Bitcoin Forum

First coinwallet.eu, then malleability and now a powerful stress test from an unknown source comes in creating a growing backlog of ~360Mb

The nice thing is that bitcoin just keeps on keeping on.

I didn't know another "test" was on until I read your post. I check the explorers, we no have 28k unconfirmed transaction totaling 310M. The good news is nothing a 0.0002btc/k fee wouldn't solve.

The part I don't understand is why are some people burning their bitcoin to repeat these tests? They haven't proven anything and it's not bringing the network to its knees. Why waste money?

I don't really understand the motivations for some of this stuff, but it is important that it happens. It won't get anywhere unless it's given a beating and comes out the other side the stronger for it.

I was not aware of this stress test either. It looks like it started sometime last night but the significant increases have occurred today. Apparently some people are persistent when it comes to disrupting Bitcoin. The good thing is that Bitcoin survived everything that they're throwing at it.
This is also a sign that someone should hurry and work on a better spam filter. Spam transactions should be identified by various factors and completely ignored by the network. There needs to be work on both this and malleability.

That which does not kill you makes you stronger. We shall simply learn and adapt. An idea whose time has come can not be stopped.

I wasn't aware either. It seems that I wasn't the only one. Yes, many, many stress tests and attack on Bitcoin network this year. Who's doing it is a good question? It seems to me that the opponents of the certain things in the Bitcoin network are behind these tests.

Good thing is that we will eventually learn like this and improve our network. I honestly think that what doesn't kill us makes us stronger in this case and this is exactly what's going on. Bitcoin will prevail in the end everything!

Here we go again..

Im a bit worried this time though, because combined with the malleability of transactions this could become a painfull thing.

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

What I've noticed:
1) it's a lot of ~15kB transactions spending 0.00001 outputs with miniscule fees (~1 satoshi/byte);
2) it's getting confirmed by BitFury mostly (only?).

Is BitFury cleaning the UTXO set?

Yep ... bitcoin connexion (RPC server) satured (100% CPU).
Keep connected to P2Pool, but it's hard ...  :-\

http://imagizer.imageshack.us/a/img911/7953/w1Push.png

this tests prove everything ...  ;D

but if you don't mine, you can't view this ...  ;)

Why do people think it is a good idea to do stress tests?

It seems like a waste of time and money.

I can think of groups that could benefit from such a thing. Whales and supporters of bigger blocks for example.

Perhaps a government organization or private corporation is conducting this attack. The fees are nothing for an entity with a high budget.

Clearly, they don't pay the fees ...  ::)

http://imagizer.imageshack.us/a/img905/1228/eShOSt.png
http://imagizer.imageshack.us/a/img909/8733/M8U0DD.png

In that case i follow conspiracy ,some people are closely looking btc when btc is starting to grow somestrange things are happening.230$ level has benn defended,number of transactin is growing.I think it is to disturbe btc one time again,maybe to accumulate more cheap btc

to the sky and behond ...  ::)

http://imagizer.imageshack.us/a/img912/3315/xsuc79.png

Stress tests could only prove that the system is robust. Just be careful that the transaction will only get through when there is at least 1 confirmation.

Is this the biggest mempool backlog ever recorded? It's gotten to the point that core devs started suggesting that node owners should set spam filters...

Of cource this particular piece of advice came from no one else rather than Luke-jr

https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/3nx7at/question_about_the_1gb_mempool_size_backlog/cvs404w

I think that it is. I don't recall it ever going this high so the attack is pretty 'powerful'. They have not started telling people about spam filters right now. There was talk about it before and if you properly set it you will not be affected by the spam.

You should judge advice on merit. Not on preconceived ideas about the person delivering it. Spam filter could simply mean adjusting your mintxrelayfee, whilst I don't like the precedent that sets I would grudgingly agree that its a necessary evil until such time as the block size limit is increased to the point where attempting to DDoS is no longer cost effective.

