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Title: question answered, nvm Post by: spenvo on May 21, 2011, 07:29:14 AM It's late at night; my mind is wondering; I had this thought (I'm sure the point has been raised before, but oh well):
We're all familiar with the vulnerability posed by an entity with 51% of the total cpu power: potentially reversing transactions. But this kind of attack requires sophistication and, well, 51% of the total network hash rate: http://bitcoin.sipa.be/ (http://bitcoin.sipa.be/). As many have pointed out, botnets are presumably made up of a bunch of low-cpu-power machines (servers in closets), making the threat of the aforementioned attack unlikely. However, these low-cpu-powered machines would be capable of spamming small transactions (.00001 btc's) to each other, right? Even if future clients are written to enforce transaction fees, couldn't a botnet use a forked client? I believe the result of such an attack would be massively delayed transaction validations. I'm sorry if I'm totally off base with these assumptions, and I don't mean to fear-monger. I thought this was a valid concern. Title: Re: A mass micro-spending attack, what's the solution? Post by: realnowhereman on May 21, 2011, 07:31:28 AM This is why small tramsactions require a fee to be accepted by generators.
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