Yeah, it's the poor mans scam for sure
The scammer probably had a slow machine that couldn't brute force more than 2 from the start and 4 checksum characters. In fact the forth letter was the first thing I noticed that helped me recognize the difference.

Arbitrage is part and parcel of the market, it can not be eliminated and it is both good for the system and the exchanges as it will keep the price at an equilibrium in all exchanges and also it can increase the liquidity in the small exchanges that desperately need it.

As for profitability, I've done some arbitrage trading for a while a couple of years back and it can be profitable but the risks make it a very stressful thing to do. The only way I can ever justify it is if there were some automation involved so that you don't waste time trying to execute trades, move coins around, etc. which also decreases the chance of making mistakes.

I believe what @albert0bsd means by "block" is to either "freeze" or "hide" these outputs either manually or automatically so that you don't see them when spending from your wallet to avoid such mistakes. For example Electrum has manual output/coin freezing option.

I had completely forgotten about it, I guess seeing the dust double spent threw me off. There are so many things weird with this particular attacker. This type of attack looks to have a very low success rate as it is, which means decreasing that "window of opportunity" to scam makes no sense. For example I wouldn't have seen this transaction if I had checked my wallet a couple of hours later.

This looks like a Dusting Attack[1] but in a slightly different and extremely weird way!
The attacker seems to be searching the chain for funded addresses like [2] then uses a "brute force tool" similar to vanity address generators to find an address that looks similar to your address like [3] but they try to be sneaky and search for an address with matching beginning and end. Examples:

1LTaZWnFTAsTqBfkSEShSXEh5VTiWUKQh8 Someone's address holding 2.56BTC
1LTKTBLDQxxf5QvgRFMzuyPMnRUULCKQh8 Attacker's address

1GZ3EfTjHVxLqnKi7yhEGCoffdATJEKeR7 2.49BTC
1GZKQVjY21SAas1tjnibAHHHNF9B8nKeR7 dust

12XqeqZRVkBDgmPLVY4ZC6Y4ruUUEug8Fx 32,321BTC
12XgkRFEdE3oSvy4tzzp8jVtsdMATwg8Fx dust

1FZy7CPFA2UqqQJYUA1cG9KvdDFbSMBJYG 15,739BTC
1FZBQjXH1RhbfpYtA3LoVrzJKqiAWSBJYG dust

Then the attacker sends two dust amounts to these similar looking addresses in the same transaction (eg. 600 sat to you, 600 sat to their own address).

Feel free to share your thoughts on why would someone do something weird like this but my guess is that they hope someone would see the incoming transaction, then try to spend that output and their own coins but copy the attacker's address that looks similar instead of their own and send all their coins there so that the attacker can steal it!

But there are two weird parts involved in this "operation":
1. Usually in this type of attack they rely on the user's greed to rush them into making the mistake and send their coins to the attacker. For example one somewhat similar attack I've seen was to use some shittokens on Omni layer in an address empty of bitcoin and send the key to the user who would then get greedy and funds the key with bitcoin so they can spend the token but before they can do anything the attacker steals their bitcoins.
But there are no tokens involved here as far as I can tell (not even the scamjunk called Ordinals) and the amount they send the user is dust!
2. They didn't even let the dust amount remain in user's wallet. As you can see now, the transaction is already double spent and none of the addresses I shared above (the ones with high balances like 2.56) have the dust any more while the scammer's address holds slightly higher than 2x the dust limit possibly wanting to repeat the attack once again but this time the sender address and the change address and your address all 3 would look similar.

The only reason why I found this is because I received one of these transactions recently and was surprised when I saw the similar addresses in the output. The attacker seems to have given up on trying to scam the big whales though as the first couple of txs in the address are sent to those.

[1] https://bitcoin.stackexchange.com/questions/81508/deanonymizing-dust-attack
[2] https://blockchair.com/bitcoin/address/1LTaZWnFTAsTqBfkSEShSXEh5VTiWUKQh8
[3] https://blockchair.com/bitcoin/address/1LTKTBLDQxxf5QvgRFMzuyPMnRUULCKQh8
[4] bc1qfyftjfs2aufq566mlwldkzgl9v6rxqqg7ta75p

It is a couple of days old but it is new and I wouldn't call it "great news", it's just one of the changes in the current chaotic world. Not to mention that China is not that different from US.

