Bitcoin Forum

Fees today are over $2 to send a transaction. 100k transactions in mempool. Someone is spending a lot of cash to spam the network today.

Gee I wonder why? /s

I don't know much about mobile wallets or hardware wallets but they should alert the user when the network is this congested. With a easy to understand fee calculator/prediction pop up before you send your transaction.

Its more then likely some people who are trying to prove that bitcoin need bigger blocks (Bitcoin Unlimited/Roger verr)?

why "warning" i though something horrible had happened!

and this is nothing new, and it seems like nobody is interested enough in it to do anything about it. miners are enjoying their higher earnings and everyone else is busy fighting over nothing with repeated arguments.

i haven't seen any solid arguments about "Who is doing the spam attacks?" we just keep repeating bitcoin is not anonymous then.
and i am not talking about conspiracy theories or pointing fingers. i am talking about some solid proof of someone doing some serious blockchain analysis and finding where these money for spam attacks are coming from.

Spam attacks have always been around... even if we HF to 2M, 4M or 8M, OR Segwit gets activated, these attacks will still come. Nothing to worry about.

A Bigger block will be enough to accommodate a lot of spam attacks.
You will not be feeling worried about that, but the more people will get stuck n the bitcoin network due to the increase of unconfirmed transaction and the fees.
This will make them thought to use off-chain transactions due to the spam attack and scaling problem of bitcoin.
It's bad in my mind.
 >:(

Nobody have any incentive to attack bitcoin network with spam transactions like this other than the one behind bitcoin unlimited to create FUD that block size must be increased  ;D

We do need bigger blocks, but such attacks are unlikely to influence people.
They are unsustainable too. Why would you continuously burn money just to prove a point?

guys is there anyway to know if there is a spam attack or is it only normal transactions ??
I mean yeah 100k is huge , but bitcoins now is all over the news which may give a reason why there are many transactions atm
personally when the price start moving like this I start to move my bitcoins from different sites , for example I start to move my gambling investments to poloniex in order to trade or lend , but in normal days I don't do that

They don't burn any money because it's the miners who are spamming the network. They are confirming their own spam transactions so they actually don't lose any money while giving us cancer.

Well played, wutang ju, well played.

This is nothing new. It happened in the past and will happen again.


Or some rich miners just wanted to bump up the fees. If you are large enough miner, you can benefit if the network is clogged and users start throwing large fees to hasten their transactions. I don't know if this is possible, just a theory.

They would lose money from sending loads of spam transactions actually.  It would be removing the profit that they would make from receiving transaction fees (with spam transactions, the transaction fees are their own money).

No evidence of spam this time.  Blocks are full.  Time for bigger blocks miners!

Sort of, but by setting spam transactions they're increasing the fees that people have to use and that often sustains after the attack as the fee market is not very competitive.  Regardless, transaction fees only actually account for a fairly small amount of miners' rewards and shouldn't actually be necessary.

That would also explain why people think that it's the BU side rather than the Core side (as both are offering scaling solutions that would fix the problem).  BU is mainly propped up by Bitmain/mining monopolies in its hashrate, and earning profit from spamming the network could even be part of their opposition to the LN.

Every time there is a big run up in price, it follows with a high mempool congestion followed by dump in price.

I think every time, it's a subset of soon to be ex-HODLers rushing their cold balance out of storage to exchange, LBC, etc to reap some well deserved profits, causing a mini-crash.

It's always the same.

I'm expecting a small-ish crash by May 15th.

Both sides are offering a scaling solution.  Using a congested network to promote BU is meaningless - the network has been congested for a long time, with spam or without it, but SegWit would scale the network to the capacity needed right now as well.

I never said bu.  Theres more than 2 sides or 2 proposals   my proposal is an immediate hf to 2mb

it is normal especially if you use web client like blockchain also remember many hackers will try to manipulate the network for getting low price , gain more coins. i expect more if the price over 2k dollors.

i wouldn't jump to any conclusions without having any proof. there are a lot of people/groups that have enough incentive and enough money to do a spam attack of this scale on bitcoin network:

• both sides of the block size debate (and this consist of all their supporters)
• altcoin pumpers. we have been seeing in the past month that altcoins like Ethereum and Dash have benefited from bitcoin's debate and big mempool and all these delays. and they both have enough money to do such an attack. we have even saw topics about this from their supporters before their pump started.
• miners. lets not forget with a spam attack, fees go up, and with that miners earn a lot more money.
• an entity that doesn't want bitcoin's usage (government?) i'd better stop here before i am assassinated ;D

Really a lot of daft opinions. Btc can't process the transactions and will never survive. The data cap is making the btc snail network unusable. 15 minutes for 3 confirmations during good times is too slow anyways.

