Next level Bitcoin stress test -- June 29-30 13:00 GMT 2015

[wizkid057]

Ah, the drama.  Looks like this malicious spam attack has no effect on other transactions than spam as well.  From #bitcoin on Freenode:

19:30 <@wizkid057> xx1d: I've been filtering the attack on Eligius since the first one (as you'll notice Eligius does not mine the attacker's spam).  I've also been monitoring Eligius's memory pool size.  As other pools mine spam filled blocks they also are mining the majority of the legit txns that Eligius is trying to mine, dropping Eligius's memory pool down to just tens of KB... meaning the attack is
19:30 <@wizkid057> effectively ineffective even without Eligius explicitly filtering (the filtering just gives me a good metric to monitor)

Just as the previous malicious spam attack.  An effective attack is going to cost a lot more, and require a large amount of capital in form of older larger inputs and larger outputs which are alowed to age before they are spent again.  The spammer is wasting his coins again, proving that bitcoin works well.  Smaller blocks only means the spammer wastes his coins more slowly.

The attack is not meant to harm the network. This test is designed to measure the effect of what will happen when transaction volume starts to pick up naturally.

Eligius filtering out the test's transactions is doing nothing but harm to Bitcoin and is a good reason why no one should mine on eligius. Filtering out transactions that belong to a certain person harms bitcoin's fungibility and it is things like their actions that will lead to Bitcoin's failure.

Agreed.
This also creates the precedence where miners are nonchalantly and flippantly willing to "blacklist" addresses.
A dangerous road to dance down. Eligius is complacent in the erosion of Bitcoin/bitcoin.

Miners have always been free to set policy on what transactions they mine and do not mine.  Eligius chooses not to mine spam from a scammer's attack and instead focus on legitimate usage of the network.

The goal of the attack is to slow down legitimate transaction processing... which by definition is a DoS (denial of service) attack.

Now, let's for a second hypothetically put aside the fact that this particular attack is actually a malicious attack attempt on bitcoin.  If there were a malicious and completely faceless attacker who was hell bent on harming bitcoin, and miners like Eligius could easily do something about it.... you're saying they shouldn't?    Seems counter intuitive.  'Those with the ability have the responsibility to take action' type of situation, and in this care the decision is pretty clear.  Why would I have Eligius mine this scammer's spam transaction when instead it can mine the transaction of someone who actually just used bitcoin to purchase something, or bought or sold bitcoin, or whatever other legitimate use case is actually happening as we speak?

Judging by miners moving to Eligius since I've announced the filtering of the spam attack (hash rate up over 10% in the last hour or so) I think miners are voting with their hash power (as they should be) and it's pretty clear what side of this argument they're on and they are more than welcome on Eligius.

Fortunately, as mentioned above, the attack is having severely limited success even without Eligius's help.  kudos to bitcoin.

[1714124959]

1714124959

[1714124959]

1714124959

[1714124959]

1714124959

[eleuthria]

What a bunch of fucking morons...this isn't needed in any way.  It's not like you're going to discover anything we don't already know.

[AgentofCoin]

Ah, the drama.  Looks like this malicious spam attack has no effect on other transactions than spam as well.  From #bitcoin on Freenode:

19:30 <@wizkid057> xx1d: I've been filtering the attack on Eligius since the first one (as you'll notice Eligius does not mine the attacker's spam).  I've also been monitoring Eligius's memory pool size.  As other pools mine spam filled blocks they also are mining the majority of the legit txns that Eligius is trying to mine, dropping Eligius's memory pool down to just tens of KB... meaning the attack is
19:30 <@wizkid057> effectively ineffective even without Eligius explicitly filtering (the filtering just gives me a good metric to monitor)

Just as the previous malicious spam attack.  An effective attack is going to cost a lot more, and require a large amount of capital in form of older larger inputs and larger outputs which are alowed to age before they are spent again.  The spammer is wasting his coins again, proving that bitcoin works well.  Smaller blocks only means the spammer wastes his coins more slowly.

The attack is not meant to harm the network. This test is designed to measure the effect of what will happen when transaction volume starts to pick up naturally.