Of course not, US economy is too big to "suffocate" from such a small thing. Not to mention that the Apple dump could even be recovered at some point in the near future. But this is becoming a regular thing, like a momentum and these dumps are accumulating in different fields. In other words the case of Apple dump is an example and it shows the high degree of vulnerability that US economy has in facing sanctions.
It's not going to be overnight either, like the dedollarisation. Dollar that once was used in 80-90% of the international trades, it is now barely reaching half of them as countries continue dumping it.

There is a popular saying that necessity is mother of invention. As I explained in OP, Chinese companies weren't manufacturing microchips until the were forced to.

Sorry you didn't like my tone, feel free to read the businessinsider article, it is saying pretty much the same thing.

It's not all cheap and substandard. In fact I see Chinese economy as a very genius one that sees the "demand" in the world and creates the appropriate "supply" for it at cheap production cost. The reason why a lot of their products are substandard is because that's what their customers want.
If you check out the population of the biggest trade partners of China (US, South Korea, Japan, Taiwan in descending order of trade size), these countries have large number of middle and lower class citizens who are living hand to mouth and prefer affordable products. So that's what China manufactures.

But that's not all China manufactures, in other fields and products you can find top quality competitive products too. Off the top of my head their car industry which is at this point manufacturing competitive vehicles which some speculate is going to put a lot of big names out of business in the near future.

I didn't give "Kudos to China" and I disagree. That war has not ended yet to call its winner and also to this point there has been no winners. Both sides are still fighting and both sides are hurting in different ways. For example Chinese economy in certain places has gone bankrupt and some private companies were literally swallowed by the government to keep them afloat.
The difference between China and US is that China is fighting US while US is fighting majority of the world.

Thanks for putting it this way specially using these terms because US did the same exact thing to China in a large number of relationships. From Huawei only because it was manufactured in China to the recent sanctions on numerous Chinese companies just because BlackRock wanted to invest in them.

In other words my tone is not anti-US, I'm simply calling out sabotage, back-stabs, betrayals, and a lot of other shenanigans United States has been pulling on the rest of the world. Otherwise it's double standard

https://www.businessinsider.com/apple-200-billion-drop-sign-post-us-tech-future-near-2023-9

The biggest mistake any decision makers in any country can make these days is not realizing the World Order has already changed and to fail to adapt to the New World Order as quickly as possible.

The most obvious example in United States that is still clinging to the Old World Order, desperately trying to remain the solo hegemony in today's multi-polar world.
Of course this change didn't happen overnight, the World Order has been transitioning for many years while many have been pushing US over the edge and down to the pit. But in my opinion the last nails in that coffin were put there by the US regime itself and out of pure stupidity, specially in the previous two administrations.

For example take the trade war with China that started on January 2018. Before that the Chinese companies didn't feel threatened enough to ever bother to start R&D of high tech stuff since they could freely import them from US manufacturers. So China remained dependent on United States.
But as the US regime kept "sanctioning" China, China started going domestic. Now for example the Chinese smart phone companies are manufacturing microchips (that they used to import) domestically.

Here is the problem, this move not only creates a serious and super cheap competition in global markets against American products that can easily replace them and devastate those companies, but also it now gives China the capability to strike back which brings us to the recent "sanctions" China placed on US, restricting usage of iPhones in China. The result? Apple got dumped $200 billion in a blinking of a eye.
It doesn't stop there, we have already seen over the past year+ the worsening US recession is also hurting the Silicon Valley and the tech sector as its first and biggest victim with banks that keep on collapsing.

This signals the start of a new era where tech giants are no longer going to be American. Meanwhile tech is not the only field and China is not the only country US keeps sanctioning...

You are forgetting that when you bag-hold the US treasuries you are in reality lending money to the US government to cover the budget deficit and the ginormous expenses; which means the US government has to pay you interest on the bonds you are bag holding. With the heavily increased interest rate, bag holding these bonds means you get more interest (more money) which US prints out of thin air like a Ponzi Scheme. This is also why all the money from all the other markets (including bitcoin) is being sucked up by US government.

