheers

15 minutes ago, an miner fee estimate to get into the next block was around 0.00075.

Yes, I think this is it as well. Hold on to your asses fellas.  :P

No that's still the backlog from the short 15 minute long spike of the actual test.

Transaction number is still slightly elevated but FAR from what KingAfurah proposed for their test.


Check: http://statoshi.info/dashboard/db/transactions
You can see the spike of the actual test that occurred hours ago, but did not last very long.


KingAfurah care to explain what's going on?

Just read through must of this thread and I think we have it the wrong way round....

Seems like OP is not doing a stress test on the blockchain but rather on their 32 servers and clearly they cannot handle the stress... ;D

On a serious note though. I think this test was a good thing overall, even if it did not go according to plan. For me personally it helped clarify many things in regards to the 'increase/don't increase the block size' debate.

I'm not sure that website is correct. Either it is buggy or something is going on.

2015-06-30 6:54:30 = 2153 tx in mempool
Then 10 minutes later
2015-06-30 7:04:30 = 13,760 tx in mempool

That is a 11,500 tx increase in 10 minutes. That isn't a slow build, that is some error, IMO.

Maybe the people behind this "tests" (obviously lobbying for a block size increase) have decided that it is better to do a lower intensity transaction flood during a larger period of time than to do a massive flood in a very short period of time. This is sad because the latter would be much more interesting IMO, I bet a mempool of 150Mb or more is not easy to handle.

Mempool at 12Mb

Maybe the test works after all  :) Still far below their goals though

There is no technical reason for the test NOT to work, the non obvious part would be the OPs agenda and motivations to do it.

Transactions per second are not unusual though. I wonder what's going on on their end that prevents them from sending the 32 tx/s as planned.

People will probably send smarter transactions if the fee gets too high.  E.g. joining more transactions in sendmany, using internal transactions at exchanges where both have a wallet, etc.  Bitcoin will not go under, and Bitcoin transaction fees have lots of room for expansion before we reach credit card or bank transfer level.  Eventually we will have to use sidechains, Lightning or similar for smaller transactions where the fee will be too high for economic use of an in-chain transaction.  And we will get faster transactions as well.  But there is lots of room for growth before we need that, as this malicious spam campaign has proved.

I agree. Imagine what an extended period of increased transaction count would have caused!

I am still observing, although I have to admit that I still believe this test, for whatever reason, is still a failure in regards to their actual plan. We won't know anything until they comunicate again. Maybe they'll manage to increase tx/s to 32 again, not sure what's stopping them.

You think the average person will put up with all that needless extra crap?  I highly doubt it.  People like simple and they like fair.  The only reason to limit the network to 1MB is to pander to elitist ideals.  People sending large amounts get security, everyone else gets risk and is forced off-chain to rely on a third party.  The wealthy minority get all the benefit and everyone else gets a second tier service.  People getting involved in crypto aren't doing so just to rely on a different third party to handle their transactions for them.  The whole idea is that the transaction is recorded on a blockchain without placing trust in someone else.  If Bitcoin can't accommodate those transactions, the majority will simply use a different cryptocurrency.  Users won't support a network that doesn't support them.

If Bitcoin becomes nothing more than a tool for the wealthy, I don't see how they're going to keep miners on board.  Billions of people sending several transactions a day on a network that does scale will easily generate more in fees than a few one-percenter-wanabees sending the occasional large payment.  As Bitcoin's block reward diminishes over time, those fees will need to increase if you don't want to start haemorrhaging hash rate.  The question is, do you make individual users pay a higher amount?  Or do you allow the number of transactions to increase and collect a greater quantity of fees.  

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.  

So servers crashed again?  They might want to do a stress test on there own systems first.

Ok it's getting interesting again. According to Statoshi we are currently at 17 tx/s !

Yea, if you look at blockchain.info's main page, you will see new transactions scrolling by so quickly that you can't even see any of them.

Total fees of unconfirmed transactions is currently ~2.04 BTC, the mem pool is ~12.25 MB, the last block was ~4 minutes ago and the 6th last block was found ~51 minutes ago

stress test + greece fear + something else = BTC UP

:)

What needless extra crap?  I didn't mention any needless extra crap.

You obviously have no idea what you are talking about.  People who don't mind weaker security, already use SPV wallets instead of running a full node.  Lightning will provide at least as good security as an SPV wallet, with faster confirmation. 

Yes, using some scamcoin could be a solution for those with very special needs.  I expect most people to use sidechains instead, where you don't place trust in anyone else.  Don't forget the fact that over the past year or so 94% of the full nodes have left the network.  The quickly increasing resource requirements is an important reason.  I have switched off two of three of my own wery well connected full nodes for that reason myself.  The security and privacy of a full node is already a privilege of the comparatively wealthy.  You want to make it even more so.  I disagree with that approach for the many of the same reasons that you want to increase the resource requirements for privacy and security even more.

You don't get it, do you?  Increasing fees means increasing miner rewards at no cost to the miners.  Larger blocks incurs a cost, which is why many miners don't fill the blocks even today.

What an incredibly useless exercise.  When I started the block reward was 50 BTC.  There was a neglible drop in hashrate when the reward halved.  There is no reason to keep the reward at 25 BTC.  The cost of that to everyone who want the security and privacy of running a full node is too high.

Ah, the drama.  Looks like this malicious spam attack has no effect on other transactions than spam as well.  From #bitcoin on Freenode:
Just as the previous malicious spam attack.  An effective attack is going to cost a lot more, and require a large amount of capital in form of older larger inputs and larger outputs which are alowed to age before they are spent again.  The spammer is wasting his coins again, proving that bitcoin works well.  Smaller blocks only means the spammer wastes his coins more slowly.

You said but if I know 10 different people who use 10 different exchanges, I'm clearly not going to sign up to all of them because that's somehow "smarter".


And the official release date for Lightning is when?  


And the official release date for sidechains is when?

(and the anti-fork crowd accuse the pro-fork crowd of kicking the can down the road - at least we have some deadlines in mind   ::) )


I get it just fine, thanks.  But I'm pretty sure there will be some miners who would like to mine some larger blocks and collect the extra fees from all the additional transactions they'll be processing.  Hence several of the large pools expressing an interest in 8MB blocks.  I suppose you think they don't get it either?


So you honestly expect miners to take a hit every single time the reward halves?  I thought I was the one who didn't understand their costs?  One way or another, fees need to go up.

The attack is not meant to harm the network. This test is designed to measure the effect of what will happen when transaction volume starts to pick up naturally.

Eligius filtering out the test's transactions is doing nothing but harm to Bitcoin and is a good reason why no one should mine on eligius. Filtering out transactions that belong to a certain person harms bitcoin's fungibility and it is things like their actions that will lead to Bitcoin's failure.

Nice animated graphs, weex.

Here's a plot of the mempool size for the past day, for comparison to normal levels.  

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

Also note the spike in required fees, brought about by the higher-than-average fees being paid by the spammed transactions.

Live graphs are available here (https://bitcoinfees.github.io).

Agreed.
This also creates the precedence where miners are nonchalantly and flippantly willing to "blacklist" addresses.
A dangerous road to dance down. Eligius is complacent in the erosion of Bitcoin/bitcoin.

Miners have always been free to set policy on what transactions they mine and do not mine.  Eligius chooses not to mine spam from a scammer's attack and instead focus on legitimate usage of the network.

The goal of the attack is to slow down legitimate transaction processing... which by definition is a DoS (denial of service) attack.

Now, let's for a second hypothetically put aside the fact that this particular attack is actually a malicious attack attempt on bitcoin.  If there were a malicious and completely faceless attacker who was hell bent on harming bitcoin, and miners like Eligius could easily do something about it.... you're saying they shouldn't?   ???  Seems counter intuitive.  'Those with the ability have the responsibility to take action' type of situation, and in this care the decision is pretty clear.  Why would I have Eligius mine this scammer's spam transaction when instead it can mine the transaction of someone who actually just used bitcoin to purchase something, or bought or sold bitcoin, or whatever other legitimate use case is actually happening as we speak?

Judging by miners moving to Eligius since I've announced the filtering of the spam attack (hash rate up over 10% in the last hour or so) I think miners are voting with their hash power (as they should be) and it's pretty clear what side of this argument they're on and they are more than welcome on Eligius.

Fortunately, as mentioned above, the attack is having severely limited success even without Eligius's help.  kudos to bitcoin.