Eligius filtering out the test's transactions is doing nothing but harm to Bitcoin and is a good reason why no one should mine on eligius. Filtering out transactions that belong to a certain person harms bitcoin's fungibility and it is things like their actions that will lead to Bitcoin's failure.

Agreed.
This also creates the precedence where miners are nonchalantly and flippantly willing to "blacklist" addresses.
A dangerous road to dance down. Eligius is complacent in the erosion of Bitcoin/bitcoin.

Miners have always been free to set policy on what transactions they mine and do not mine.  Eligius chooses not to mine spam from a scammer's attack and instead focus on legitimate usage of the network.

The goal of the attack is to slow down legitimate transaction processing... which by definition is a DoS (denial of service) attack.

Now, let's for a second hypothetically put aside the fact that this particular attack is actually a malicious attack attempt on bitcoin.  If there were a malicious and completely faceless attacker who was hell bent on harming bitcoin, and miners like Eligius could easily do something about it.... you're saying they shouldn't?    Seems counter intuitive.  'Those with the ability have the responsibility to take action' type of situation, and in this care the decision is pretty clear.  Why would I have Eligius mine this scammer's spam transaction when instead it can mine the transaction of someone who actually just used bitcoin to purchase something, or bought or sold bitcoin, or whatever other legitimate use case is actually happening as we speak?

Judging by miners moving to Eligius since I've announced the filtering of the spam attack (hash rate up over 10% in the last hour or so) I think miners are voting with their hash power (as they should be) and it's pretty clear what side of this argument they're on and they are more than welcome on Eligius.
...

Miners are miners and profit is profit.

Miners are not really concerned with Bitcoin/bitcoins future use and growth, they are only concerned with ROI now.
They can and do jump ship at will.
If miners do, in the future, as you say, and are doing currently, then the golden goose is already dead.

When the Miners determine what to transact and not transact (or whitelist and blacklist),
they are cooperating with those who wish to deteriorate the system and ultimately control the system.

If you are not careful, with your way of thinking, one day it could be possible to blacklist all Eligius's block rewards, and other miners may agree.
If you open the can, you won't know what you have really done, till its done.

I am just a noob, but all transactions/addresses/coins must all remain valid, or one day none will be.

[wizkid057]

Ah, the drama.  Looks like this malicious spam attack has no effect on other transactions than spam as well.  From #bitcoin on Freenode:

19:30 <@wizkid057> xx1d: I've been filtering the attack on Eligius since the first one (as you'll notice Eligius does not mine the attacker's spam).  I've also been monitoring Eligius's memory pool size.  As other pools mine spam filled blocks they also are mining the majority of the legit txns that Eligius is trying to mine, dropping Eligius's memory pool down to just tens of KB... meaning the attack is
19:30 <@wizkid057> effectively ineffective even without Eligius explicitly filtering (the filtering just gives me a good metric to monitor)

Just as the previous malicious spam attack.  An effective attack is going to cost a lot more, and require a large amount of capital in form of older larger inputs and larger outputs which are alowed to age before they are spent again.  The spammer is wasting his coins again, proving that bitcoin works well.  Smaller blocks only means the spammer wastes his coins more slowly.

The attack is not meant to harm the network. This test is designed to measure the effect of what will happen when transaction volume starts to pick up naturally.

Eligius filtering out the test's transactions is doing nothing but harm to Bitcoin and is a good reason why no one should mine on eligius. Filtering out transactions that belong to a certain person harms bitcoin's fungibility and it is things like their actions that will lead to Bitcoin's failure.

Agreed.
This also creates the precedence where miners are nonchalantly and flippantly willing to "blacklist" addresses.
A dangerous road to dance down. Eligius is complacent in the erosion of Bitcoin/bitcoin.

Miners have always been free to set policy on what transactions they mine and do not mine.  Eligius chooses not to mine spam from a scammer's attack and instead focus on legitimate usage of the network.

The goal of the attack is to slow down legitimate transaction processing... which by definition is a DoS (denial of service) attack.

Now, let's for a second hypothetically put aside the fact that this particular attack is actually a malicious attack attempt on bitcoin.  If there were a malicious and completely faceless attacker who was hell bent on harming bitcoin, and miners like Eligius could easily do something about it.... you're saying they shouldn't?    Seems counter intuitive.  'Those with the ability have the responsibility to take action' type of situation, and in this care the decision is pretty clear.  Why would I have Eligius mine this scammer's spam transaction when instead it can mine the transaction of someone who actually just used bitcoin to purchase something, or bought or sold bitcoin, or whatever other legitimate use case is actually happening as we speak?

