A scaled up spam experiment : #SpamTheBlockchain As A Service

[amaclin]

IF I DO IT, WHAT TYPE OF CHART WOULD YOU LIKE ?

1) spam kbytes per day
2) miner fees of spam txs per day

As I've said above - it is easy enough to create 1x99kb spam transaction instead of 200x500 byte txs.
Anyone will be able to put his favorite photo in jpeg to blockchain for only 0.01 btc 

[btchip]

Some metrics I'd like to see, along with the current "spam level" and the health of major services : number of nodes active, consistency of mempool across all nodes, size of blocks mined, time between blocks mined

[danielpbarron]

TALKING ABOUT BITCOIN, EVEN IF IN A GROUP, DOES NOT MAKE YOU PART OF BITCOIN.

[amaclin]

TALKING ABOUT BITCOIN, EVEN IF IN A GROUP, DOES NOT MAKE YOU PART OF BITCOIN.

What should I do to be a part of your sect bitcoin? Let me in!

[hhanh00]

@OP
Could you explain what you are trying to show?

[amaclin]

@OP
Could you explain what you are trying to show?

ability?

[fbueller]

I'm intrigued what this might mean. I agree it's worthless debating anymore, each side is drawing on hypothetical's that are largely unknown, whereas there's only one thing that will happen for sure if we run this experiment - the blocks will be full.

Are you close to having it running?

[Nicolas Dorier]

@OP
Could you explain what you are trying to show?

I told in the post why I think it is necessary to do that.

What am I trying to show ? Objective data + a peak about how miners / payment providers / wallet providers / users will behave in real economic condition.
I don't want to proove anything, I hope that discussion about data will replace the "pies in the skies" discussions about what will happen.

Personally, I am curious about what will happen if UTXO set grow several order of magniture.
And also what will happen to any in memory mempool implementation will behave when the tx rate is higher than 7 per sec for long period of time.

I am asking you the data you would like to see, so anybody can learn something out of it that might change your view, and hopefully reach a common agreement.

The debate about block size is not anymore in a productive state (but a destructive one), I hope changing the situation.

I'm intrigued what this might mean. I agree it's worthless debating anymore, each side is drawing on hypothetical's that are largely unknown, whereas there's only one thing that will happen for sure if we run this experiment - the blocks will be full.

Are you close to having it running?

I did not start coding it, but if I start I should do it in 1 or 2 weeks. I hope laurentmt, who is better than me for presenting information the right way, will help me (or provide his own separate analytics website) so we can get fixed faster.
There is also an unknown : Maybe the community will not be able to fund enough fees for spamming for a long enough time.

My goal is at least to maintain something like 14 tx/s in total tx on the network for a month. (with estimated fees for 3 block confirmation)
Maybe it won't be possible, and I will adjust fees. Or maybe I'll just ask the spammer what amount he wants to spend per spammed KB.

[dexX7]

My goal is at least to maintain something like 14 tx/s in total tx on the network for a month. (with estimated fees for 3 block confirmation)

Just to put it in some perspective:

With a size of roughly 250-350 kB per transaction, that's about 4000-6000 BTC spent in total for fees, with estimatefee 3 = 0.00044247 BTC/kB, and 14 tx/s for one month.

[amaclin]

Or maybe I'll just ask the spammer what amount he wants to spend per spammed KB.

Would you like to hire me? 
Let us start 0.00005 per transaction or 0.0001 per kilobyte.

[Nicolas Dorier]

My goal is at least to maintain something like 14 tx/s in total tx on the network for a month. (with estimated fees for 3 block confirmation)

Just to put it in some perspective:

With a size of roughly 250-350 kB per transaction, that's about 4000-6000 BTC spent in total for fees, with estimatefee 3 = 0.00044247 BTC/kB, and 14 tx/s for one month.

Very true, I've done back of the envelop calculation also, and it would get very expensive.
Note that we already have approx 3 tx per seconds (400KB block average), for reaching 14, it is "only" 11 tx. (or 5 tx to be just above)

Last 2 spam days experiences was done by 2 persons I thought having read somewhere [citation needed here, I may be wrong].
You are right though, estimatedfees is too high, and I will need to find a compromise about minrelaytx and estimatedfee. (Or ask the spam to customize the fees himself)

TALKING ABOUT BITCOIN, EVEN IF IN A GROUP, DOES NOT MAKE YOU PART OF BITCOIN.

Not sure what you are talking about. Have I hurted you because I used the terms "ecosystem", "we" or "community" ? I'm not interested in the terminology, replace by what you want. I'm interested with people who wants to learn from the experience, or devs strongly opposed for specific technical reasons.

Would you like to hire me?
Let us start 0.00005 per transaction or 0.0001 per kilobyte.

Well, tweaking the fees will be easy anyway when the website is on.
Do you want to help ? I think the most important stuff to provide is all the raw data and charts for others to analyze.
I think the spamming site (which I can take care of, even if I would appreciate help for the front end "spammer" UX) will be decoupled from charts sites, I hope to reference websites of other developers providing and presenting the data.

