Bitcoin Forum

someone (a service or maybe a spammer?) created about 3000 transactions with about 80 MB in size (in total) and flooded the network with them:

https://i.imgur.com/j7bIJ1F.jpg

image source: https://statoshi.info/dashboard/db/memory-pool

And I looked at here https://jochen-hoenicke.de/queue/#0,2h
The two hours interval and it's really crazy.

https://i.imgur.com/Jw2DXJk.png


Question is that if anyone wants to make the mempool busy artificially then they can do such things?

Well, nothing can stop somebody that wants to create 80Mb worth of 1sat/byte transactions, however, spamming with 1 sat/byte transactions won't start a bidding war. If the blocks found in the next couple of days aren't completely full with transactions paying a higher fee, some of the 80 Mb will probably end up in in blocks, otherewise they'll be pruned from the mempool in a couple of days.

note that the more interesting thing about this is the spike not the end size result. which means you have to go back to 8 hours interval to see the spike in that link.


nothing can stop anybody from creating valid (standard) transactions and broadcasting them.

to determine if this was a spam (if that's what you mean by artificial) then these transactions need to be analyzed more. i don't run a custom node yet to be able to do that and it is a time consuming thing to create and analyze.
in any case with initial observation since this is a single spike and it has not yet been repeated, and also considering the fact that these are big individual transactions there is a good chance that this is a big service simply consolidating its inputs.
additionally there is a big ongoing drop in number of UTXOs in the same time frame as new blocks are confirmed https://statoshi.info/dashboard/db/unspent-transaction-output-set?panelId=6&fullscreen

https://i.imgur.com/txlcuAQ.jpg

Agree with you and I was quite surprised that OP jumped so fast into such a conclusion without proper research.

We need a lot more information about these transactions to be able to say if is this a spam for sure or only "a big service consolidating its inputs" or anything else, to be honest.

I know you meant this:
https://i.imgur.com/1HliWmR.png

By my focus was on the information we had from mouse hovering. Anyway, does not matter. We got that we wanted.

That usually means either a pump or dump is incoming for the bitcoin price.

If you clog the mempool, people can't get their coins to the exchanges to sell, which makes a pump easier as it is only dealing with coins that are already on the exchanges. Once people do get their coins on the exchange you get the dump phase where all those coins are suddenly dumped on the exchanges causing the price to tank.

The transactions look like perfectly ordinary consolidation transactions. They're at a really low feerate-- they'll basically just be a supply of ready to include transactions whenever there is capacity until they all get included.

I've read elsewhere that it's Binance's USDT address.

And this https://www.blockchain.com/btc/address/1FoWyxwPXuj4C6abqwhjDWdz6D4PZgYRjA

is number two on here - https://wallet.tether.to/richlist

Since the fee is extremely low I presume it's so everyone can easily bypass them which makes it non spamming surely?

right. You need to add spam at high fees to spam effectively, not the lowest fee possible as in this case

Do you think this has affected the price of bitcoin? After all, it has recently fallen in price.

Nope... There is no direct correlation, maybe a very indirect one tops. It's possible certain price fluctuations might have resulted in an exchange having more unspent outputs than usual (because of more deposits and withdrawals, so they might have chosen to consolidate. This fact, coupled with a low optimal fee might have prompted them to consolidate their inputs...

But this (and other) theory(s) is/are really far-fetched anyways. The odds are even bigger there is no correlation at all.

This action by itself cannot be the reason. The network is far from being unusable right now. According to https://bitcoinfees.earn.com/, you can still get included in the next block if you pay 20 sats per byte. In 2017 that was hundreds of satoshis. 20 sats/byte is nothing compared what it was back in the day.

here is a funny thing people are not realising

someone 'injected' 80mb of tx into peoples mempools.
yep 80mb of data relayed around the network in a 10min timeframe.....

... no nodes crashed

so i guess the worry of 2mb 4mb 8mb 32mb blocks are not a concern if nodes can recieve verify and relay transactions without crashing. all they need now is a block header to associate the tx to a block and they are confirmed. without a crash

i was wondering why my 1 satoshi/byte transaction from yesterday never confirmed. there's still 79 MB in the mempool at that price!

thank goodness for RBF. it looks like i only need to bump the fee to 2 satoshi/byte. :D

apart from what @mocacinno said this rise was not that significant to cause any issues. not to mention that it was a 1 time thing not a constant injection of transactions into the mempool like what we had back in 2017 with real spam attackers that were flooding the network.


that's how i found it. i still have one transaction stuck but since it is a consolidation and i don't care, i won't bump its fee and let it stay there until it confirms.

I think we should see the positive side to this whole event, whoever did this does not matter, what matter is that it was done and that it did not

"crash" the network like we had with the spam wars during the Bitcoin (BTC) vs BitcoinXT period.  ;)  It was said that SegWit would make sustained

attacks like this very expensive and not viable for long periods and I think this event validated those claims. OP, thank you for posting this, because

it would just have gone unnoticed and it is actually very important to show that SegWit is doing what it was supposed to do.  ;)

This isn't really relevant to SegWit (which was never about scaling anyway), even without SegWit 1 sat/byte transactions won't make fees rise. Worst thing that can happen is that transactions from other users who used the same fee will get disrupted, but thanks to RBF they can bump the fee a bit to fix it. If you want some silver lining, you can just say that the fee market works as intended and makes spam either useless or very expensive.