Judging by miners moving to Eligius since I've announced the filtering of the spam attack (hash rate up over 10% in the last hour or so) I think miners are voting with their hash power (as they should be) and it's pretty clear what side of this argument they're on and they are more than welcome on Eligius.
...

Miners are miners and profit is profit.

Miners are not really concerned with Bitcoin/bitcoins future use and growth, they are only concerned with ROI now.
They can and do jump ship at will.
If miners do, in the future, as you say, and are doing currently, then the golden goose is already dead.

When the Miners determine what to transact and not transact (or whitelist and blacklist),
they are cooperating with those who wish to deteriorate the system and ultimately control the system.

If you are not careful, with your way of thinking, one day it could be possible to blacklist all Eligius's block rewards, and other miners may agree.
If you open the can, you won't know what you have really done, till its done.

I am just a noob, but all transactions/addresses/coins must all remain valid, or one day none will be.

I think this post pretty much proves your ignorance of the situation and how miners function and what their purpose is.

I'll just point out one thing and leave the rest alone.... Keep in mind that with Eligius filtering the spam transactions miners are not getting the fees those spam transactions carry.  So, this is not a for profit decision.  It's a decision to help bitcoin in general.

Miners have always determined what transactions make it into blocks.  This is nothing new and nothing that will change.

[ChetnotAtkins]

KingAfurah, why don't you flood the mempool as you planned but continue this sustained slightly elevated tx number? Wouldn't it be far more interesting to push the mempool as high as possible for this test?

[coolbeans94]

Is this attack/test still going on?

[Meuh6879]

Ah ... sweet !

[hodlmybtc]

I haven't followed this latest stress test, is it different than the previous where there weren't that many transactions but transactions were big in size?

[LFC_Bitcoin]

I was sent 0.18 BTC & 0.095 BTC today a few hours ago for my Da Dice sig & avatar campaigns that I am enrolled in.
Blockchain.info is showing both transactions as received but no confirmations.
My worry though is that neither transaction is showing up on my BTC core client, not even as unconfirmed transactions, just nothing, not received.
What's going on? I've never had anything like this in over 2 years.
Is this related to the stress test?

[hf100]

I was sent 0.18 BTC & 0.095 BTC today a few hours ago for my Da Dice sig & avatar campaigns that I am enrolled in.
Blockchain.info is showing both transactions as received but no confirmations.
My worry though is that neither transaction is showing up on my BTC core client, not even as unconfirmed transactions, just nothing, not received.
What's going on? I've never had anything like this in over 2 years.
Is this related to the stress test?

It's probably the result of the stress test that flooded the network with minuscule spam transactions. There are over 8000 unconfirmed transactions in a queue waiting to get in a block, and your payment is probably one of those waiting in line. Each block can only hold 1 MB and some miners refuse to fill blocks up fully so confirmed payments are being delayed until the miners can get through the backlog of unconfirmed transactions.

https://blockchain.info/unconfirmed-transactions

[LFC_Bitcoin]

I was sent 0.18 BTC & 0.095 BTC today a few hours ago for my Da Dice sig & avatar campaigns that I am enrolled in.
Blockchain.info is showing both transactions as received but no confirmations.
My worry though is that neither transaction is showing up on my BTC core client, not even as unconfirmed transactions, just nothing, not received.
What's going on? I've never had anything like this in over 2 years.
Is this related to the stress test?