I suspect you're right.

Right now, there are over 102 thousand unconfirmed transactions! The highest I've ever seen or even heard of!

Looks to be climbing slowly too... does anyone happen to know where I might find records of the highest unconfirmed txs are?

https://statoshi.info/dashboard/db/memory-pool
play with the dates on top right corner of the screen to look at a longer term.

blockchain.info also has lots of charts too:
count (number of transactions): https://blockchain.info/charts/mempool-count
size of the mempool: https://blockchain.info/charts/mempool-growth
aggregate size: https://blockchain.info/charts/mempool-size

I struggle to see what (if any) the incentive would be for anyone or group of people to attack the network other to his/their own detriment.  Its pointless.

There were history that some known group of people have conducted stress test on blockchain network to showcase how strong it is basically. They had spent thousands worth of bitcoins for conducting that. But I am not sure what is time these people are trying to say. But I am sure this is not the right way to prove the importance of bigger blocks.

By spamming blockchain network, miners will be trying to gain more tx fee , is it possible ? I could not understand how this will be working in favor of them to some extent.

Or someone is pulling the price down?  I have a bad feeling about this, massive spam attack the network delaying all the transaction confirmation then releasing a news about bitcoin scalability, then spreading FUD.  Someone wants to short and he is testing the scalability issue to pull Bitcoin price down.  I hope holder won't be shaken by this event.


Pointless if they do not have any agenda.  Either they are pushing Block size increase or pulling the price down, if either of them happen, then they will benefit the most.

I want to believe you what you are doing is not complaining about the fees because if its that, then I will have to ask about the specific wallet you are referring to that is charging that amount so I can switch. Just few days back, I spent over $8 to make a transaction but no one was spamming it as at that time if my memory serve me right so I want to know how $2 amounts to spamming.

Roger Ver is back at it. Once he has dumped all of his coins on spam attacks and he realizes we still have 1 MB blocks, he'll realize how fucking stupid he is.

Roger, no amount of spam will ever force a block size increase, only organic growth. So keep wasting your money, nobody cares about you or Buggy Unlimited.

plenty of organic growth in places like japan.  but how long will it be till ethereum offers better usability there.

tick tock.

Omg you're one of these complaining newbs that won't be doing anything at all about it. Btw, $2 per transaction? Wtf are you talking about? How many inputs? How many sats/byte? You clearly don't understand what you're talking about.

But can we really consider ethereum as a currency,it is a contract and what they do is provide decentralized smart contract functionality.The nodes are rejecting transaction fees which was fine a few months back and now we have to rebroadcast those once again,it is really frustrating to see these things happening in bitcoin,need some changes to rectify these issues if not it will be a disaster as the transaction fees keeps on increasing.

There are more investors and transactions per day and it has increased a lot after 2017 and with Japan recently legalizing bitcoin the amount of transactions has increased rapidly and on top of that we have these spam attacks to frustrate everyone as it is really taking a long time to get a confirmation ,if they activate segwit then there will be a temporary solution but not certain what the long term implication will be as you cannot roll  back once you activate segwit.

Why don't we split or hope pople will deal more with some other altcoin, this is nuts...

https://blockchain.info/unconfirmed-transactions - 137k with my transaction being somewhere, will be lucky if it confirms in 2 days....

We srsly need SegWit and BU to come together and talk..... This might cause price to dump even...

It's not nice how they are playing with us around and I don't think that is a spam attack as the price of btc is high, more people are getting into btc and transferring funds.

2 possibilities that immediately come to mind.

Someone is trying to crash the market and buy more. This is obvious, Bitcoin is on the rise and some people are bitter they forgot to buy a month ago.
There's some reaction to this and the price has dropped, so the attackers must be proud of themselves.

BU supporters are doing their thing again.

Is there any reason it doesn't function well as a currency?  Isn't it fast , cheap, and scarce?

I have a transaction I made 24 hours ago and I have no confirmation, First time :(

Ethereum will collapse as soon as it gets any relevancy. Right now nobody gives a damn about Ethereum for purchases, if someone did care about Ethereum at the level of Bitcoin transactions, the fees would even be higher.

They talk about Casper and sharding which are a scam, and they got the half baked Lightning Network version (Raiden).

Not to mention ETH is a centralized mess powered by Proof of Vitalik.

Looks like LTC will win as the payments coin unless Jihad Wu enables segwit.

tick tock.

They can do the same without spamming the network.It isn't helping anything.Did you notice the sudden price rise in altcoins ? Are they trying to pull bitcoin down ? Nice try to whoever.Attempt was made!