What a bunch of fucking morons...this isn't needed in any way.  It's not like you're going to discover anything we don't already know.

Miners are miners and profit is profit.

Miners are not really concerned with Bitcoin/bitcoins future use and growth, they are only concerned with ROI now.
They can and do jump ship at will.
If miners do, in the future, as you say, and are doing currently, then the golden goose is already dead.

When the Miners determine what to transact and not transact (or whitelist and blacklist),
they are cooperating with those who wish to deteriorate the system and ultimately control the system.

If you are not careful, with your way of thinking, one day it could be possible to blacklist all Eligius's block rewards, and other miners may agree.
If you open the can, you won't know what you have really done, till its done.

I am just a noob, but all transactions/addresses/coins must all remain valid, or one day none will be.

I think this post pretty much proves your ignorance of the situation and how miners function and what their purpose is.

I'll just point out one thing and leave the rest alone.... Keep in mind that with Eligius filtering the spam transactions miners are not getting the fees those spam transactions carry.  So, this is not a for profit decision.  It's a decision to help bitcoin in general.

Miners have always determined what transactions make it into blocks.  This is nothing new and nothing that will change.

KingAfurah, why don't you flood the mempool as you planned but continue this sustained slightly elevated tx number? Wouldn't it be far more interesting to push the mempool as high as possible for this test?

Is this attack/test still going on?

Ah ... sweet !

http://imagizer.imageshack.us/a/img540/8798/ZIiGmS.jpg

I haven't followed this latest stress test, is it different than the previous where there weren't that many transactions but transactions were big in size?

I was sent 0.18 BTC & 0.095 BTC today a few hours ago for my Da Dice sig & avatar campaigns that I am enrolled in.
Blockchain.info is showing both transactions as received but no confirmations.
My worry though is that neither transaction is showing up on my BTC core client, not even as unconfirmed transactions, just nothing, not received.
What's going on? I've never had anything like this in over 2 years.
Is this related to the stress test?

It's probably the result of the stress test that flooded the network with minuscule spam transactions. There are over 8000 unconfirmed transactions in a queue waiting to get in a block, and your payment is probably one of those waiting in line. Each block can only hold 1 MB and some miners refuse to fill blocks up fully so confirmed payments are being delayed until the miners can get through the backlog of unconfirmed transactions.

https://blockchain.info/unconfirmed-transactions

These are the 2 transactions (not that anybody cares lol)

https://blockchain.info/tx/507786c7c0533ff032426df74c937d23101e0323f97b06d32be0dafcf8974c68

https://blockchain.info/tx/1c66569e8e0d2e75929e576fb25b5dc5761f16dc597abd9033a5ba57e41dd5ef

Edit - Now blockchain.info is down , it's had enough ;D

Fee is too low, especially during a stress test, it will confirm eventually tho but you could potentially wait 1-2 days.

Miners are free to set the policy on what transactions they mine. Pools should make this policy public and transparent and miners will have the choice to join them or not. I just moved to eligius for this reason.  Others may leave.

I just registered to tell you that my bitstamp withdrawal has been stuck for 8 hours because of these "stress tests"
I have now missed making my mortgage payment because of this. Thanks... I'm already completely broke and struggling to feed my family. Now I have more bank charges and lost value from today's peak.

Way to hit the small guys.

My last 4 BTC.

Of course not, but you may choose to sign up to some kind of service with a shared wallet if that enables you to send transactions for free to other users.  Or you can pay the fee to do it on chain.  Up to you.  Yes, a shared wallet is less safe, but this is about very small amounts where you don't think the fee is worth it.

Probably long before the need for larger blocks arise.  As this spam attack shows, there is plenty room for spam in the blocks already.  No need to encourage more of it.

A larger block size enables more transactions, not more fees.  Think about it.  It will only make the transactions cheaper.  The total amount of fees will not increase.  The supply of block space increases, and the resource will no longer be as limited as it used to be, so people will pay less per kB.

Take a hit?  Do you seriously not think miners have the block reward halving in mind when calculating their ROI already?  It is not something unknown that suddenly jumps up and attack miners.  It is perfectly predictable.  More predictable than the difficulty.

Oh so you didn't actually address what I was saying, but instead made statements of my ignorance.
Which btw, I admitted when I stated I was a noob, so thank you for your confirmation without explanation and correction of my understanding.

My understanding is miners "choose" transaction based on fee amount and are placed into priority, not what you are saying which is:
"Miners have always determined what transactions make it into blocks.  This is nothing new and nothing that will change."

But you aren't doing that. You have blacklisted the addresses of the "attacker", "Spammer", "tester" whatever people want to call them.


Are you saying that all miners are blacklisting addresses? That's news to me and I'm sure other bitcoiners as well.
 

Yes it is.  If the malicious spammer wanted to test something, we have a testnet for that.  This is exactly what the testnet is ment for.

Do you read and store all your email spam as well, forwarding copies to all your friends?

Incorrect.  The specific patch to Eligius which blocks this attack does not include any blacklist or addresses.

I did a transaction with a my usual transaction fee settings (slightly larger than standard fee) half an hour ago.  The transaction was sent by my Electrum client via my Electrum server.  Blockchain Info showed that the transaction confirmed in 6 minutes (next block).

However, at this network  load my Electrum server was lagging and I didn't see the confirmation for some time.  The server runs on a slow processor and the Electrum Server is using about 7 times as much CPU time as the bitcoin core node on the same machine.  Another problem was that the Electrum client (on a different machine) still hadn't picked up the confirmation for several minutes after the Electrum server was done processing the block containing the confirmation.  I restarted the client and this time it worked.

Performance (so far) of Bitcoin Core has been exemplary.  Performance of Electrum, less so.

Well I don't see how it could determine who the attacker is without some reference point, such as address, ip, node, or etc.

If you are just rejecting all transactions below a certain miner fee and not including in a block, then I have no problem, in theory.
I'm only against outright blacklisting/whitelisting of addresses/coins/etc that will ultimately lead to Bitcoin/bitcoin's destruction.

u should let the electrum team know about your experience, if they aren't hacking through it themselves.

looks like they might be: https://github.com/spesmilo/electrum-server

update 7 hrs ago with some kind of mempool update

It was explained in the thread regarding last week's test why the test net was not used - doing so would not properly measure economic incentives of both miners and other users in regards to TX fees.
You are comparing apples to oranges. Email I receive to my private email, is by definition private and will not (with very few exceptions) be shared with anyone.

A better analogy would be would I forward emails sent to my mail server intended for my customers when the sender is paying for them to be forwarded? The answer would obviously be yes.

Eligius is treating certain inputs differently then other inputs. Plain and simple. They are saying that Bitcoin owned by one entity is not allowed to have their transactions confirmed by their found blocks.

This is not the first time that eligius (via Luke-jr) has done something similar to harm Bitcoin. Gambling sites were previously blacklisted by default by mining software when this was pretty clearly not a wanted "feature" of such software. In other words the software did things that its users did not want. This is how a lot of people describe malware.

You can't spot the spam transactions yourself?  Get … eyes.  No, you don't need to know who it is to block the transactions.

So... was that it? Back to 2 tx/s.


Now what I really want to know is why on earth did they not send transactions at a pace of 32/s as planned.

So you are automatically adding and then manually subtracting those "spam" txs before publishing the block, with your eyes?

Wow back at 30 tx/s

http://statoshi.info/dashboard/db/transactions

How much longer is this supposed to go on?

BS.  If the attacker had a tenth of a clue, she could easily simulate all transactions over a period, and add his spam to that.

But you do read and store it?  No filtering of any kind?  Treat all mail alike?  I am sure the spammers won't mind if you share it, btw.

So you take money for spammers to spam your customers.  Great.  I am sure you get a lot of them.  Do your customers know?

Nope.  They didn't say that.  Even when you download and install a fresh Bitcoin Core form bitcoin.org or compile one from git, there are anti-DoS measures preventing most spammy transactions from getting forwarded and mined, and it prioritize non-spammy transactions over spam.  This malicious attacker has tweaked his spam to get around the default anti DoS measures.  Nobody can prevent miners to tweak the anti spam code in their server to ignore the new spam transactions or change the priorities.  In fact, they don't need to mine any transactions at all, or they can choose to mine all transactions.  Most miners are bitcoin friendly however.  They keep keep the anti-DoS measures, include all sensible transactions waiting to get mined in their blocks and only mine spam if it doesn't get in the way.  All miners prioritize sane transactions when blocks are full.