It's probably the result of the stress test that flooded the network with minuscule spam transactions. There are over 8000 unconfirmed transactions in a queue waiting to get in a block, and your payment is probably one of those waiting in line. Each block can only hold 1 MB and some miners refuse to fill blocks up fully so confirmed payments are being delayed until the miners can get through the backlog of unconfirmed transactions.

https://blockchain.info/unconfirmed-transactions

These are the 2 transactions (not that anybody cares lol)

https://blockchain.info/tx/507786c7c0533ff032426df74c937d23101e0323f97b06d32be0dafcf8974c68

https://blockchain.info/tx/1c66569e8e0d2e75929e576fb25b5dc5761f16dc597abd9033a5ba57e41dd5ef

Edit - Now blockchain.info is down , it's had enough

[hodlmybtc]

I was sent 0.18 BTC & 0.095 BTC today a few hours ago for my Da Dice sig & avatar campaigns that I am enrolled in.
Blockchain.info is showing both transactions as received but no confirmations.
My worry though is that neither transaction is showing up on my BTC core client, not even as unconfirmed transactions, just nothing, not received.
What's going on? I've never had anything like this in over 2 years.
Is this related to the stress test?

It's probably the result of the stress test that flooded the network with minuscule spam transactions. There are over 8000 unconfirmed transactions in a queue waiting to get in a block, and your payment is probably one of those waiting in line. Each block can only hold 1 MB and some miners refuse to fill blocks up fully so confirmed payments are being delayed until the miners can get through the backlog of unconfirmed transactions.

https://blockchain.info/unconfirmed-transactions

These are the 2 transactions (not that anybody cares lol)

https://blockchain.info/tx/507786c7c0533ff032426df74c937d23101e0323f97b06d32be0dafcf8974c68

https://blockchain.info/tx/1c66569e8e0d2e75929e576fb25b5dc5761f16dc597abd9033a5ba57e41dd5ef

Edit - Now blockchain.info is down , it's had enough

Fee is too low, especially during a stress test, it will confirm eventually tho but you could potentially wait 1-2 days.

[ajas]

Ah, the drama.  Looks like this malicious spam attack has no effect on other transactions than spam as well.  From #bitcoin on Freenode:

19:30 <@wizkid057> xx1d: I've been filtering the attack on Eligius since the first one (as you'll notice Eligius does not mine the attacker's spam).  I've also been monitoring Eligius's memory pool size.  As other pools mine spam filled blocks they also are mining the majority of the legit txns that Eligius is trying to mine, dropping Eligius's memory pool down to just tens of KB... meaning the attack is
19:30 <@wizkid057> effectively ineffective even without Eligius explicitly filtering (the filtering just gives me a good metric to monitor)

Just as the previous malicious spam attack.  An effective attack is going to cost a lot more, and require a large amount of capital in form of older larger inputs and larger outputs which are alowed to age before they are spent again.  The spammer is wasting his coins again, proving that bitcoin works well.  Smaller blocks only means the spammer wastes his coins more slowly.

The attack is not meant to harm the network. This test is designed to measure the effect of what will happen when transaction volume starts to pick up naturally.

Eligius filtering out the test's transactions is doing nothing but harm to Bitcoin and is a good reason why no one should mine on eligius. Filtering out transactions that belong to a certain person harms bitcoin's fungibility and it is things like their actions that will lead to Bitcoin's failure.

Miners are free to set the policy on what transactions they mine. Pools should make this policy public and transparent and miners will have the choice to join them or not. I just moved to eligius for this reason.  Others may leave.

[Tamo]

I just registered to tell you that my bitstamp withdrawal has been stuck for 8 hours because of these "stress tests"
I have now missed making my mortgage payment because of this. Thanks... I'm already completely broke and struggling to feed my family. Now I have more bank charges and lost value from today's peak.

Way to hit the small guys.

My last 4 BTC.

[sturle]

What needless extra crap?  I didn't mention any needless extra crap.

You said

using internal transactions at exchanges where both have a wallet

but if I know 10 different people who use 10 different exchanges, I'm clearly not going to sign up to all of them because that's somehow "smarter".

Of course not, but you may choose to sign up to some kind of service with a shared wallet if that enables you to send transactions for free to other users.  Or you can pay the fee to do it on chain.  Up to you.  Yes, a shared wallet is less safe, but this is about very small amounts where you don't think the fee is worth it.

And the official release date for Lightning is when?
…
And the official release date for sidechains is when?

Probably long before the need for larger blocks arise.  As this spam attack shows, there is plenty room for spam in the blocks already.  No need to encourage more of it.

You don't get it, do you?  Increasing fees means increasing miner rewards at no cost to the miners.  Larger blocks incurs a cost, which is why many miners don't fill the blocks even today.

