Ultimate Bitcoin Stress Test - Monday June 22nd - 13:00 GMT

[ACCTseller]

I will however point out that the company that is claimed to be behind the stress test does not actually have an [ann] thread on bitcointalk and a google search for them yields very few results. I would also point out that the domain coinwallet.eu appears to be registered only a little over a month ago. I think there is a fairly good chance that this is actually a somewhat elaborate scam to try to get peope to sign up for their wallet service, deposit money so they can run away with such money

I don't think there are some wrong with the company since they paid transaction fee and published their stress test process and results.We will aware the potential neck block as the transaction volume increases and understand the benefit brough by the increased blocksize.
 

My concern is that this is not a "real" company/exchange/service, but is rather a scam that is trying to gain publicity by advertising that they are going to do a stress test on Bitcoin.

I would somewhat doubt that the "test" actually happens, I think either the OP is going to "cancel" it because of a negative reaction, or we will hear silence.

Understood! But bitcoiners wouldn't be easily trust this kind of newly launched wallet provider! We all know that there are a lot of scams and hacks around crypto world! We are always cautious about keeping our bitcoin except the new bitcoiners.

Have a look at this:

The plan - We have setup 10 Bitcoin servers that will send approximately 2 transactions per second each - Each of these transactions will be approximately 3kb in size and will each spend to 10-20 addresses - The outputs will then be combined to create large 15-30kb transactions automatically pointing back to the original Bitcoin servers.
Example: https://blockchain.info/tx/888c5ccbe3261dac4ac0ba5a64747777871b7b983e2ca1dd17e9fc8afb962519

And two related bitcoin address:
https://blockchain.info/zh-cn/address/1NiFhMbV6cQrw4zZScEfkEQ9kofmWfXjNJ
https://blockchain.info/zh-cn/address/1Q6M9Vyuv5RyeuqpgJfCUCWrM2yrSb45BD
The transacton is as they claimed.These transactions was approximately 3kb in size and will each spend to 10-20 addresses - The outputs will then be combined to create large 15-30kb transactions.They took place continuely on these few days.IMO the test is there!

They are trying to pass themselves off as a service that is more established then they really are. If a potential customer were to think that a service is very well established then they would likely not due as extensive of due diligence as they might otherwise.

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[redhawk979]

I love all the "WHY CANT U DO THIS ON TESTNET YOU JERKS!" messages.

Can you imagine if an organization who hated Bitcoin like the big banks, a government, or mastercard spent cash to clog up the bitcoin network for weeks? You think they'd care that you called them mean names?

They are paying the necessary fees to use the network, even if you consider it spam. Welcome to the free market.

You think that is free market? To flood the network for maybe a 3 day backlog of unconfirmed transactions?

Yeah, you are right.
Lets also charge billions of penny transactions/per second through the visa/mastercard system and when they shut it down and freeze it due to fraud and ddos, we'll just shake our fist and be like "hey yous.. free market guyz".

Except that their system can probably handle that much better than Bitcoins 3tps. And they can cancel backlogged transactions without consensus.

So if these guys are paying the fee for the transactions, its bad? Who decides what is spam and what isnt? why is this bad, but dice transactions are ok?  

[Kprawn]

Guys and Gals.. sometimes we need to have real world testing in a live environment to have the best answers to our questions.

I have done this many times before on other networks and even if this is disruptive, the test results received from this is VERY valuable and worth the little disruption it may have caused over the short period it was done.

These guys have been open in warning people in advance that they would be doing these tests.. So that is already something positive, but it could taint their experiment.

I would have done this without prior notice and then published the result publicly for scrutiny to get the best real world results.

There is so much arguments about this, that some proof with facts would end this.

The danger of prior notice, could also open up the opportunity for someone else with bad intentions to jump in and run a simultaneous attack to cloud the results or to crash the system.

[cellard]

The zealous bitcoiners need to wake up and smell the coffee: we need to test the network under real circumstances before we can aim at reaching a mainstream audience. Imagine a bad actor with an agenda and lots of resouces tries to flood the network.. they could have done it before if they wanted to, they just don't see a real treat (yet). We need to know what would happen and we need to take the measures before a real enemy attemps a mega flood attack on the chain. And like Kprawn says, they should have done this in a random day without telling anyone to simulate a real attack. Now the results will not be as clear. Remember guys, a real attacker is not going to tell you "do you want this on the testnet or not?"

[ajas]

What shall we learn from this kind of experiment:

1) We need a limit on the block size. This limit has to be
   sufficiently large for day to day transaction amounts but
   sufficiently small to prevent scam to enter the blockchain.

2) There should be some self-adjustment of fees. Clients should be
   able to inquire from the full nodes an estimate for a reasonable
   fee based on the content of the mempool. This would allow for
   moderate fees under usual circumstances but would increase fees in
   times of flooding the blockchain with scam and would turn scamming
   into an expensive exercise.

[Ibian]

Could we look at it another way? What if the very idea of a limit on the blocksize is the problem? What if instead, each transaction had a fee based on the size of the transaction? That way no matter how big the block gets, the fees cover it.

[iram66680]

What shall we learn from this kind of experiment:

1) We need a limit on the block size. This limit has to be
   sufficiently large for day to day transaction amounts but
   sufficiently small to prevent spam to enter the blockchain.