I am a user.  I want this.  I want bitcoin to be successfull, not spammed to death.

Mempool at 16.5 Mb. Not bad but didn't they aim for 120 Mb?

If you need more than a few minutes to code a filter after looking at three of the spam transactions with your eyes, you should find something else to do with your life.

This is the biggest consequence to my mind of these stress-tests.  Average guys who didn't hear about it beforehand having to wait days for transactions to confirm.  I know that the dudes who are "stress-testing" say they're proving some important point, but the collateral damage, in my opinion, is too great just to confirm conclusions that we already knew.

Thankfully Eligius pool is working against the DOS attack and that fact is encouraging, that at least some miners are willing to prioritize transactions based on something other then pure fee---in this case, the Eligius miners are standing up for the small guy and regular users who are being disrupted by this "experiment".

Here is my original quote, that you then took part of, and responded to.


Maybe you can answer my question and stop tap dancing around.
Is your "filter" filtering based on transaction sizes and not miner fees?
And if so, are all transactions at or around that chosen number being excluded, including non-attacker txs?

Because my understanding was that the attacker's txs are being excluded, not all below a chosen limit.

I don't have a filter, but I can easily see the malicious DoS transactions are all of two different forms, making them very easy to filter.  No need to check transactions sizes or fees.  Don't expect Eligius to reveal the exact filter, since this will enable the attacker to circumvent it.

The mempool is at 19.5Mb! Has it ever been that high?

So what you are saying is you don't actually know how they are filtering, but have decided to comment that it is correct, fine, and easy to do.

All that I was saying is that they should not filter coins, addresses, servers, nodes,ip and etc, IMO.

BTW, the attacker, if wanting to take down the network, would keep increasing transaction amount and fees to circumvent the "filtering".
The intention is not to harm, in theory. This isn't an attacker, but most likely a tester or spammer. IMO.

Mempool at 20.5Mb. Is this the highest it has ever been?

This test is getting exciting again!

Mempool at 21Mb. Has it ever been this high?

Meanwhile transactions per second have sharply decreased again

If I knew, I wouldn't tell.  For obvious reasons.

Spam filters can have many configurations.  Filtering IP addresses would be pointless in this case.  Filtering addresses is generally pointless as well.  You can have an unlimited number of addresses.

The attacker obviously doesn't have the funds to circumvent the filtering.  Of course the intention is to harm.  You don't wage a DoS attack if you don't intend to harm.

Blacklisting is by definition about people, and no miner has ever attempted that to my knowledge.
Addresses are not people, and do not even exist in the Bitcoin protocol. Instead, they are converted into scripts.
Bitcoin Core has filtered what scripts it will relay or mine since Satoshi Nakamoto himself added filtering in 0.3.18 (2010 Dec 8th).
To disable this, you must use (or rewrite) patches (https://github.com/luke-jr/bitcoin/tree/accept_nonstdtxn) that I have maintained almost as long as I have been involved in Bitcoin (https://github.com/bitcoin/bitcoin/pull/559).
As far as I know, however, not a single miner is currently mining without any script filtering whatsoever.

This is 100% false/FUD/lies.

1 BTC transaction from OKCoin to Bitfinex with a fee of 0.0001 got through in the block that took ~48 minutes to be found, I made the transfer ~10 minutes before it was found.

I moved my C1 to Eligius, and will keep it there until the DoS attack is over.  Mining to their donation address, because I think their anti DoS measures should be rewarded.

I've been keeping an eye on Eligius's memory pool (which doesn't contain the attacker's transactions) as other pools find blocks and for the most part it is cleared each time, which means that most legitimate transactions are being mined regardless of this DoS attack.  Good for bitcoin. :)

It appears BTC China is filtering the spam, also, as it doesn't appear to be showing up in their recent few blocks.  Good for them. :)

As for Eligius, I feel the need to point out that Eligius's normal spam filtering is public for the most part, with the exception of the portions added recently that combat this specific attack (which would be silly to release during the attack and let the attackers work around it).  Suffice it to say, as I mentioned before, the attacker's transactions are very easy to spot and thus very easy to filter.  Admittedly, I'm kind of surprised that the attack is so simple to filter out.  Leads to questions about the attacker's actual knowledge about bitcoin, or more specifically the lack thereof...


Thanks for this. :)

How about all other miners refuse to include transactions from Eligius' payout address. Since addresses are not people that should really not be an issue, right?

First, there is no "from" address on a transaction.  This is a pretty big misconception that is spread around.  So no one, including Eligius, refuses to include transactions based on it being "from" an address.

Second, Eligius's payouts are generated payouts in the coinbase transaction, which is mined when a block is mined.  No node even sees this transaction until it appears in an Eligius block (except the miners who are mining for Eligius).

*sigh*  The amount of misinformation in this thread is staggering.

Few people are having issue about blockchain tx. confirming, how long will this take?

Still an unanswered question is: Who is behind it. Cui bono.

coinwallet.eu wants to store and trade Bitcoins. Well. They have set up a virtual office. The company Coinwallet does not exist in GB. They promote their services and claim that they don't need to know their customers identity. So it is obviously not a British firm, otherwise, they would implement KYC, AML and CTF-policies.

So who would entrust an entity his coins without knowing anything about them? This sounds like a total scam.

Interesting, thoug, that coinwallet claims to be partnering with Multibit. Maybe they can shed some light on it?

I, as a miner, consider this "stress test" being a ddos-attack. Never mind what "results" they may present. And what they have presented until now isn't really useful.

Wow this is a very cool initiative, I heard it worked very good, even better as planned.  ;D

It's planned good, but i just wonder when will this finished. It makes delay in tx.

I am not even sure that the current transactions being pushed to the network is even part of the so-called stress test:

There are a large number of no/low fee transactions in the current mempool. As of recently, there were only around .2 BTC worth of tx fees in the mempool, but still thousands of unconfirmed transactions (over 10k) and a mempool size of well over 10 MegaBites.

It also appears that the brainwallet for cat has been flooded with no fee transactions; the private key with "cat" is 5JiznUZskJpwodP3SR85vx5JKeopA3QpTK63BuziW8RmGGyJg81 which translates to a public key of 04a45ebc40f95cc06ef93a5f5e9daa22774a5c9a120ac14d87c328b44c1158f81cddd109246a4d8 bff5f93cbba79a17f2dc6e7c73da8d6bd0d98615d1bf353f8be which translates to an address of 162TRPRZvdgLVNksMoMyGJsYBfYtB4Q8tM (https://tradeblock.com/blockchain/address/162TRPRZvdgLVNksMoMyGJsYBfYtB4Q8tM))

I've got 0.18 & 0.095 BTC incoming transactions lost in the wilderness somewhere. They're both coming to the same address. Blockchain.info explorer shows them in said address but my Bitcoin Core client (wallet) shows nothing, not even pending.
They're both unconfirmed transactions after several hours, both the medium, recommended fee. They're payment for a signature & avatar campaign I participate in.

I understand they're not confirmed transactions but a little worried they're not even in my core wallet as pending.

I hope this will be finished asap, it's getting people in trouble. Any one have information how long must we wait?

I wouldn't be so sure abou that. There are plenty of legit transactions still waiting to be confirmed. For example, we have few here: https://www.nicehash.com/?p=miners&payments

If your mempool empties out with each block, then perhaps these legit transactions are never broadcasted to you?

Is test stress happening right now?

I don't see the network is being really busy

It looks like that eligius just found two blocks (https://blockchain.info/block/00000000000000000638218146b8c0ac807315174c0104f390481853188df124 and https://blockchain.info/block/0000000000000000071359c423077912ed499e7351de61b9462d4178f2b45e94), both of which were under 52 kb and 82b43c7617e9bf1afcfbda94152da4fa9ccd2f477a6b5ed203326789d510847a and 5db4631aea702ee3ac6e0895f019e06d7c24b896e76f8cf1f1ba1e51e66d6acf are still showing as unconfirmed and are on the above link with recent mining payments from NiceHash. They do each have 8+ inputs and a large number of outputs. ::)

I started a transaction today around 12pm noon EST and it has yet to have 1 confirm. BTC mining price is .0003.. amount of 1.7774


Is there anything I can do to make it go any faster??