I am sure other, more sophisticated methods for deciding on what constitutes spam will emerge as the need dictates. Free market at work.

Bitcoin passed all the tests.

I was joking when 'judging' this idea. I think that filtering transactions sounds good in theory to be honest, it's usefulness would mostly benefit the individual using the filter unless it was widely adobted. I could think of arguements agest it being used as default though.

You should ask Amaclin https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?action=profile;u=197593 (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?action=profile;u=197593) about this.

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1198032.0
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1166928.0

Is amaclin's "Cheap way to attack blockchain" what's currently used to stress test bitcoin?

Is what he say on that posts.

Its the miners they are testing ways to create backlog so they can make more money in fees.
I made a thread about it some time ago.
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1116899.0

The highest backlog was around 200k

They wish to study the correlation between backlog/wait-time and higher fees to better understand how they can sap more money out of users.

That doesn't make much sense. Do you think that this is what's going on this time too?

No way to know for sure but its my guess they are looking for a sweet spot. A place wherein they only drive out dust transactions and maybe micro transactions while still making more money then they spend on spam.

good point.

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set a restriction to 0,0001 in minrelaytxfee now.

If miners are doing it willfully means that would be another stress test. We need to code bitcoin accordingly. In a free world anybody can do anything at their own wish, but only the versatile things stands out. We need to thank them for conducting test with their own money.

Well if they are stress testing attacking I can't see any effect at all on my node. Latency is currently at a 7 day low, hash rate and miner temp unaffected, pool is running smoothly.

Whoever they are {Bigger block size supporters / Miners / People trying to sabotage Bitcoin} ...It's getting old very quickly. They seem to have a lot of money to burn on rubbish

stress testing and it's probably a waste of time anyways. Satoshi decided on these smaller block sizes deliberately to prevent spam attacks.. and now people are pushing for it.

Just get over it, and leave the network to sort it self out with natural incremental increases of the block sizes.   

Wut?

Umm... Anyway the bottom line is the network will be fine. Weaker nodes like the raspberry pi's and old computers' may crash or run out of Ram forcing them to use disk space thus slowing them down and potentially increasing propagation time accross the network, leading to a more fractured network and more orphaned blocks causing even more bloat on full nodes that have to store all these orphaned blocks but having said all that everything will be fine. Really!  

There is rule of existence,
"survival of the fittest/strongest"
If bitcoin is stronger than those attack, it will survive like it is doing till now. I don't think this type of silly attempts will down this highly secured blockchain network.

What's the maximum amount of RAM a top of the range node is likely to be capable of having? I have seen bog standard computers with 8GB, but servers are designed to allow a much higher maximum, if needed. I'm not familiar with the maximum top of the range ASICs can use, or if they are designed like servers so their RAM can be upgraded to a very high amount.

First off, ASICs are used in mining, as far as I know they don't even have RAM they are used in mining-Rigs not full-nodes. The only real issue here are those nodes hosted on laptops made in the 90s and the first Raspberry pi's (250 to 500mb of RAM.) To your question; how much RAM dose the average high end node have? I don't know, I don't know how many nodes run on the network or what kind of hardware they have. I would love to hear the opinions of a p2p network specialist on the block size issue. 

Well that is true BTCitcoin passed the all test and now growing more rapidly than before and it has more positive signals about it bright future, i think now it is ready to go to the mainstream.

Agreed with you now bitcoin more stable after this all stress test and getting more attention from bigger investors as Gemini is about open it doors for this morning.

no

Oh, thanks for the clarification. That seems a bit surprising though, seeing how cheap and efficient the method you detailed would be for a 'stress test'.

Edit: now that I think about it, the current stress test likely has the goal to crash nodes. It's not the most efficient block filling attack but from what we see it was quite effective at crashing nodes. Would the SIGOP stress test have any success at such a thing?

