Bitcoin Forum

It is very interesting to see how community react to huge amount of spam transaction with very high fee, say 0.1 bitcoin per transaction

This will effectively push most of the transactions in mempool back in the queue so that they would never get confirmed

However, the fee reward for each block will become almost 100 bitcoins, this will greatly increase the profitability of mining, thus many people will start to mine bitcoin. Difficulty will skyrocket again

At the same time, the attacker would need to buy 14400 bitcoins from exchanges every day to facilitate the test, thus raise the exchange rate exponentially

So it seems that a large scale attack will just strengthen the bitcoin exchange rate, and when the price goes up by 10 fold, existing bitcoin holders can afford a much higher fee to compete with the attacker, and new comers would be attracted by the price rally, and accept a fee as long as it is a couple of percent, which they are familiar with in today's banking system

If the network naturally reach such a limitation, then all the participants will also reduce the transaction frequency and raise their fee to be ahead of the queue, so that eventually will achieve the same result, but slowly over time

This is all in contradiction with today's legacy financial system: In legacy financial systems, people always seek for higher and higher transaction speed to devalue the underlying currency. (mv=pq is the quantitative theory of money, with higher v, p becomes higher, means currency becomes cheaper) It is easy to predict that with lower transaction speed, the value of currency will rise

Notice that we are all born in a fiat money infested world, so we have been brainwashed from birth to take all the reasoning logic from the fiat money financial systems, which encourage lending, frequent spending and higher and higher transaction speed, at a cost of depreciating currency

But bitcoin is totally on the other end of the spectrum, it does not have many similarity with the fiat money system, the traditional utility driven behavior might not fit well with its design

You touch on a very true point in regards to bitcoin not being the same as the fiat system.

I think that is also one of the main reasons why so many people do not see bitcoin for what it really is keep on trying to squash it into the fiat box where it does not fit and neither belong.

This stress test is going to be interesting from the point of the increased transaction fees. I however cannot see them keeping it up long enough to cause a 30 day backlog. Time will tell but I think they have high hopes or very very deep pockets.

Your theory seems interesting, but in practice that might not happen, as we've seen from previous stress tests. Markets move in strange ways... And someone might feel like cashing out on top of the spammer.

And I don't really see people accepting a fee similar to fiat banks, that would definitely make me unattracted by Bitcoin...

That being said, I hope there will be no stress test, even if it has the positive implications you mentioned. As we could see from previous tests, this will only clog up the small 1MB blocks (or these transactions simply won't be mined, making the test irrelevant) and they already proved the point.

Well correct me if I am wrong, but nobody has yet done a stress test with such a high tx fees, no? So the OP's theory is very interesting. Moreover, we cannot know how would network react and if OP's theory would come true if there would be no stress test.

So I welcome this stress test in this case. And I would sure as hell like to see the OP's theory coming true. This would make Bitcoin even more interesting as a technology and would definitely set a precedent in a finance world.

That LAST thing we need at the moment is another stress test.

Anyone conducting such an experiment at this point in time is either misguided are intentionally harming Bitcoin.

The XT guys are so keen on proving that they are right that they'll continue doing these stress tests even if that ends up harming bitcoin, they see that they might not win the consensus and so they're like if we don't win, no one wins. Let's hope that OP's theory is right and that it ends helping bitcoin by increasing it's price but I doubt it will happen, like last time we're going to see a lot of stuck up transactions with correct fee and it will make a lot of people angry when some of their important transactions get stuck due to this.

These stress tests really do make bitcoin look bad. They are very annoying to average users as well.

Indeed, but that's how P2P works. Anyone can do whatever they want.

Johnyj,
considering what you say 1 BTC should value a lot more than the actual price if the test goes as you described.
But isn't it only a way for miners to get profits again after all this price stagnation?

