Bitcoin Forum

I find the timing of this transaction spamming bot very suspicious.

There is no financial gain from running the bot, just aggro for uninformed users.  Their transactions do go through, all funds end up in the addresses where they belong, but they end up with a invalid transaction in their wallet that has to time out.  And of course there can be secondary effects if they have software that relies on outcomes that change because of the vandalism.

It's easy enough to argue that it's just some child exploiting a flaw for amusement. But to be having the far reaching impact that is being reported today, the script that is modifying transactions has to be running on well connected, high bandwidth nodes, and probably quite a few of them.  It also has to be nodes that promiscuously transmit zero fee transactions, which eliminate the mining pools as core suspects.

So who benefits from this behavior and has access to multiple highly connected nodes?

MtGox is the only candidate I see. 

Everyone benefits because potential shortcomings are exposed. If the shortcomings are addressed, the network becomes stronger. If not, it's time to scrape the Bitcoin experiment...

Does it matter?

Someone is demonstrating an attack and it is obviously causing at least an annoyance.

It raises the priority of addressing the transaction malleability issue.

look up the meaning of altruistic, takes bow for superior understanding of english

There may be individuals out there who are legitimately trying to take advantage of this quirk in the bitcoin protocol.  It's been known for years and hasn't been an issue unless your large scale service has forgotten to account for it when coding.

There may also be good or bad actors who are just doing it anyway as a method of stress testing the system. 

Whatever the case, if they keep it up it will require the devs to come together and actively make a push for more mainstream changes.  It will further hasten a consensus on how to facilitate transaction tracking and better secure against double spends.

Oh, and imagine if someone was doing this without Mt.Gox having brought it to everyone's attention.

People would be crying bloody 51% attack with all the "double spends" showing up on blockchain.info.

Even if they are, this is not really important as it causes no harm to the network.

It quite makes sense, because people started noticing it only after these gox problems and people not believing them, no?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Correlation_does_not_imply_causation

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it'd be great to something something fast from the foundation.  BTC is falling fast

Of course given how technically inept Gox has proven themselves over the last year++ we may be giving them too much credit.

It obviously matters very much.  If MtGox is actively attacking the network they cannot be trusted.

So you prefer they just fix it on their part and carry on as usual? Meanwhile, the rest is getting scammed out of coins without being the wiser.

If it really was Mt.Gox and they were doing this to force the issue to be fixed ... I would be impressed.

No one except for Mt.Gox is being scammed out of coins.  And they were scammed due to their own negligence.

Spamming the network with modified transactions is the equivalent of a child throwing a temper tantrum.

You realize that the majority of the exchanges have halted withdrawals?

If the child throwing a temper tantrum causes Bitcoin to be more resilient and user friendly, have at it.

Pissing in the punch bowl isn't an acceptable method of pointing out that someone could piss in the punch bowl.  Malicious griefing of the network for no purpose other than to disguise your own incompetence is unacceptable.

If Mt.Gox is behind this action they should be taken out and shot like a rabid dog.

I hope some of the developers are tracking down the nodes spawning the altered transactions so proof will be available to the community soon.

All speculation. Any company will try to put blame elsewhere. The initial dev responses weren't much better.



Not going to happen.