Yea, what kind of filters you are using are most likely filtering out most of legit transactions or your pool does not have good connectivity with other nodes. If it is the second, then you should really establish connections with big bitcoin service providers (like BitGo for example).

Over 8 hours to get todays payment from Westhash.

Luke - it's important to remember when any of your regular lies, can be easily shown to be lies, and thus it's a bad idea to post those lies publicly.
If you can't even remember what you said 5 minutes ago, you need check your facts about yourself before you post about something in the past :P

When you write code to Blacklist something and even in the code, you call it a Blacklist, it's rather bazaar that you'd then go and say it isn't a Blacklist. Even worse, you added this code on by default in gentoo bitcoin so that anyone who didn't disable your Blacklist, got it.

Current code:
https://github.com/luke-jr/bitcoin/blob/0.10.x-ljrP/src/main.cpp#L943

Note that the name was originally BlacklistedPrefixes:
https://github.com/luke-jr/bitcoin/blob/19cc5c03a0448f8c88cc81538bf3e54594867e5e/src/script.cpp#L1834

Of course you can (yet again) say that dictionaries are wrong and you are right, but even the Oxford dictionary says your definition is wrong:
http://www.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/american_english/blacklist
"Person" or "Product"

( By "Yet again" I am referring to: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=28402.msg1369274#msg1369274 )

While you are at it, don't forget to tell the real bitcoin devs that their use of the term Blacklist in the code is wrong :P
https://github.com/bitcoin/bitcoin/blob/master/src/qt/paymentserver.cpp#L163
So I take it since a "certificate" isn't a "person" then that code is wrong in main bitcoin :P

You like playing word games to pretend you aren't doing what people say you are doing, due to some technicality (that is also false)
Here's an example of how I'd expect you'd get out of murdering someone:
Luke:
"Your honour, I didn't shoot him to death, which is the charge levelled against me, thus I am not guilty of murder.
You see, what happened was, a bullet from the gun I had in my possessions left the barrel of the gun and pierced his body, but he was still alive.
When I pushed him, staggering, off the cliff, the entire fall to the ground far below, he was still alive, thus the bullet didn't kill him, it was the rocks below that killed him.
Thus I am not guilty of murder."

It's funny to see wizkid play these same games of yours also ...
Palpatine, you are training your padawan well ...

So hard to figure out what people mean by that damn eye-rolly smiley face.  You do understand that mining is a stochastic procedure right?   Finding a block isn't going to be predetermined in size or number of inputs.  I'll try it too: ::)

We are back at 1tx/s. So if the test has now ended they have achieved only a 10th of their goal of 200Mb

I call bullshit on this entire 'stress test' idea .. the idea that one group of spam scammers could flood the network is absurd

Giving a variable a name in code isn't the same thing as declaring in a court of law that you should interpret it by some dictionary definition.  People name things in code all kinds of stupid things, naming a variable is simply not the same thing as describing to someone in human language what it means or does.

why to set a stress test? really you wont never get an acurance results as bitcoins is sended all the time and all days ,soo why to make a test ,not worthing your free time to check the time of them .The time it needs to get confirmation is just a security question.

My own transaction to send money to someone is stuck thanks to your stress test. Over eight hours waiting now and my tx fee higher than your 10,000 satoshis. How long will this take until this ridiculous test concludes? All my btc is stuck in a change address in this transaction.

No problem to send bitcoins to kraken ... with 0,00001 BTC fees.
Stop using low fees ...  ::)

Indeed - then read the rest of the post that shows he is lying.

Is the test over?

Record transactions past 24 hours.  162k.

There certainly were delays for many.  I had a payment to me delayed by several hours---but this wasn't as bad as when I got caught in the "test" last week and had a delay of 11 hours.  But if we shouldn't give credit to the OP, the who should we give it to?  Something was clearly going on.  11K unconfirmed transactions (which I witnessed earlier today) isn't the norm.

I had to move some miners out of BTC Guild at the last minute before it shut down and picked Eligius because of this. Call it filtering, blacklisting or whatever ... I think that this response was appropriate.

Me too... I supposed to have my payout from my sig. campaign few hours ago, however it is still unconfirmed until I've sent my transaction with extra fees (I've paid 20000 satoshis for just a 3xx byte tx!) and the sig. campaign's payment and my payment confirms in the same block, with my tx just after the sig. campaign's tx (so all the participants should thank me for paying extra fees to let their tx to be confirmed :)). I think such tests should stop immediately, and none of them should be carried anymore. Please stop spamming the blockchain.

Thanks for the support!  It is appreciated. :)

I prefer fungibility, which is the basic concept of Bitcoin, the peer to peer digital currency, not blacklisting.

However, Eligius' blacklisting had no positive effect on the stress test and helped no one.
In fact what Eligius did, helped prolong the problem.

Not sure where you get your facts from, but as I had mentioned previously in this thread, there was no "blacklist" in play with regard to filtering this particular spam attack.  The transactions are pretty easily detectable because the attackers really don't seem to know what they're doing.

The only things prolonging the attack are the attackers and other pools/miners *not* filtering the scammer's spam.  The other pools/miners would rather fill their blocks with the attacker's transactions for an extra 0.1 BTC in fees vs protect bitcoin as a whole... or it's laziness.  Either way, any ill effects of this attack could easily have been countered 100% with the participation of just a few of the larger pools.

100% ... no that's false and you know it is.

Doing Luke's bidding? Not gonna happen by anyone but you.

The simple fact is that they were valid transactions with fees.

If following Luke's orders, your pool decides it wants to block valid transactions, that's up to him.

However, as I stated:
In fact what Eligius did, helped prolong the problem.

Whatev. I'll run my own damn test. At the same time, I'll generate a transaction here and there, with some nominal increment over the standard fee you're paying. I bet I spend less, and end up more satisfied in the outcome, than do you.

Do you oppose the default anti-DoS filters which are built into Bitcoin Core as well, or just this particular anti-DoS filter because of problems with a specific person?

Perhaps you and I have different ideas of what the problem is?  To me the problem is the fact that legitimate low fee transactions were replaced by malicious spam.  Eligius solved this by allowing even the low fee transactions confirm, in the same way as the default settings in Bitcoin Core filter spammy transactions which used to cause DoS earlier.

I have to completely agree with Kano here..

A valid TXN is a VALID txn. Full stop. End of story. NO POLITICS.

If someone starts to show that it is possible to 'edit' which transactions go through the system, then I think it sets a very bad precedent.

I don't see why the miners weren't really happy to be slurping up all those extra fees !? That's what they live for.. isn't it.. ?

FREE BUFFET!! EAT AS MUCH AS YOU LIKE!!  ;D

(Ok - so we made you work for it a little harder today, but we don't want you getting fat and lazy..)

Blocking any transactions is the thin end of the wedge. If it starts for any reason it will snowball until international governments start ordering pools to block a regularly updated list of transactions. What if the pools were ordered to stop processing transactions from Greece?

Greek people will use VPN instead  :)

Actually I don't know if you can specifically broadcast your transactions to one pool that you prefer. If pools have different policies when it comes to transaction priority, then maybe 0 fee transactions could still be done with some pools (They block spam transactions intentionally). And overtime, more and more spam transactions will be queued in the memory pool due to more and more pools are blocking them

Then we have an interesting situation that although there are 200MB queued transactions in memory pool, most of them are spam transactions ::)

Finally got my BTC. What a nightmare, I'm glad it was only a relatively small amount, I would have been really anxious if I was waiting on 10+ BTC. Last night was the first time I've ever had a transaction going through when there was a stress test. I'm not a tech expert so what did they actually learn from spamming the network & making lots of people worry about non confirmed transactions.
I checked bc.info & at one point there were over 11,000 unconfirmed transactions. Was it really necessary for that many?

You should stop using Bitcoin Core then, or any P2P based coin with users or miners.

Bitcoin Core refuses to make, forward or mine most valid transactions.  The set of valid transactions it accepts by default is only a fraction of all valid transactions.  It won't make, forward or mine transactions with dust outputs, for example.  This is a very effective measure against spam, and against DoS by exploding the UTXO set.  All users can change this policy if they want to, and even set it to accept all valid transactions if they have enough RAM and CPU to accept all the junk transactions which is never going to get mined.  You could even keep them in your mempool and rebroadcast them forever.  My definition of dust is 10 times larger than the default definition.  This saves space in my mempool, and fortunately you can't force me to waste my resources on your junk transactions.  This is my choice when I choose to spend my resources on running a full node.  You are free to make your own choices.