The value will be more in the data we can collect from this than into the spam service itself. (without great feedback, there will be no great incentives to spam)
I did not thought other devs would help, I can create a group on github if it helps where we can put all projects related to the spam service, if I'm not the only coder.

[amaclin]

Would you like to hire me?
Let us start 0.00005 per transaction or 0.0001 per kilobyte.

Well, tweaking the fees will be easy anyway when the website is on.

I mean that I can send useless txs. I am not ready to make a website

[tspacepilot]

My goal is at least to maintain something like 14 tx/s in total tx on the network for a month. (with estimated fees for 3 block confirmation)

Just to put it in some perspective:

With a size of roughly 250-350 kB per transaction, that's about 4000-6000 BTC spent in total for fees, with estimatefee 3 = 0.00044247 BTC/kB, and 14 tx/s for one month.

That makes this idea seem like an insanely expensive experiment!  How could this ever be a feasible thing to pull off if dexX7 is right about these costs?

[hhanh00]

@OP
Could you explain what you are trying to show?

I told in the post why I think it is necessary to do that.

What am I trying to show ? Objective data + a peak about how miners / payment providers / wallet providers / users will behave in real economic condition.
I don't want to proove anything, I hope that discussion about data will replace the "pies in the skies" discussions about what will happen.

Personally, I am curious about what will happen if UTXO set grow several order of magniture.
And also what will happen to any in memory mempool implementation will behave when the tx rate is higher than 7 per sec for long period of time.

I am asking you the data you would like to see, so anybody can learn something out of it that might change your view, and hopefully reach a common agreement.

The debate about block size is not anymore in a productive state (but a destructive one), I hope changing the situation.

And if the infrastructure isn't ready for it and is damaged as a result, how would you fix it? I could be misunderstanding something but it seems like inoculating someone with a disease in order to study how he will react in real conditions.

[amaclin]

And if the infrastructure isn't ready for it and is damaged as a result, how would you fix it?

He wouldn't.
There are several categories in car racings: pilots, mechanics and spectators. Pilots do not repair broken cars. Spectators also.

[dexX7]

My goal is at least to maintain something like 14 tx/s in total tx on the network for a month. (with estimated fees for 3 block confirmation)

Just to put it in some perspective:

With a size of roughly 250-350 kB per transaction, that's about 4000-6000 BTC spent in total for fees, with estimatefee 3 = 0.00044247 BTC/kB, and 14 tx/s for one month.

That makes this idea seem like an insanely expensive experiment!  How could this ever be a feasible thing to pull off if dexX7 is right about these costs?

It should be noticed that "estimatefee", a Bitcoin Core command to estimate fees to pay, seems a bit high, when it suggests to pay 0.00044247 BTC/kB to get a confirmation within 3 blocks.

And further, 14 tx/s is about 10x the transaction volume we currently see, assuming those transactions make it (which they wouldn't).

But either way, I agree, even with some magnitudes cheaper costs, this seems expensive.

NB: what is your goal anyway? Disturb the network and delay legit transactions? I'd would feel more comfortable, if those experiments use rather low fees instead, so that regular transactions are mostly unaffected, or require only a small fee bump.

[JeromeL]

Salut Nicolas,

I feel uncomfortable with your "experiment" as from what I understood, it is not more not less than a real attack towards the Bitcoin network.

TestNet appears to me like a better suited environnement for this kind of experiment.

[TrollPay]

This sounds like something I'm in the works of developing! I wonder what the outcome will be long term, hoping for the best.

[fbueller]

FWIW I can mine testnet coin very easily. In a few hours I mined about 18,000, more than enough to fund this experiment for a month.

In fact, I've been giving it a go - https://www.blocktrail.com/tBTC/address/n2GcwNsdybZrr6mbLakrwgQoWSurABHU3a I've broadcast about 30,000 transactions on testnet in the past 12 hours. It currently leaves about 4000 tx's in the mempool with and none of the blocks exceeding 750kb.

Some numbers: I moved 30testnet coins in 30,000 transactions, for a fee of 0.51 (dynamically calculated by the client). I have 18,000 testnet coins. So we can deploy this on testnet today, and see exactly what will happen.

[tspacepilot]

FWIW I can mine testnet coin very easily. In a few hours I mined about 18,000, more than enough to fund this experiment for a month.

In fact, I've been giving it a go - https://www.blocktrail.com/tBTC/address/n2GcwNsdybZrr6mbLakrwgQoWSurABHU3a I've broadcast about 30,000 transactions on testnet in the past 12 hours. It currently leaves about 4000 tx's in the mempool with and none of the blocks exceeding 750kb.

Some numbers: I moved 30testnet coins in 30,000 transactions, for a fee of 0.51 (dynamically calculated by the client). I have 18,000 testnet coins. So we can deploy this on testnet today, and see exactly what will happen.

Did you deploy?  And are the issues these guys are eperiencing related to you? https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1079182.0;topicseen

Just curious.