For 100 reasons you probably can assume.Let's start with 1 - > Dump the prices of bitcoin.

ETH is written in a language that allows for too many attack vectors.
Satsohi designed Bitcoin without turning complete for those reasons.
In fact, he disabled many interesting OP Codes to prevent exploits.

ETH is an experiment in contracting devices, not a sound currency.
People who wish to use ETH as a currency is fine, but it is no where
as secure as BTC, since it was not designed to be used a such.

ETH was intended to be a token that fuels contracting computation.
Using ETH as a currency is like to using Skee Ball tickets as currency.
It is possible (fast/cheap/scarce/etc), but is not recommended for
important reasons.

The question is: Should ETH be used as a currency? Not can it.
What is important in cryptocurrency is security, without that,
everything else (fast/cheap/scarce/etc) is an illusion.

The main reason i would site is that ethereum is centralized and it is just a fuel rather than a currency.Lets take the case when there are as much transaction like we see in the bitcoin network,will they be able to handle everything smoothly and let us not forget about the number of coins premined and for all these reasons i will always have my second thoughts to consider them a real currency .

Edit: @AgentofCoin summed up everything in detail what i was trying trying to tell.cheers mate

You have a good suggestion there..... These wallet providers should do much more than what they are doing now.... A popup notice, when the

Mempool is congested, would go a long way to help noobies adjust their fees. We are seeing a lot of newbies coming to the forum with

unconfirmed transactions for 24 hours and more.... and when you go into the details... you find that the wallet provider has set a "default" fee,

that are ridiculously low... resulting in transactions that might never be confirmed.  ::)

Thank you for this! The statoshi link is new to me. The graphs above confirm it I guess. This is the highest its ever been. 130k unconfirmed? I can definitely see fees just pumping now, esp as BTC price is stubbornly above $1,500.

Bigger blocks = bigger spam.

Neither bitcoin unlimited nor larger blocksize could fix this.

Its not a "scaling issue".

It could be better defined as crypto needing to implement forms of DDoS protection.

This is not entirely true.

When you have blocks that are naturally full of 'real' (non spam) transactions, spam becomes exponentially cheaper.

If you need help understanding this, let me know.

There are two types of spam txs.

The first is a block attack vector designed to bloat the chain with worthless
data. The 1MB Cap prevents that attack type. The fee market is the
mechanism that prevents this while allowing the network to remain
functioning with that 1 MB Cap.

The second is a fee attack vector designed to bloat the mempool and
increase the fee price. These automated scripts are specifically designed
to create different fee levels, in order to increase the priority fee price.
The lower priority txs will either take many hours to days to confirm or
be dropped after "72 hours". The purpose is to cause pressure for altcoins
that allow for new P&D schemes.

These two attack types can and will exist no matter what the Bitcoin
blocksize is, which is what Hydrogen was alluding to.

140,000 unconfirmed transactions and counting, unless we could identify the nodes broadcasting those spams and ban/ignore them nothing will change. more than 13BTC as fees, miners can't include them even if they wanted to.

If we could reject those blocks which intentionally include obvious spam transactions it'd be great.

Indeed, we are always eating attacks ever since the internet was born. And it would be the same as we go along...well can even intensify in the near future as people and technology are getting to be sophisticated and more intelligent. It is easy to blame anyone or to make anyone a suspect but only a god-like mind can tell who can be behind those things and who can be telling the truth. Nothing to worry about.

Largest spam attack in history is underway and no one is talking about it?

It's a common occurrence nowadays. People that are used to deal with filled mempools handle it by including a larger fee to avoid getting sucked into something that plays outside their reach.

After this spam attack an even larger one will show up, it's just another day at the beach. Roger Ver will step up his game higher and higher till he can accept that all his efforts go to waste (i.e. he lost the game).

This is getting scary. There's been over 100K unconfirmed transactions for more than 24 hours. When is this going to end? It's also very impressive. I can't believe there's a single attacker behind all this. This got to be a concerted effort with, many, many computers.

I guess BTC needs to protect itself, maybe with a fixed minimal fee, so that spam attack would get more costly.

Too many new spammers in these days. Did you not think the new adoption will not be affecting anything?

If this pure caused by the spam attack, Some spammers are trying to give a signal about the bitcoin technical problem.

It must be resolved.

New adoption and Spam attack can be a good combination to attacking the network which has limited blocksize.

 ???

Why do you guys think that this is all a spam attack??