Miners can decide which transactions to put in their blocks.  This is true for all coins which use distributed mining.  Some pools use stricter than default settings.  Most use the default settings.  Some, particularly Eligius, accept most valid transactions which other pools will refuse to mine.  Eligius demands a fee for that kind of transactions, which is their choice.  Some, e.g. Eligius, will let you add a fee to a transaction by sending the change output with a higher fee, considering the fees and sizes of both the parent and the child when prioritizing transactions.  Most pools will only consider the fee of the parent transaction.  This is entirely up to them.

Dust txn. Fine (to block).

No fee txn. Fine (I don't think zero fee txns should be allowed at all actually).

'Spam' in all it's varied forms. Fine.. (Well, until some size fix solution is found. Then if you pay, and there's room, you should be allowed through.)

But a normal valid txn that pays the standard fee. That should be allowed through.

Miners should LOVE to mine txns that pay fees. As Luke himself said, these are numbers, not people. There should be NO POLITICS involved. Otherwise, it's a very slippery slope.

How on earth are you going to accomplish that, even if you were all the governments on Earth?  You could give all the orders you want.  It would be impossible to separate transactions from Greece from the rest.  Bitcoin doesn't know geographical boundaries.

Unconfirmed transactions left, right and center. If this isn't proof that we need a blocksize increment then I dont know what the hell it is. LN is not a solution long term.

Wow!  That was quite a change from

You are of course entitled to your own opinion on mining policy, just as all the miners, users and even non-users.  I don't think any pools or solo miners block normal valid transactions that pays a fee.  Most allow no fee transactions as well, as long as there is room in the block and the priority is high enough.

If I had the hashrate to make a difference, I would give a high priority to transactions which reduce the UTXO set significantly, e.g. by combining a lot of dust outputs to one or two more sensible sized coins.  I would mine those transactions for free if the gain was high enough, since it saves resources, and therefore reduces cost, in the long run.

Well, I was loose with my terminology..  :P Dust and No fee I don't consider valid.

The point is that normal fee paying transactions were blocked.

It's amazing to me how many of the posts in this thread are just shouting "Luke shouldn't be doing this!!!".  As if what they shout somehow matters.  People need to listen to the miners who are dropping facts on you.  They keep tellling you "I am a miner and I decide what to do with my hashrate.  I decide what to try to process and what to ignore".  The point of this setup is that everyone is free to implement their own mining policy and see how it goes for them.  For people claiming that no-fee transactions should be blocked: consider that as long there's a block reward I can set up my miner to only hash no-fee transactions, as long as I find a block I get the block reward and that far-outweighs the fees associated with a given block (on average, nowadays).

I, personally, think it was very noble of Eligius pool to ignore "stress-test" transactions, this was an example of a mining pool putting the interests of the regular, everyday, bitcoin users above their own profit interests.  This is very interesting because miners and users are often seen as having opposing interests.

Anyway, consider please, folks, shouting about what miners should do won't change the fact that they are free to do as they please.  This is the nature of a trustless, distributed, decentralized system.  The system provides conditions under which everyone, while working for their own interest, can secure the network for all.  If you work against your own interest (ie, say, you spend 20BTC just to spam for fun) you are free to do that.  Along the same lines miners are free to ignore higher-fee transactions of said spammer. 

Them's the facts!

So has the mempool ever before been as large as it was yesterday (21Mb) ?

I really enjoyed observing how the network reacted to this increased 'stress'

jbreher, I hope you will perform a test as well. These are very important, to find weaknesses in BTC companies' implementations, etc

well i dont get why soo several things to be done to improve blockhain instead of it someone is testing it spped? Camon just do something better for bitcoin then some kind of test

I can't understand what you are saying which makes me think that you are just posting this to get paid for your signature ad.

Maybe if you slow down and used spellcheck it would help, but I can't guarantee it.

---

@ChetAtkins I'm pretty sure that was the record, but every node has it's own mempool so it'd be hard to say overall what the largest mempool ever was.  However, I imagine a public tracker like blockchain.info would be a reasonable stand-in, and it seems like it was a record on BCI.

testing is still running or what? 1600TX per block and I'm waiting 20 minutes for first confirmation, even I paid recommended fee..

edit: 4.7k unconfirmed and still growing:( https://blockchain.info/unconfirmed-transactions

blocking a tx just because you think it is spam.. is bad.

i get the idea of blocking tx's that have values of less than a penny.. but blocking a tx due to data bloat needs careful consideration..

imagine a company wanted to pay its 10,000 staff in bitcoin. and it sent out tx's as such.. luke jr would block the tx.

the problem is not that tx's need blocking. the problem is that the test is showing that even a small handfull of tx's can cause such controversy. if the blocks were 20mb, there would be no controversy as all tx's would fit happily with no bottleneck..

 

yeah. I really think, that we need some change with this block magic asap, because now waiting almost hour for FIRST confirmation, even I paid fee. we should be lucky, that bitcoin is not massively adopted yet, because this is like waiting 1h for email delivery..

Yes, now at 6.5K.  I was unaware of any "test" going on today but I'm also waiting over 1.5 hours now on a tx with a standard fee.  I didn't check the backlog status yesterday evening to see if things cleared out and this is a new wave of spam or if it's just ripple effects from yesterday's event.

otherwise, it is simply harming new bitcoin users..they all knows, that TX is almost free and takes something about 10 minutes and their first experience with default setup of wallet in non-reversible enviroment may be 2 hours (I'm actually waiting 2 hours now with default electrum fee paid)

The "test" more and more turns into a ddos...

Hard to take you seriously when you just blatantly lie and slander me...

No, if blocks were 20 MB, the damage would be 20 times worse and literally destroy Bitcoin.
No matter what the limit is, or how big blocks are, spam should never be mined, and can never be supported (it would literally require infinite block sizes).

Since this is a technically minded discussion, I have to say that your suggestion that mining all spam would require infinite block sizes is clearly hyperbole.  Any amount of observable spam is finite.  No block-size limite would be something like a limit of infinity on block sizes, but since any observable amount of spam is finite we can go ahead and assume that all spam can fit into a finite block ('specially since you can't hope to mine an infinitely sized block anyway).

In any case, I really respect that you stood up for normal bitcoin users yesterday potentially at cost to yourself given the fees the spammers were paying.

Did the stress test affected today tx. ? I had a small tx. and payed fee but took to long about 4h to get confirmed.

Use blackcoin.  Way faster and more secure and you wouldn't have the issue of pools blacklisting transactions.

is there any report of the stress test released like the last time?
for the last test i saw this: http://redd.it/3au3rs but i can't find anything like it for this one.

You probably don't have the issue of a company spending thousands of dollars to spam it with useless transactions either.  If you did, you might not consider that "blacklisting" to be problematic.

FUD as usual from you.

The number of transactions on the bitcoin network is NOT decided by the block size limit.

At some point in the future it MAY be a major factor, due to the block size being smaller than the demand for bitcoin transactions, but that is NOT the case now.

No, your "mail" is delivered. Its just not confirmed yet. Besides what you experienced was the "normal" rush to ~6k TX. That is a daily even between ~1800 CEST and ~0100 CEST. Its probably european/us prime time to spend/move coins.


Bigger blocks would - for one - make these kinds of attacks more expensive. This stress test is only slightly effecting others because OP is burning coins as fees and miners are - as its intended - greedy. If the max blocksize is 2 MB the same attack would have needed 40 BTC instead of 20 BTC[1] to have the same effect. How bigger blocks would worsen the effect is not right away clear to me, if they are full, they are full and others have to wait.

[1] According to OP that are the funds dedicated to this test, I did not check how realistic this is.

uhh ok, so the mail is delivered, but I'm unable to read to content and have to wait unknown time, because lot of guys sending mails.. (btw, yesterday I have to wait 5 hours and 28 minutes for first confirmation)

..if you don't feel this like a problem, believe or not, but it IS problem.

More like you can't prove who sent the email for unknown time. Which is actually true, since email is basically always insecure.

A better analogy would be credit card transactions. Those take 6 months to confirm.

Right, but in this analogy, you can't reply or act on the information in the email until you figure that out (no spending coins that aren't confirmed yours yet).  Actually, the analogy is getting rather stretched by now as you aptly transition to below.

