500$ is the new 5$

2014/08/24 Monero Blockchain Spam Attack - Post Mortem

On 2014/08/24 a spam attack was launched against the Monero blockchain. Up to that point, Monero had a relatively low fixed fee per transaction of 0.005 XMR (under 1 US cent per transaction). This allowed the attacker to broadcast extremely large transactions every 5 seconds.

For the most part, the network worked as expected. The dynamic block size limit allowed the max block size to grow, and transactions were broadcast without incident. However, the (relatively) slow expansion in the median block size, among other things, lead to some transactions taking some time to confirm. This is not the usual turn of events - normally an increase in usage occurs over a couple of days in a best case scenario (Monero is featured on Dr Phil and Oprah, and every Monero user gets a whale once they check under their seat). At its worst, there were ~400 transactions in the memory pool that were waiting to be confirmed. The sudden, sharp, drastic increase means that the network needed to adjust, and in the interim some transactions took anything from a few extra minutes to an hour longer than usual.

I have a lot of people wanting me to help them enter in the Bitcoin/Cryptos (like a broker).

When they see the alts they all want to buy them too, so I advise them to diversify 2-5% of their capital in them.

This is fresh fiat that would go into BTC if it wasn't for the alts.*

I bet my clients are not the only ones doing so.

On the other hand *they have to buy BTC first in order to buy alts, though this is changing fast.

Opinions?

Looking bad..

Bitstamp Up. BTCChina down.

Interesting times ahead!