I do not want to spend even 0.1 btc for stress-testing even with "cheap" method
I am not so rich as coinwallet.eu
 

 ::) first, not any P2P software store mempool (cache) on RAM more than 1 minute : Bitcoin Core store this indefinitly = crash of the node when we have SPAM.

second, P2P software use drive in better way than Bitcoin Core does ... what a hell is this software that it must read 4,2Go of files with a 200Mb of cache ?!? http://imagizer.imageshack.us/a/img633/1496/AlSIGf.gif

three, why this "node" must to use more than 20% on a 3GHz system (2 cores) ? just to store and compare transactions ? Come one ... hashset organisation do this more quickly AND more sanity (less freezing in the environment of others running programs) than DBberkeley organisation.

i understand why, now, the developper don't love the architecture of the build bitcoin core genesis code ...

---

But i understand the thing when developpers says : i don't run a local node ... i loan a server in a datacenter instead.

 ::) it's not a real and local P2P solution, now ... it must have ressource and power, now.

Well, i regrete this but it's internet money, too.
I prefer rigurous money supply (finished supply) than the actual mess of the economies (you work, you have money and then, a chimpanzee in a central bank http://imagizer.imageshack.us/a/img913/8247/EVgr3z.gif emit money = time work value destroyed).

SIGOPS-attack can be used for doublespending and delaying regular users' transactions up to several days even the fees are sufficient

This stress test may be a good thing for Bitcoin. It can show that the network can handle a large load and all in all it may raise the price. I think that we actually may have something to gain from all of this.

Its nice to see that bitcoin is good enough to pass all the stress tests that someones are doing this year.

ELI5: How would the SIGOP attack be used for double spending?

2015 is the year of the stress tests and the block size debate.
I think the block size debate is the cause and that is what 2015 will be remembered by.

Durring the recent spam my node crashed after ~4 hours because it ran out of memory. Its using 2 GB and I currently have to filter TX by fee in the hopes that another such attack will not result in a crash.

I also considering a server upgrade to 4GB which would have dealt with this attack w/o issues, but might still result in issues with a larger attack. Under normal circumstances (as they are now) it hovers around 900MB RAM used system wide.

solution : https://medium.com/@octskyward/mempool-size-limiting-a3f604b72a4a

work great, no fees filter applied during this SPAM test.

im guessing its real hard core hacker culture. theyre doing it for bragging rights and to prove they can.

and yes, it helps in the long run.

of course the mainstream media will have a hey day with all the FUD they can proliferate about it... well be hearing about it for years. just like gox, silkroad, all the dark web scare propaganda. it does hinder adoption somewhat (hopefully temporarily)

Well what ever they're doing today it seems to be having a minor effect on my node. My hash rate is down almost 1% and my miner temperature is up 2°F.

That's some serious bragging rights there.  ::)

well, it's true ... but, setting provide by XT (max transaction in mempool) work well now.

http://imagizer.imageshack.us/a/img903/5373/bbnoZs.png

Heh, are you running a BFL Jalapeno or is that a Little Single?

R-Box (same building system than U3).
It's to view the activity inside of Bitcoin Network (server mode) ... not to really mine.

Which I have a feeling the money actually comes from a source where the people there want to see bitcoin failed. And one more thing we shouldn't forget is that fiat can be printed infinitely so whatever funds can actually be generated on the go. Even if the objective does not succeed to prove anything, the money is still basically free money.

It really doesn't seem to have an impact on the price of bitcoin; although you would expect some downward pressure.
So there is no motivation for large traders to play a role in this.

Bitcoin passed this stress test this month. Its price went up again after bad days.
Some people wanna manipulate heavy use of bitcoin but they always fail.

Those stress tests proved the resilience of Bitcoin, it is actually good for bitcoin. So the great days are ahead, indicated by the recent rise of bitcoin price.

I believe bitcoin will rise again next month. This month we've been able to get the standard price for bitcoin. it all will continue to rise.