Except Bitcoin does allow spending unconfirmed coins. ;)

yes, but average Joe don't care about 6 months, because he is not waiting during paying process more than 5 hours like me yesterday. He simply don't care about TX's in background between credit company, bank and other institutions and he will literally never find out, that it takes 6 months in "reality"

I got your point, but waiting endless hours for first confirmation (and LOT of services requires at least one confirmation) is imho not comfortable at all and should be somehow changed..

Why are there 3209 Unconfirmed Transactions with 4623.65234375 (KB) backlog. Is this still ongoing?

I don't think so. However there was no blocks mined within the last 30 minutes till the newest block was mined about 3 minutes ago. That block takes 0.39 BTC as transaction fees.

Bitcoin Core does that.

Blocking some kinds of spam is OK, but blocking other kinds of spam is not OK?  Avoiding data bloat (UTXO set) is the primary reason for blocking dust.  Of course every filter needs careful consideration.

Congratulations!  You just discovered, all by yourself, one of many reasons for why centralization is bad.  Keeping the block size small is important to avoid more centralization.   Therefore we need to block malicious spam.  If Luke mined 100% of all blocks, which he could theoretically do if he got well over 51% of the hashrate, he could block the tx.

Now you lost me.  Which small handful of tx's caused controversy?

If the blocks were larger, blocking transactions will be easier.  The number of full nodes has already been reduced by 94% over the last year.  If you multiply the resource requirements for running a full node by 20, there won't be many full nodes left.  Not running a full node sacrifices both privacy and security.  Few full nodes makes it easier to block transactions, because a small set of nodes in a few datacenters are easier to control than a large set spread all over the world.

And the 5 blocks before this one was almost empty...

That is just not true. The measurement of full nodes changed. We never really had that huge number of full nodes, some people are propagating.
Furthermore, it is complete bollocks, that you would need a datacenter to have a full node. Please stop spreading that nonsense.

Why do you assume the price of a transaction – the txfee – will stay the same as the supply of transaction space increases?  This contradicts the law of supply and demand (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Supply_and_demand).  The price should go down when the supply increases and normal demand stays the same, and the cost of the attack against 2 MB blocks will be exactly the same as the cost of an attack against 1 MB blocks.

Yes, but all you can do today is ask services to trust your unconfirmed transaction like they do with credit cards.
If you defraud them, they can just terminate your service.
If people abuse this in retail, they may end up having to ask for photo id for Bitcoin purchases.
Given a year or so, hopefully Lightning will solve it in a nicer way.

The measurement by multiple different people happened to all change in just the exact same way so that the same conclusions were drawn? Don't be ridiculous.

20 MB blocks means you need 41 Mbps upload. Most people don't have that even available.

Please share your calculations.

I'm apparently missing something.

If we assume that each transaction received is sent to 2 other nodes, then a full 20 MB block over 10 minutes would mean that you would have needed to send approximately 40 MB during that time.

40 MB X 8 bits per byte = 320 Mbit

There are 600 seconds in 10 minutes.

320 Mbit / 600 seconds = 533,333 kbps

That's only a bit more than half of 1 Mbps.

Somehow you ended up with a number that is almost 77 times larger than my calculation.

Does that mean you are assuming that each node sends every transaction it receives to 154 other nodes?  That doesn't seem like an accurate estimate.

What am I missing?

... and it doesn't matter unless you are mining.
That is only the problem of pools and people using their nodes for solo mining.

Everyone should be running nodes, but most people shouldn't be using them for mining.
That's a risky thing to do ... even some pools do that badly ... like Eligius.

A transaction processing node doesn't need to get every block ASAP.
If it takes even a minute it doesn't matter.

And aside from that, aren't we looking at 8MB now anyway?  The 20MB proposal seems to have been overruled by mining pools.  Granted, there's also talk about doubling it every couple of years, but I expect there will be further discourse about that part.  Even to someone like me who supports larger blocks, doubling could potentially be a little on the excessive side, but then I guess it all depends on adoption levels.

20 MB = 160 Mbit.
8 peers minimum.
30 seconds maximum to upload new blocks in a timely manner.
160 Mbit * 8 peers / 30 seconds = 42.67 Mbps.

But you can't spend 10 minutes  uploading the block to each peer.
Nor will things propagate reasonably if each peer only uploads to one other peer - consider that SPV/light nodes only download.
The network will just break down entirely...

Here is what I think
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=766190.msg11769397#msg11769397
In general no mater how big block tx becomes if Tx fee is low there will be always a chance with little money invested to "spam" the network. A reasonable solution for me is to increase tx fee in a first place then increase max block size if needed
That will be a good step forward to be ready when block reward will be arround zero - a good long term solution which will solve most or all of the current issues  ;)

My test was tongue in cheek, motivated by a too-short temper. I've since cooled down.

But my point I think is valid. I think there is a chance this 'test' was motivated by less than altruistic scientific curiosity. I was just pointing out that paying a little more than they were willing to per transaction would likely have resulted in prompt validation.

Please see my sig.

... or you could look at the current network requirements of a well connected node and see that the supposedly relevant guessing by a certain person further above is just random vague guessing coz he thinks he knows something but doesn't.

A bitcoin with more than 50 connections averages (well) under 40k bytes a second ... total in both directions ... with the current 1Mb block limit.
It gets above that when you let people download the blockchain from you ... ... so you don't do that if it matters ...

So if that 1Mb limit was suddenly 20Mb and you made the unlikely assumption that it would jump up 20 times ...
you're still under 7mbit ... ... ... total in both directions ... on average

So you'd add on top of that your own transactions you are generating ... to get a reasonable idea of the requirements.

It's like guessing that empty blocks solves the problem of a slow crappy getblocktemplate function someone wrote in bitcoind.
No, it's slow crappy pool code and a badly managed pool that's the problem, the slow crappy getblocktemplate function is minor compared to that.

Look at real numbers ...

Luke-Jr, you would know better than me, but if I see that there's a transaction on the network which spends coins to an address I control, then I guess you're pointing out that nothing stops me from sending out a transaction signed by that address which sends them elsewhere.  Is that right?

But I know none of the wallets I've used allow this ("this will become spendable soon...").   And I'm surprised that a transaction referencing an output which isn't yet confirmed wouldn't be rejected as invalid.



Yes, and the coinomat people are starting to get infamous for this.

BS!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Only if you are miner you need that speed. For normal user you can do that in 5 minutes and you are still more then fine. EDIT: "Also who say you will send out to 8 nodes? If you are slower you might send that to only one." Miners are connected directly and have bater connection and don't relay on other nodes. And I have second cheapest option at home and it is 10/100 with no limits(none has limits just to be sure). Is internet really that bad in US that this can be an argument that 40 Mbps is so hard to get? But anyway 4Mbps is more then enough at 20 MB

Agreed, my full-node has a time offset of -8 at 4Mbps, so this is not the problem  ;D

I would also like to say thanks for unannounced soft fork of some pools and nodes. Transactions that worked fine 24 hours ago are now rejected by some nodes and miners. The main problem I have with that is that it looks like at lest same of people that are behind this are against announced hard fork. It looks like thanks to this I will have to use my Credit card or cash first time in about 90 days... I just can't get mind funds of a pool... And I see less than half full blocks. So thank you very much for showing me that BTC can be as slow and arbitrary as banks... If a smaller pool operates don't know you will pull this shit that is just great...

Miners can/will make sure of this. If you send 0 fee transation you can see this. Even if blocks are less then full it will take long time to get conformation. Even low fee takes much longer...

EDIT: And we can make a structure that only 1MB is for low fees. Like 50k that is for hi priority transactions... The rest 19MB or 7MB hi fees... Problem solved...

Yes.  Most DSL providers in the US only give 768kbps - 1.5 mbps upstream.  It is very rare for DSL to provide higher than that in the US.  If you're in an area with a cable alternative, you can get maybe 3-5 mbps upstream.  Upstream in the US is EXTREMELY low compared to downstream across the board, normally a 10:1 ratio of downstream to upstream at best.

Fiber is rolling out in VERY few areas in the US, and due to the country's size, you're unlikely to ever see it outside of larger cities, not counting the "test cities" that are lucky enough to get rollouts in smaller towns.