2) There should be some self-adjustment of fees. Clients should be
   able to inquire from the full nodes an estimate for a reasonable
   fee based on the content of the mempool. This would allow for
   moderate fees under usual circumstances but would increase fees in
   times of flooding the blockchain with spam and would turn spamming
   into an expensive exercise.

1) Ineffective. The attack is meant to fill the entire block thus preventing the daily transaction from getting confirmed fast. Lowering or increasing the size will never solve the problem since spam transactions will still fill the blocks.
2) Ineffective. The attack can cause the fees to increase and discouraging users to make transaction.

BTW FTFY.

[Bitcoinpro]

A spam attack like this would bring down a bank for days

and result in police fbi etc involvement

for us to be protecting against this kind of attack means

we have become the Government 2.0

[Ibian]

A spam attack like this would bring down a bank for days

and result in police fbi etc involvement

for us to be protecting against this kind of attack means

we have become the Government 2.0

No, that's the point. There is no government in bitcoin. Anything goes. So we must make sure that nothing anybody tries breaks the system.

[NorrisK]

I guess it has got to hurt a little to get a message clear to the current devs. I hope tests like this will show the importance of steps that are to be taken.

[ACCTseller]

A spam attack like this would bring down a bank for days

and result in police fbi etc involvement

for us to be protecting against this kind of attack means

we have become the Government 2.0

No, that's the point. There is no government in bitcoin. Anything goes. So we must make sure that nothing anybody tries breaks the system.

Well from the looks of it, this kind of attack on bitcoin would be very inexpensive, at only ~20 BTC per day, this works out to be roughly $5,000 to launch this kind of an attack against bitcoin assuming the max block size stays the same.

An attacker like Western Union, who would have a lot to loose if bitcoin were to become massively adopted by the public, could launch this kind of spam attack and make bitcoin less desirable to most consumers.

[pereira4]

Could we look at it another way? What if the very idea of a limit on the blocksize is the problem? What if instead, each transaction had a fee based on the size of the transaction? That way no matter how big the block gets, the fees cover it.

This is probably harder to program than it sounds, and when dealing with big transactions the fee would be way too big to benefit from one of the main strong points of Bitcoin, which is moving money with low fees regardless of the amount you are moving.

[Ibian]

Could we look at it another way? What if the very idea of a limit on the blocksize is the problem? What if instead, each transaction had a fee based on the size of the transaction? That way no matter how big the block gets, the fees cover it.

This is probably harder to program than it sounds, and when dealing with big transactions the fee would be way too big to benefit from one of the main strong points of Bitcoin, which is moving money with low fees regardless of the amount you are moving.

Not amount, size. As in data size. Which I guess wasn't thought all the way through. Could just lift the limit with the way the system is set up now. Or set it to a hundred times what might be needed on average. Why hasn't this already been done when miners can just limit the sizes they accept anyway?

[mwizard]

The target will be to generate 1mb worth of transaction data every 5 minutes. At a cost of 0.0001 per kb (as per standard fees) this stress test will cost approximately 0.1 BTC every five minutes. Another way to look at the cost is 0.1 BTC per full block that we generate. We have allocated 20 BTC for this test, and therefore will be able to single handedly fill 100 blocks, or 32 hours worth of blocks. However, we will stop pushing transactions after 24 hours at 13:00 GMT Tuesday June 23.

More indications that this is a publicity stunt and will not happen.  It does not give confidence that the first bitcoinhash post by the author is signed

"Best wishes
Colonel Afurah,
Nigeria Army"

More specifically the maths seems wrong.  One block each 5 minutes for 24 hours is 288 blocks.  It is not clear where the 100 blocks comes from.  

There are other minor indicators that the author is not that familiar with computers, for example the use of mb and kb with lower case b for Megabytes and Kilobytes, rather than mB/MB and kB/KB.

[Spjuth]

And so it begins: https://blockchain.info/unconfirmed-transactions

[Buziss]

And so it begins: https://blockchain.info/unconfirmed-transactions

CMIIW, isn't it just 12:06 GMT (from http://time.is/GMT) at the moment, so it is still roughly an hour to go?

[GingerAle]

popcorn

[entons]

And so it begins: https://blockchain.info/unconfirmed-transactions

CMIIW, isn't it just 12:06 GMT (from http://time.is/GMT) at the moment, so it is still roughly an hour to go?

Yes, it should start in an hour. There was no block discovered for 20 minutes, so number of unconfirmed transactions is bigger then ususal.

[entons]

popcorn

Is there some convinient web page for monitoring attack and state of network, except blockchain.info?

[Spjuth]

And so it begins: https://blockchain.info/unconfirmed-transactions

CMIIW, isn't it just 12:06 GMT (from http://time.is/GMT) at the moment, so it is still roughly an hour to go?

I think GMT is UTC+1 right now since it is daylight savings time.
It seems to have started anyway, with full force. It seems to have killed statoshi
http://statoshi.info/dashboard/db/transactions

Edit:
Seems to work now. Showing ~14 TPS.
http://statoshi.info/dashboard/db/transactions?panelId=6&fullscreen