Yes we have to many of unconfirmed txt its been around 150k https://blockchain.info/unconfirmed-transactions . But with higher btc price maybe people just want to be involved in it. I don't believe that this is an spam attack as for it you will need to move coins constantly as it will cost them in fees when it all adds up... From my point of view this is a result when you go for mainstream adoption, btc simply can't work for every people on the planet. With everyone being an _ _ _ _ _ we won't see any improvements in the block size this year which will just fill the network. It is not perfect, it was intended to be a test, we may say that it is somewhat going good for now. But we see the flaws and if you ask me btc won't be the major intenet (digital) currency if we don't see some real development. It's not perfect, we know that. If they don't change block sizes or something else that will make the network being faster and with btc price raising we may only see higher and higher fees, I wouldn't be suprised if the fees went for like 5-10$ in future for a single transaction. We have mssleading here as it is a "digital gold" or an asset rather than "digital currency" , most of the people forgot that it is a currency. I just hope that issue will be solved within next 2 years, if not btc might crush.

Yes we don't like the situation as it is now if this continue it will result bad for btc. As I need to send my transaction for like 1$ or even more to be included in the next block or within 1hour...

1. because of the way these transactions are injected into the network.
it has a nearly fixed rate, which in normal circumstances it can not be the same.

2. because in normal circumstances we have 1000 to 3000 transactions in the mempool and with all the growth and price rise, etc it has gone up but not to 160,000

3. because of the transactions that can be found and look useless. for example sending from and address to same address or sending from 1 address to another but instead of sending 100BTC at once you send 0.01BTC every 5 seconds in a new transaction until 100BTC is spent, then from the second address you send to third address the same way.

Who are the main beneficiaries here?

It is obvious that miners are vitally interested in "raising the bar" (i.e. extorting higher fees), but who can also profit from that apart from them? It should be obvious that this spam attack won't change a thing in the Core versus Unlimited confrontation. There should be at least some logic as well as goal behind this wall or wave of spammy transactions. I don't think that someone would be spending plenty of money to bring Bitcoin network down just for the fun of it

This is no longer an issue of blocksize but rather it is more crucial than that issue. Spam attacks are largely made to destroy bitcoin and it is not only the thing that are happening today several computers are being attacked by cyber attacks. Hope bitcoin will not be greatly affected by this issues and will still continue to rise up and grow stronger.

1. Spam attack won't destroy bitcoin per se, they will however create illusion that bitcoin is not working properly and it is outdated piece of software - altcoins will profit.
2. Other that spamming the network there is not much else that can be done to harm bitcoin network ATM.
3. Bitcoin doesn't care about malware, ransomware or other types of threat normally dangerous to centralized systems.

Yet another thread complaining about confirmation times, block sizes and supposed "spam". There's nothing we can do except make a move on. Pick a side, or help come up with a solution.


How are you sure that this is even an attack? With the massive recent growth, this could mean that we have so many people really wanting to give bitcoin a try. This would be horrible, as the current confirmation times and average fees are so horribly high. Technically we could be driving new users away.

that's a disgrace for bitcoin... We need bigger blocks here and now, nothing will solve this issue as good as bitcoin unlimited can, that's why I am for bigger blocks. At the moment there are 130k transactions thaat are waiting confirmations and most of them will be returned to senders because the mempool will definitely not clear itself out in a few days. Just imagine how much harm is being done to the merchants and stuff like that, and paying 2 dollars for sending over small amounts of money like 50 cents is just ridiculous. BIGGER BLOCKS NOW!

I'll just elaborate it a bit. Countries have started recognizing and legalizing Bitcoin and they are major countries not just small ones especially Japan and Australia. Since no one can provide a concrete proof or evidence that this is an attack then it would be more probable to think this way. I hope that somebody has been thinking of solution right noe regarding this issue and be fixed asap.

No. It's actually a spam attack I can't show what address spams the mempool just search it on this forum instead we don't need bigger block to solve this problem we need to prevent the whole blockchain against these spam attacks, it just a propoganda to support bitcoin unlimited. Let just hope that the spam attack will be over.

Bigger blocks might not and will likely not help

As well as shilling in their favor, just for the record. What's the sense of bigger blocks if the miners are not filling up even 1M blocks (today's size). Going for bigger blocks is just miners' pretext to keep things as they are today, i.e. in a state of permanent confrontation, a situation in which they can "legally" extort higher fees. If blocks are made 4-8 Mb in size what will it change if miners can still choose what size to use? Even if it were a solution (which it is not), it wouldn't work out anyway

lol. SegWit is needed and people till try to deny its benefit. I have just sent 200k satoshi with 80k satoshi and up to new, there has been no confirmation. Hope that my payment does not expire

Only post worth reading in this entire thread.