Wireless internet (4G) isn't an option because our data caps are also absurdly low.  While many US wireless services advertise unlimited data, ALL OF THEM are lying.  They ALL throttle you down to 3G (and even 2G) after about 5GB of data on their "unlimited plans".  Want more?  Well Verizon can sell you a 150GB 4G LTE plan...if you want to pay $750/month.  All the other carriers are similarly absurd in their pricing if you want more than 5-10 GB/month over LTE.  Oh, and that's up+down combined.

So EU is light years ahead of you. Go figure... Relay unlimited 4G in my country cost only 20€/month. 100/100 fibre cost only 42€, 10/40 cable is 35€, not sure about DSL but I guess not too expansive. I pay for 10/100 internet 160 channels+ (including premium like HBO), 72 hours look back option and phone line(calls in ISP network for free) less then 55€.

EDIT: You can get cable practically everywhere and fibre in towns as small as 1500 people. EU did invest a lot in internet.

I guess US needs to slow you down for NSA to look at everything...

If you are a very dedicated user, you may accept that your internet is slow as heck for 50% of the time.  Most won't, and will opt for lower security and less privacy with an SPV wallet instead.  I don't think spam is important enough that we should accept more centralization or forcing lower security upon a lot of users.  As the malicious attacks has demonstrated, there is plenty of room for all the non-spam transactions in 1MB blocks.  If your goal is more spam and lower security and privacy, the answer is larger blocks.  If your goal is to make transactions confirm faster, the answer is better spam filtering.

There is another option, if you insist on a hard fork: Smaller transactions.  Using different crypto algorithms, the size of each transaction can be reduced to about 1/4th of the current size.  This unfortunately come with the cost of higher CPU consumption.  Nothing is free.  With each transaction taking 1/4th of the current size, we can do with a block size of 250k for years to come, allowing even users with metered internet and mobile connections to run full nodes.  Assuming spam filtering, of course.  If you want to abolish spam filtering entirely, then no block size would be large enough, and no personal user will even dream of doing a full blockchain download.

What's the transaction fee for it? I think you guys need to clarify all these things from the very beginning ,so it doesn't pose a problem for us. Also i found last test rather interesting. This one was okayish,

Yeah, and the EU is half the size of the USA...

How about outside those towns?
For example, where there's one hour per hectometre.

Not sure about other states but it is like water or electricity. You will get cable or ADSL or WiFi(EDIT: it might even be fibre) provided by state and you need to only get ISP.

In many of those rural areas of the U.S., people have their own personal well for water out of the ground, so water may be a bad example, unless you are saying that their is some way to dig into the ground and tap directly into some high speed internet reservoir?

It is not a fee problem. It is getting rejected since pool(not BTC mining pool but pays in BTC) is sending to more then 200 addresses. It worked yesterday but now it doesn't. Well to got confirmed after more then 24 hours... So I don't like this soft antispam(what the f**k is spam hire anyway???) fork that doesn't work as it should and it was not announced so we would know how to make transactions that will not be spam according to it. Changing rules like that can kill bitcoin not 20MB blocks.

I don't use core for transactions for a long time. Not safe. If there would have connect a Android device with Trezor option I might use my XT node for transactions but since this will probably not happen MyCelium works just fine. It even has integrated BTC to SEPA in it... So why use a node for transactions? You can't use it of a phone. Big problem if you get hacked. Personally I think suggest that you should use node for transaction is really a bad idea unless you are security expert. Most people aren't. And core is far from secure wallet.

And now what is spam? How do you know that? Who give you the right to decide? If you don't like it don't run a node. Are you a bank? Are we going the way banks are going? And how will users know so they will not be blocked. What happens if someone didn't know that rules have changed? Isn't that why we don't like banks?

And as soon as I see on option that will work without increasing block size limit that will happen in less then 1 year I'm OK with 1MB. But there isn't any... even one that are mentioned need bigger blocks in long run so making them bigger now changes noting. Also I see some conflicts of interests in persons that are against it. Like chef scientist of altcoin or working on some alternative payment system that uses BTC. If your payment needs you not to understand something I assure you you will not understand it. And making BTC settlement layer will make altcoins(p2p users) and that system(BTC users) more attractive. Until now I didn't see an argument that is not BS speculation...

We will need bigger blocks and all alternative payment system, sidechains, altcoins and who knows what more but for now we have size... If you have alternative payment system in place when we need to make blocks even bigger grate but there isn't one now.

And just to be sure. There will not be 2 Bitcoins after hard fork. If it happens 25% will change to bigger blocks or will be killed by bitcoins tht are useless or even 51% attacks for sure... So saying there will be 2 and big problems is BS. When first big blocks is mined small chain will die in hours or days... Unless there are more exchanges and wallets on it. Than it might take longer or it might even manage to beat big one since miners might change back to it. But there will never be 2 Bitcoins for a long period time... Just look what happened with LTC and FTC.

Talking about EU. If you have a building permit you will get electricity, water and a chance to use broadband connection. I should use word country not state.

What are you talking about? There was no soft-fork for antispam rules. The soft-fork was for BIP66 which has to do with transaction signatures. Also, a fork cannot be unannounced because the fork only happens when miners mine blocks for it, which can only happen with a code change. They won't change their code for no reason, so fork had to be announced.

I'm calling it soft fork since nodes and some miners have implemented antispam rules that reject valid transactions. And as far as I know it is unannounced.

Not very smart of you.
1. You can be tricked into believing a transaction has been confirmed when it is not.
2. You leak information about which addresses belongs to you to full nodes you are talking to.

It used to run fine on N900, but the blocks are too large now.  You statement will be true in the future as well if the block size is increased.

Any node can make up its of mind about what spam is, and have the right to decide it.  There are some default filters, and some of them can even be adjusted by command line options.  If you don't like it, use a bank.  If you use an SPV wallet,  the random full node it talks to will decide for you if the transaction you are about to send, or one you expect to receive, is spam or not.  Users won't know what the policy of an individual full node is.  The average policy of the network will be estimated by full nodes, and translated into fee and priority estimates.  If you run a full node, you will know what is required to get a transaction confirmed with good probability within a given number of blocks.  If you send from an SPV wallet, you must trust the defaults and the full node you are talking to.

Remember the last soft fork (BIP66)?  We had a six block chain split after the fork because F2Pool didn't take the time to verify the blocks it got before building upon them.  Why didn't they verify?  Because it takes time to verify a 1 MB block.  Why was this a problem?  Because F2Pool announced support for the soft fork, while actually they didn't.  Now try with a hard fork to even larger blocks.

What antispam rules? I know that Bitcoin Core will drop and not relay dust transactions, but that has been there for a very long time and it must have been announced and discussed to ever have made it into Bitcoin Core.

Well it is much less of a problem then getting hacked and loss all your coins on core. And you can't use it without a computer. Unless you use TeamViwer and get hacked that way... It must have some backdore since even with 2FA someone connected to it and downloaded wallet.dat for 2 times. So I really don't see how you can use core in any practical way...

It is not safe. Still just a core. And you need 20GB and Trezor is missing... And I'm sure it is not an app but something you need to compile... So not for normal user... Battery life?

If you don't understand why the idea any node can make up its mined is dangers I can't help you. Normal user will think that if something works one day it will work the next. Even BitGo has problems today(service that pool is using). If that is not a problem I don't know what is... And running full node doesn't give me any idea what fee should be or rules on the network... And it is a security risk if you have funds on it...

Yes 1 hour and problem more or less solved. And I really don't see how big blocks will be any different. I think they learn the lessen and will be checking when next fork happens... And it was not like they didn't verify. There was a bug in a code they use. As sone as they got a block they start hashing the next one and checking one they got. But for some reason when they couldn't verify it they didn't reject it but start building empty blocks on it(I can explain you in full if you are interested why empty blocks).
Yes but if you would read some more you would see that some additional rules were added in last days by some big pools and also big nodes. And it is a big problem for some services like BitGo...

Why is bitgo having a problem?  I heard that some pools had added measures to ignore tranasctions based on a rule intended to identify the "stress test" spam computers.  Is bitgo getting caught in that filter?  Even if they were, other pools would mine their tx.  Is the problem that bitgo isn't paying sufficient fees to be heard in the sea of spam?

LOL!  Do you use Wintendo or some other virus hive?  Don't use your toys for storing money.  I run bitcoind on a Linux computer, which I can access over ssh from anywhere.

This is by design from the beginning.  If you don't like the way bitcoin is designed, you should use something else.  There is no way to change it.  There is no way to force anyone running a full node to mine or relay any specific transaction.