In fact, during their last test, I was not satisfied with my nodes performance, so I added a line in bitcoin.conf to drop the low fee transactions altogether. If many nodes are doing the same this time, then the test will not have any effect on the network unless they raise the fee enough high

Based on blockchain statistics, most of the transactions are larger than 0.5 bitcoin, so people could tolerate 0.005 bitcoin at ease, means that attackers would need to bid higher than 0.005 bitcoin fee to affect enough transactions to raise a concern

I think the price stagnation is caused by the current confusing status about this block size debate, since it revealed that there is no good decision making mechanism in bitcoin community yet. Once we passed this crisis and there is a well-established consensus decision making mechanism, we will be back to the stable growth path

Interesting theory. In order to create a significant backlog in the network, the stress-testers should first burn a lot of money for their transactions to pass through. And because of the added fee per tx, miners would profit heavily from this. Very interesting indeed, however, I don't think that they will go to that extent burning millions of $$$ to prove that the network isn't that robust and strong as we think it is.

Looks like these guys could be facing potential criminal charges in the UK.

http://www.coindesk.com/bitcoin-spam-tests-could-violate-uk-law/

If you were to attack a banking network, you would be prosecuted. How is this any different?

Afaik, the whole bitcoin network is not under any authorities or jurisdictions of any country, so why would they be liable to any criminal charges if they want to stress-test a peer-to-peer decentralized network?

I doubt if anybody would actually register a case and proceed to prosecute.
Who is going to be the victim? Somebody who didn't get his transaction confirmed because the fees was too small?

we need Blockstreams business sidechains NOW!


/s

This is nonsense. Since when bitcoin needs laws to be protected? If that's the case, we can conclude that bitcoin is a big technical failure.

AFAIC bitcoin as a decentralized system is supposed to resist any kind of behaviours done by bad actors and they shouldn't be considered as a problem. The problem is the system that can't handle them.

If you disagree with this then why on earth did you put your money in such a weak system?  ???

The First US City With 10 GB Internet Is Salisbury in the US

http://www.wired.com/2015/09/first-us-city-10-gb-internet-salisbury/


hopefully they can handle 2 MB blocks  :-*

Stress test suck, they delay a lot of my working schedule, and it is not fair for small users. There might be a need to do one every year or so, but to have Bitcoin malfunctioning for days really does harm.

No one could actually do something about it, everyone can do what they want to do in the network as there would be no regulations to stop them. With every stress-test, just think of something like this: someone is burning loads of money in order to push the network to its limit and strengthen it by doing so. ;)

Nice try online wallet PR team /s

You write some good points though, it will be interesting to see how it pans out.

This was another unexpected stress test which made my mind up to say good bye to blockchain for good.I  woke up today and wanted to transfer some funds and it took all the day long to be up again.All this uncertainty will have no good impact on blockchain users.

Lets be hopeful and positive to not see these things happening in future.I think in future there will be more legislation and protection for Bitcoin users and we will not see at least unseen down times on name of stress test.They need to compensate the affected users.

Weren't some devs suggested certain improvements to prevent these kind of stress tests. During the last stress test, I I have written the same post as yours, that we can't do anything about. But then one of the hero members has written that measures have taken places to prevent such stress tests in the future. I don't know is something like this possible, maybe somebody here has more info.

There are simple ways to filter out the spam transactions, but I'd rather not do it, just let the traffic fill the mempool and stress the nodes so that we can have a rough estimation what kind of load there will be if we use 8MB blocks (A total crash of almost every node maybe?)

The stress test is a good simulation of future when every block is full, we will see what kind of solution people will come up with when they experience delay in transaction

A typically reaction is to wait and combine several small transactions into a large one and send it with a higher fee (just like ATM cash withdraw in foreign country, you always do the maximum withdraw to reduce the impact of the fee since fee is fixed regardless of withdraw amount)

Then maybe rely on some online web wallet service since they typically combine lots of transactions into one thus can afford much larger fee

Anyway, currently the fee is really small, I guess most of the users will just raise the fee by 10x and be happy with it

Humans are forgiving

That depends on the bank. Usually, there are 2 fees. One from the bank which issued the credit card, and another from the foreign which provide the cash. One can be fixed, the other can be %, there are many cases...

Regarding the stress tests, I welcome them. They show what it will be like next year, with more people using BTC. Banks also do stress tests!

Stress tests don't have to be disruptive. That's why we have testnet. :D

This isn't a 'stress test', it's a premeditated attack on the network.