So on one hand China wants to get that profit by being a bag holder (so they bag hold $800 billion) and at the same time they want to get rid of it to reduce their risk (so they dump $200 billion out of the initial $1000 billion they held). This is also why they got rid of a large amount of their dollar reserves by converting it to both gold and yuan.

Your statement would have been true only if these were normal bitcoin transactions made by normal people for normal reasons!! Well they are not. They are spam that aren't only injecting "inscribed messages" to the blockchain, they are injecting these garbages into the blockchain then trade those arbitrary satoshis that no longer have anything to do with the junk data. That market (where they pump and dump satoshis) is acting like the fuel for the spam. So it's not going to end unless that market ends which it doesn't seem to be ending.

I'll start flying around a little and maybe go to the moon to see what's up because I must be sleeping to have found the key to Huobi's address with all its Omni shittokens

So you're having fun with your theoretical 925 sat outputs now...

Being open source means absolutely nothing here because nobody has any way of knowing what the actual source code the centralized default coordinator is running.

It does as it successfully breaks the link between the bitcoins you convert to XMR and the bitcoins you get after selling XMR because of the way Monero is implemented.

The global usage of USD in international trades has been going down for many years now and it is speeding up in the past 2 years. The less dollar is used by countries the less power US will have.

I don't know what that has to do with anything!

The biggest US power is the dollar not the military, specially since US military strength is mostly an illusion.

As for US military bases, the thing is United States is a cancer and the military bases are like tumors, each time a tumor is removed the cancer can metastasize in another part of the earth. In other words it depends on where you look. For instance in East Asia, US presence has been increasing but in West Asia, US has been getting kicked out.

The best example is Afghanistan which is literally the biggest escape of the century. US military fled Afghanistan which is one of the most strategically important geographies in the world that gave US the power to destabilize the entire region and threaten the international trade by spreading extremism, terrorism and separatism. It affected 3 super powers at the same time: Iran, China and Russia. Today, apart from some operatives and terrorists, US has no military presence in Afghanistan.
Similar things have been happening elsewhere like Iraq were US bases have been getting shut down ever since 2020 like the ones in Al-Anbar province.

Let me add a little on top of this with some different views.
Ignoring the fact that the bear is trolling, I should say that people should avoid seeing the world in black and white. For example China bag-holding US dollar doesn't mean everything between the two is all dandy and nobody wants to get rid of the dollar just as China dumping the dollar and the US bonds doesn't mean China wants to annihilate US entirely and overnight. Same with other countries.

It is the World Order changing and in the chaos during the transition to the New World Order each country will strive to get a bigger piece of the cake. That sometimes means relations and cooperations with all sides.

In the past 80-ish years the World Order has changed 3 times!
1) First one was after the second European War aka WW2, where US gained power and the Bipolar world shaped between US and USSR, during that transition we had the same situation where countries were playing for one side or the other which later on led to different face offs one of which was between Communism and Capitalism.
2) The second time was when USSR fell apart and for the first time in history the world was Unipolar and during that transition we had the same situation where countries strove for power. In fact that is how China gained a lot of its powers. They were playing both sides of the cold war and in the end they leaned towards US but not for free. They milked US for as much benefits they could and had the economic expansion we see today. A couple of countries even became nuclear in that time.
3) This is exactly what's happening now. After about 30 years the World Order is changing as US loses its power, but this time things are going back to being Multipolar, just like it were for thousands of years. During this transition time different countries will seek as much benefit they can from other "powers".

- This is why we see India is both in BRICS strengthening the biggest threat to the dollar and at the same time shaking hands with US stricking different deals and making statements like "they don't want to weaken the dollar". LOL
- This is why China is tightening its grip on US neck while still having the largest exports to US.
- This is why Iran is bombing US bases while negotiating with US and releasing US spies for $10 billion.
- This is why Japan is moving towards building nukes while still being an occupied country where US hasn't been allowing them to even have a decent military.
- And of course this is also why we see countries like France desperately trying to get out of US shadow and play a similar game and failing.
- etc.