And that is really user friendlily. Command line bitcoin... Not enough of a geek if there is a better way. I didn't even like that whan I had to do that for NMC. More secure it is less user friendly it is. I decided not to use it for money and I don't care if it gets hacked. Nice dedicated windows machine with antivirus TeamViwer... And 99.9% will think the way I do. Why should I put myself in all that trouble if there is a easier way?
No you need to change it to do that... If you don't it will not reject valid transaction. You need to add so-called antispam to it and say this in a valid translation but it is not valid for me. And when a big pools and nodes start doing this and that is blocking big wallets providers it is a big problem if they don't tell you what new rules are... this is practically unannounced a fork...

Is there a way to relabel Lucko from "Hero Member" to "Clueless Idiot"? <.<


No, this is what Bitcoin has always done by design and also by default since 0.3.19 released by Satoshi.
Policy is not a network fork in any sense.

I thought I'd point out, the EU is not half the size of the US.
The EU outnumbers the USA by nearly 200 million.

EU Population: ~503 Million est.
USA Populaiton: ~318.9 Million est.

I was referring to land mass, not population.
Your information means the EU is 4 times as dense as the US, so easier to build up infrastructure for...

If you change the rules of the network it is a fork. I can send a valid masage but if everyone is saying I don't care if it is valid it is not valid for me. So the protocol is different. So what else is it then a fork? Only difference is that you don't know it is coming and upgrading doesn't help since it is arbitrarily set of rules. Please enlighten me how this is any different?

Ah, makes more sense, you are correct there. Also if more people in less space paying similar taxes and rates, why isn't the infrastructure better? Bumming cheap skates. :)

So why is such a big problems in city then? Well I also looked up on that and it is not density. Your cites are probably more populated then EU. Monopoles that you have there are the real problem I guess. One good think that came out of EU ware some rules on how much something can cost and what is penalty for not letting competition in your network. I can use infrastructure of one ISP and services of another ISP... So it is more or less your regulators fault...

You're misunderstanding the difference between the rules of the network and the actions of the participants in the network.  If you send a message over the network then listeners will use the rules of the network to parse your message.  If they can parse it, it fits the rules of the network.  What your peers do in response to your message is in part determined by the rules of the network, because if your peers send unparseable messages no one will understand.  But even within the rules of the network, your peers have choices: they can rebroadcast your transaction to their peers, they can turn off their machine and go home, etc.  The rules of the network is not the same thing as the actions of the participants.

if there isn't one already someone should graph the unconfirmed transactions total...

would be good to see how it compares to all of previous bitocin history if someone has the data to plot.

Just look at statoshi.info. They have graphs and numbers for the stats of the unconfirmed transactions among other stuff.

I'm using extreme to get a point across. Everyone agreed Sybil Attack were attacks not choices. So unless you think that there was noting wrong with doing that you should use same critters with antispam rules that disrupted wallets...

EDIT: Just adding a link http://www.coindesk.com/chainalysis-ceo-denies-launching-sybil-attack-on-bitcoin-network/

Yes, it is.  I never got the hang of graphical user interfaces.  They slow me down, and it is hard to automate anything with them.

Ehm..  Just about everything is easier than Windows.  The last Windows versions are so mindboggingly confusing, I can't understand how anyone can get anything done with it.  TeamViewer?  You have already lost.  It is not even open source.

Currently my main Bitcoin wallet is on a small 4 core ARM processor with 2 GiB RAM consuming about 2 W of power.  Fanless, about 5x5x5 cm³, costs less than 100 USD.  I have about a week of battery backup power replenished from a small 10W solar panel in case lightning knocks out the ground fault breaker when I am on holiday.  Could run the server and ADSL on solar and battery for the entire summer if the weather is nice.  /home is on an encrypted file system, of course.  Solid, stable, secure and no hassle to install.

WTF?  No, there has been no forks relating to any of the antispam features.  Most of the antispam features are built into Bitcoin Core, which reject most possible valid transactions by default.  Have a look at AcceptToMemoryPool in src/main.cpp, and associated checks.  With no provisions against denial of service attacks, I can't see how bitcoin will survive in the long run, and of course bitcoin has to adapt to new attack vectors.  The rules do not change the validity of the transactions, only your willingness to relay and mine the spam.

I gotta agree that a properly set up Linux box is a far better option (for almost everything) than a standard Windows set-up.

Unfortunately I have found through many years of trying to convert people to Linux that unless people grew up with a command line interface that trying to get them to give up on their familiar 'double-click does everything" is near impossible.

People fear the unfamiliar. lol.

EDIT: Badly done Antispam is even more dengues... If your Antispam filter would reject all mails that had more then 10 recipients you would not be happy about it... If sender would not get a message that that happen it would be even a bigger problem in case it is a legit impotent mail... So just say if it has more then 200 outputs it is spam is really stupid way to do that...

I did grew up with DOS. But command line doesn't work for me of a phone. It will not read QR code... And to properly setup a linux box takes more time then standard Windows setup. Well at lest last time I did that took longer but I must say I didn't to that for a couple of years now. But anyway we are talking about using on-line bitcoin core in a safe and easy way as a wallet compare to Trezor and MyCelium(EDIT: and running a core without using a wallet). I really can't see how you can make that safer. Even if only your connecting device get compromised you are in trouble.

Ok, but using "an extreme example to get your point across" which confuses important distinctions does more harm than good, imo.  BTW, thanks for the link to the story and the sybil attack.  If you ask me, people are of course free to try to make false nodes on the bitcoin network.  What should happen is that real nodes stop communicating with them if they don't provide copies of the blockchain upon request or other data which you would expect a good peer to do.  Again, I believe we have to differentiate between valid network messages vs behavior of people/computers sending and receiving those messages.  Everyone has to be free to participate at their own willingness or it's not really going to work, ever.   No one forces a peer in a peer-to-peer network to do anything at all.  The peer is free to disappear at will, to attempt what it will attempt.  The system works when other peers respond in a way which creates incentives for being nice.  Not by creating rules which force someone to be nice.

Senders have to deal with that.  This is a P2P network where you must assume the nodes you are talking to are hostile.  I can even pretend to accept the transaction, and forget about it without relaying it.  You have no way to know until you receive your transaction from other nodes, and even then it may be my nodes cooperating to fool you.  So you better keep sending it to new nodes until you reach someone willing to mine it.

Could somebody explain me what the f.... is going on? I bought 0,05BTC via our local web exchange and they sent me it to my wallet with tx fee 0,0001. This tx has 226bytes. It was rejected by blockchain.info node after 7 hours of waiting for confirmation. Exchange has sent it to me again with tx fee 0,0002. There is status estimated confirmation time VERY SOON (High priority). But it is waiting for 6 hours now!
What the hell have you done with BTC?! Is it normal? BTC will not be usable for everyday txs this way. Tx fee 0,0002 is not enough for 226bytes-tx?
Maybe there is somebody speculating about fees for his miners and do this "test" with BTC network. Tell me why havent you used test network?

Because there is an ongoing spam attack on the Bitcoin network. Normally this doesn't happen, but with the current spam attack, transactions are becoming delayed because of the massive number of unconfirmed transactions caused by spammers. Just wait and your transaction will eventually become confirmed. Sometimes though, your transaction can be more delayed by what is in it, e.g. dust transactions.

However, Bitcoin has not done blacklisting, that is what you do.

Bitcoin has done prioritisation based on non-blacklisting rules e.g. transaction confirm age, fee, transaction size, etc.
It doesn't single out addresses of casinos or people you don't like, that is what you do, it is random with regards to addresses, companies, people.

Though your blacklisting is even worse, since it also matches addresses that aren't on your blacklist due to not being a 100% match check.
Your blacklisting is actually the same as
Bystander: "Hey you shot the wrong guy!"
Luke-jr: "Well he looked similar, so he deserved it."

So september 2015 SPAM bitcoin from a society have already a thread ?  ???

I'm not sure if I understand your question, but if I do, you're looking for this:

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1157584.0

(and the "speculation" discussion: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1156152.0)

I was in hopes these guys would forget about "tests". But someone posted on their thread. This is why we can't have nice things :D

Anyways, the OP seems to have forgotten about his account here. They won't probably stress test anything after what happened.

right answer.

reward  :D : http://www.pastamontegrappa.com/public/img/631x/cannelloni_carne.jpg