The economics of the fee attack are obvious.  They do not need to spend that much money in order to get the fees to go up.  If they flood the lower fee levels with transactions they are paying smaller fees if the transactions do go through at all.   Also, due to their own attack their transactions spend a lot of time in the queue just clogging up the queue - less cost for the attacker.  If they are really successful then most of their spam transactions will never get into a block and will eventually get dropped.  The cost to the spammer of the transactions that get dropped is zero.

Just take a look at the chart here:

https://bitcoinfees.21.co/

Clog up the lower transaction levels and everyone who wants to actually do a transaction will have to pay more.

Larger blocks will not solve this, Segwit will not solve this, the actual solution is already in place:  pay a higher fee for your transactions if you want them to go through.

I could add even more injury to insult

Even if some or most of these transactions come through eventually, the fees paid will still be received by those who likely paid them (or paid to send them), i.e. miners themselves. Since there is a mining oligopoly out there, we shouldn't be surprised if this attack is a combined effort of a few mining groups (pools), which might in fact belong to the same mining baron at that (and we all know his name). So it is a win-win situation for them (him), most of the time, at least. In a nutshell, expect more attacks in the future

If everyone pays a higher fee then the fees will easily rise tenfold or more from their current level. There is a point where increased fees will only hold bitcoin back. Lightning network has the potential both for near unlimited transactions AND higher fees to miners.

In my opinion this is the best solution currently being offered to scaleability issues. And Segwit or larger blocks would solve this as it would make any spam attacks much more expensive to the attacker since they would need to clog up a larger number of transactions.

It's kind of funny to see threads like these made every so often because the price of Bitcoin is going a certain direction. I like how the price of Bitcoin affects the speed of the transactions within the whole Blockchain. Whether the transactions are just slow or if the transactions are really fast, a large portion of the people that spam the network already know that once they get the money they can try to break Bitcoin so no one else could make money from it.

that is not entirely true.
in order to have an effect on what others pay as fee you DO need to pay higher fee or at least a fee on par with others.
the fact that bitcoinfees website shows majority at 101-120 is because many are using old or bad wallet clients that will suggest a fixed default fee of that amount. for example blockchain.info is always going to say 110-120 satoshi per byte.

if the attacker floods the "queue" with low fee transactions they are ALL simply going to be ignored.
for example if there are 100,000 transactions with 100 satoshi per byte fee, i am going to pay a higher fee of 110 s/b and have more priority than them.

in order for a spam attack to be successful and cause higher fees and delays it needs to pay higher fees than what "I" pay. and they do pay higher fees. i have seen from 300 to 600 s/b (there have been 24993 transaction in last 24 hours with 301+ fee)

and it is not just weird unknown entities spamming, it is miners who are filling (wasting) blocks so that they have less space for real transactions.
186704 tx belonging to Bitfury: 3QQB6AWxaga6wTs6Xwq8FYppgrGinGu15f

BU supporters are attacking the network.
The BC/BU division is more likely to damage bitcoin rather than any country or sentral bank.
Bitcoin will be destroyed from the inside.

The problem here is that the situation is providing miners more incentives not to decide on the question of Bitcoin scaling problem. We are all greedy and miners are just like all of us. The thing here is that miners should not be the one to decide on matter like this. We already see what they can do by not doing anything because they can earn more if we continue on with the status quo. This should have been a big lesson for all stakeholders of Bitcoin and hopefully once this can be solved the same thing should not be repeated in the future. But sometimes people are so weak in learning the lessons of history that is history can always repeats itself.

as i see it doesn't make sense for an attacker to spam the network with higher fee, which would cost him money just to increase the average fee for allt he other, unless this spammer is a miner of course which i suspect it could be

i also don't think that pying higher fee is a solution, that's the issue here, segwit would solve the second issue but not the first from what i can understand, i'm curious how they are "sending worthless data"

if by that he mean dust TX with no fee, these will simply be rejected

Could you expand more on how near unlimited transactions could possibly go along with higher fees?

First of all, the very idea of unlimited transactions is against higher fees in and of itself. That should be straightforward that higher fees make transactions more expensive and thus suppress the desire to transact. Conversely, lower fees would contribute to more transactions since they would be cheaper in that case. Further, as I understand how Lightning Network works, it makes mining somewhat redundant since people can transact off-chain, and the cost of providing payment channels is negligible (when compared mining). That would greatly facilitate the competition between payment channel providers, and thus lead to low or no fees at all

SPAM warning.

http://imagizer.imageshack.us/a/img923/710/3vch81.png

Linked thread : https://medium.com/@SDWouters/why-schnorr-signatures-will-help-solve-2-of-bitcoins-biggest-problems-today-9b7718e7861c