After the transitional phase as the World Order is solidified, each country will have its fixed place in the geopolitical game. Some will have more power than the others. Some borders will change. Some countries (specially microscopic ones) may cease to exist while new countries may have formed.
The only constant now is change and its unpredictability... So don't be surprised when you see countries playing both sides or even if you saw them switch sides in the coming years...

Claiming what they did was a mistake and they learned a lesson is claiming that one could have predicted the market and this very new trend that has never happened in bitcoin history when after the bull run starts and goes to a new ATH ($60k+) it comes back down to reach the previous bull run's ATH ($20k). Literally nobody could have foreseen this, nor the global recession starting in 2022.

Such weird prison sentences are common in Turkey, for example in 2021 they put 1239 people (including 305 children between the ages of 12 to 17) in prison for "insulting the president"!

It is tough in most cases to detect this type of scams, we already have a history filled with big and small versions of them specially among the centralized exchanges that keep running away. The difficult part is of course because they don't look like scams since they are working fine until they run away!

Technically even the flawed and broken ones are smart contracts.

It is also not about the interest in the platform these smart contracts would run on, it is all about the interest in the tokens they create. As I've said many times tokens are useless ergo there is no interest in them. People want to make money from their pump and dumps so when they get more pumped and dumped on Ethereum compared to RSK they would go to Ethereum regardless of how centralized mutable and broken it is.

In other words even if RSK were the most fantastic decentralized smart contract platform in history, people would still stick to shitplatforms like Ethereum because the pump and dump potential there is a lot higher.

Are you sure that you are not talking about BIP152 instead of 158? Otherwise can you point to the part of the code in core because I can't find it.

Developers don't seem to be interested in fixing or preventing this exploit and considering how Bitcoin is decentralized people should start acting themselves. By demanding a patch for the clients they run or for example those running bitcoin core should run that patch by Luke Dashjr that would refuse to relay these malicious transactions.

https://gist.github.com/luke-jr/4c022839584020444915c84bdd825831

Exactly and this is the problem we are facing. And at this point the last arrow in NATO's quiver to protect their hegemony is armed conflict.

The current strategy is to try to open up as many theater of operations as they can to divert the focus on NATO to somewhere else. One of these theaters is across West Asia and North Africa (the US Middle East focus). I've already posted multiple times about these theaters in different dedollarisation topics explaining how US has been increasing tensions in the area and as predicted presently it has led to multiple small scale armed conflict mainly in Syria as the resistance (+Syrian+Iranian+Russian armies) have been facing the revival of US backed Da'esh terrorists among other Takfiri groups.
In Iran we are already bracing for a wave of terrorist attacks that the Western Propaganda Media is going to refer to as "protests" like last year. There was already a terrorist attack by Da'esh in Shiraz about 3 weeks ago and over a dozen neutralized bombing attempts which is believed to increase in September[1].

The other main theater is going to be in Iraq and Lebanon, both of the have already been facing terrorist attacks and an increased movement by the US military moving in forces and equipment some of which has been bombed and destroyed by the resistance but they keep coming.

Another theater is going to be Azerbaijan that is currently moving all the military strength and the reserves they have to the Armenian border preparing for their large scale invasion, in which case there is a strong possibility that Iran would enter and bomb them back to stone ages according to the Geneva Conventions. The biggest problem in this theater is that if Baku invades its neighbor, it has tendency to grow real fast pulling Turkey in (desperately trying to build the artificial "Big Turkistan") and then expand to the rest of the region as the entire Turkish oblong geography will be attacked heavily from the South. Apart from the fact that Turkey is a NATO member and NATO is not capable of helping it, there is also the fact that half of Turkey (from big industries to lands) was sold to the Arabs over the past month or two as Erdogan desperately tries to get some money into the failing Turkish economy. This could also pull Saudi, et al in to protect their "assets".

For now I'll keep an eye on US Navy. If they evacuate the Iranian waters (ie. Persian Gulf and Makran Sea) and go way deep into the Indian ocean (2k-3k kilometers away) it is a strong signal of starting a large scale war.
Hopefully these threats are going to be neutralized before they can grow, like previous times.

[1] Interesting fact about September is that the Zionist terrorists consider this month the "month of blood" and historically they have committed majority of their bloodshed in this month that goes from assassinations and bombings all the way to 9-11.