These stress tests only exist and have relevance because of the lack of leadership in the bitcoin community.   What is being tested is not the bitcoin protocol or software.  What is being tested is the  possibility of a useful community without competent leadership.

It is obvious that none of these stress tests would be happening if the blocksize issue had been resolved.  The blocksize issue has been festering for years. Solving this problem is basically a one line code change.  The inability of the so-called "core" developers to resolve this problem demonstrates their total lack of leadership skills.

A stress test on testnet is not going to give you the most important feedback from all the actors in the whole ecosystem. You can not anticipate what each users will do, each of them will come up with their own solution to deal with the transaction difficulty

There is no leadership in a decentralized society, only the best effort to reach consensus. Luckily now we have internet and advanced communication tools like twitter/reddit/forum to quickly exchange ideas, it is possible to reach consensus without leadership

The difficulty in deciding block size just showed that consensus has not reached, without consensus, there will be no change. If every block is full and many people are complaining then there will be a consensus to raise the block size

I hope automobile manufactures don't replace their dummies with real people to get better feedback...   ;D

In all fields of science the tests are done on simulated environments. If coinwallet.eu really wanted to test and not to attack the bitcoin network and the testnet is not good for them then it ought build a simulated environment with nodes, miners, users doing tx in a big scale using cloud technologies but that needs serious money and expertise.

Satoshi-dice was sort of the stress-test of it's day.  It was annoying, but ultimately I think it was one of the best things that happened for the system since it spurred a range of developments (code and otherwise.)  I said so at the time IIRC.  Overcoming that challenge gave me and I suspect other people more confidence in the system.

I like to think this is rather something like this.. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZWSMoE3A5DI  {Skip to 3:11} ... The people doing these tests know it's harmful but

they simply do not care, because the ultimate goal is to destroy the network. Do some small attacks and see how successful they are and then launch the final attack to sink

it, at a reduced cost. This is nothing other than sabotage, in a time when it's not welcomed. They do not care, if a few soldiers die in the process.  >:(   

Good. I want more attacks. Especially from friendly BTC supporters, because we have to get ready in case of some real bad guys (Islamic State, Russia...) organizing a real attack to destroy western economies.

True. But friendly bitcoin supporters would never do things that harm the network and disrupt the entire economy. Everyone already knows that the 1MB block size needs to be increased, so this is just an attack exploiting an already known vulnerability.

Finding a new weakness is one thing, but this attack is not helping bitcoin. It's unnecessary and counterproductive.

The recent tests/demonstrations/attacks have already shown weaknesses in various bitcoin implementations.  For example, they have shown that the existing Electrum server code will be unable to keep up with higher network throughput possible once the block size has been expanded, even on very fast processors.  As a result, there is (finally) serious effort to upgrade this software.  I'm sure there are other examples, but this is the only one that I am personally familiar with.

That's good, just like the bank stress test, some of the banks will fail the test and have to improve their liquidity, if we could periodically have this kind of test, then we can have a good estimate of each node's capability in case a sudden surge in transaction volume hit (non-spaming, during price rally or crash)

Don't compare a bank stress test with the current Bitcoin stress test.
During a bank stress test the customers of the bank will not notice any difference in their interaction with the bank. They don't pay more tx fees, they don't find longer queues in cashiers or ATMs. They don't even know that the bank is under an ongoing stress test. And finally the definition of bank stress test is: "An analysis or simulation designed to determine the ability of a given financial instrument or financial institution to deal with an economic crisis". The key words are analysis or simulation, not destructive activities that can block bank customers to interact with their accounts.
The current Bitcoin stress test is not an analysis or simulation using the testnet as it ought to be and finally will not produce any new results that we don't know yet.

And let me clarify upfront: The reasons for my positive attitude can be classified as "Techno-Darwinism".

Bitcoin and its underlying blockchain is an incredible piece of technology. The reason I write "piece" and not "masterpiece", is because there are still dark places. Some we know and I believe some we still don't know. From time to time these dark places appear on our radar and sometimes they stab us in the back unannounced.

Remember - among others - the "faucet" bitcoin client in 2010 that allowed you to create large amounts of bitcoin? Or the March 2013 hard fork?

I'm talking solely about the technical blows Bitcoin experienced, not the socio-economical like thefts, Go[of]xs and the like. Guess what happened *every single time*? That's right: What doesn't kill you makes you stronger. It may seem twisted to you, but following this, we should actually try to kill Bitcoin more often and in a more systematic way.

I do not propose Bitcoin XT. In fact, I hope it will vanish deep in the anals of history - so to speak. ;-)

On the other hand, the limits regarding transactions is a serious issue and anybody who would like Bitcoin to become more popular and widely accepted should agree that this problem (and a problem it is) has to be solved and it has to be solved for good.

For me personally, just increasing the max. block size is not a good solution, but then again I have not contributed a single line to the core/client. Some adaptive mechanism would be better, and a more generic concept of offloading transactions (merchant sidechains) probably even more so.

If nothing else, this stress test would lead us somewhere where we have never been before. Reminds me of a recent session with https://loader.io/ where we tested a web site. The productive one, I might add. Result: About 2 hours of intermittent downtime and bad availability, but in the end the site is now able to flawlessly cope with twice as many concurrent clients (1000) than before when 500 started to take it down. Plus we now have better insight where and how to scale.

If someone is willing to spend 100 BTC to enable(!) the Bitcoin community to do a similar thing and announces this in advance, I cheer to him. Bitcoin is still very young and still has to prove itself. Events like these contribute to the proof of concept.


Rico

Spam from Satoshi-dice and other onchain gambling sites are easy to filter. Miners can easily change their code such that the transactions orginating or   going to their known address would effectively not be included in the block. However, the main problem with such stress test attacks is that the coins can be sent from different address and end up in different address. Without a huge amount of fees per transaction, they cannot cripple the entire system and it would be quite expensive. Currently, many attacks are just slowing down the confirmation timing for transactions with very low fees. The most viable way of stopping this kind of spam is to increase block size, thus increasing the cost for attackers to fill the block with spams.

"Necessity is the mother of invention" as they say.

Bitcoin is still in its experimental phase.  Even the reference client states "This is experimental software." in its About window.  The waters can be rough at times and nothing is certain.  Those critically reliant on Bitcoin's smooth operation only have themselves to blame for their overexposure.

But the network carried on working during the spam attacks.

as a monetary good into digital mode the miners mine and trade the buyers do the relevance to dollars and euro and yen and the dong but the world its not prepared for bitcoin into a good digital way of fast decentralized currency in order to fight governments from left or right wing who know hows gonna pick this coin the left wing did into terror a bit that's make us nervous and stressed lol

My bank's mobile payment system constantly crashes (at least twice this month) for hours and they only "apologize for the inconvenience" on their website and customer support. So we definitely know the bank's system technically is unstable from time to time, but who cares, as soon as it back online, everyone happily trading again.

But bitcoin holds much more stability than banks, even during the stress test, you can pay enough fee and make sure your transactions will be confirmed in time. It never stops working. However the other aspects of the network will be more interesting to observe, like block orphan rate and CPU memory usage

A rich attacker can always fill the blocks with spams regardless of the cost, especially when he has other larger short positions opened on exchanges waiting for the panic to strike. Users must rely on much more hard measures to be sure that the system is robust against any kind of attack, not praying that some hedge fund don't strike like Soros

If we are using 8MB block right now, if the attacker successfully filled every blocks, then the problem is not only delayed confirmation, but the total chaos of the network: segmented nodes disagreeing with each other, confirmed transactions get cancelled due to the whole chain become orphaned 3 blocks later, double spends, many forks on different part of the network. In one word, no transaction can be reliable at all

 my view is the stress test will be a big 'yawn' ...some slowdown and much hype but by next week it will all be forgotten...for the amount of time etc spent on it for what it will show
it will again imho just be a big 'ho hum'

we will see in a week I guess :)

 

I am ready to face the upcoming stress test better way this time.I already removed my funds from blockchain temporary to not repeat the mistake I did last last.I just can hope this time can not achieve whatever they want to know from this stress test.They should check stress test once in two months if necessary not very often.