I get it just fine, thanks.  But I'm pretty sure there will be some miners who would like to mine some larger blocks and collect the extra fees from all the additional transactions they'll be processing.  Hence several of the large pools expressing an interest in 8MB blocks.  I suppose you think they don't get it either?

A larger block size enables more transactions, not more fees.  Think about it.  It will only make the transactions cheaper.  The total amount of fees will not increase.  The supply of block space increases, and the resource will no longer be as limited as it used to be, so people will pay less per kB.

There is no reason to keep the reward at 25 BTC.  The cost of that to everyone who want the security and privacy of running a full node is too high.

So you honestly expect miners to take a hit every single time the reward halves?  I thought I was the one who didn't understand their costs?  One way or another, fees need to go up.

Take a hit?  Do you seriously not think miners have the block reward halving in mind when calculating their ROI already?  It is not something unknown that suddenly jumps up and attack miners.  It is perfectly predictable.  More predictable than the difficulty.

[AgentofCoin]

I think this post pretty much proves your ignorance of the situation and how miners function and what their purpose is.

I'll just point out one thing and leave the rest alone.... Keep in mind that with Eligius filtering the spam transactions miners are not getting the fees those spam transactions carry.  So, this is not a for profit decision.  It's a decision to help bitcoin in general.

Miners have always determined what transactions make it into blocks.  This is nothing new and nothing that will change.

Oh so you didn't actually address what I was saying, but instead made statements of my ignorance.
Which btw, I admitted when I stated I was a noob, so thank you for your confirmation without explanation and correction of my understanding.

My understanding is miners "choose" transaction based on fee amount and are placed into priority, not what you are saying which is:
"Miners have always determined what transactions make it into blocks.  This is nothing new and nothing that will change."

But you aren't doing that. You have blacklisted the addresses of the "attacker", "Spammer", "tester" whatever people want to call them.


Are you saying that all miners are blacklisting addresses? That's news to me and I'm sure other bitcoiners as well.
 

[sturle]

The attack is not meant to harm the network. This test is designed to measure the effect of what will happen when transaction volume starts to pick up naturally.

Yes it is.  If the malicious spammer wanted to test something, we have a testnet for that.  This is exactly what the testnet is ment for.

Eligius filtering out the test's transactions is doing nothing but harm to Bitcoin and is a good reason why no one should mine on eligius. Filtering out transactions that belong to a certain person harms bitcoin's fungibility and it is things like their actions that will lead to Bitcoin's failure.

Do you read and store all your email spam as well, forwarding copies to all your friends?

[wizkid057]

I think this post pretty much proves your ignorance of the situation and how miners function and what their purpose is.

I'll just point out one thing and leave the rest alone.... Keep in mind that with Eligius filtering the spam transactions miners are not getting the fees those spam transactions carry.  So, this is not a for profit decision.  It's a decision to help bitcoin in general.

Miners have always determined what transactions make it into blocks.  This is nothing new and nothing that will change.

Oh so you didn't actually address what I was saying, but instead made statements of my ignorance.
Which btw, I admitted when I stated I was a noob, so thank you for your confirmation without explanation and correction of my understanding.

My understanding is miners "choose" transaction based on fee amount and are placed into priority, not what you are saying which is:
"Miners have always determined what transactions make it into blocks.  This is nothing new and nothing that will change."

But you aren't doing that. You have blacklisted the addresses of the "attacker", "Spammer", "tester" whatever people want to call them.


Are you saying that all miners are blacklisting addresses? That's news to me and I'm sure other bitcoiners as well.
 

Incorrect.  The specific patch to Eligius which blocks this attack does not include any blacklist or addresses.

[tl121]

I did a transaction with a my usual transaction fee settings (slightly larger than standard fee) half an hour ago.  The transaction was sent by my Electrum client via my Electrum server.  Blockchain Info showed that the transaction confirmed in 6 minutes (next block).

However, at this network  load my Electrum server was lagging and I didn't see the confirmation for some time.  The server runs on a slow processor and the Electrum Server is using about 7 times as much CPU time as the bitcoin core node on the same machine.  Another problem was that the Electrum client (on a different machine) still hadn't picked up the confirmation for several minutes after the Electrum server was done processing the block containing the confirmation.  I restarted the client and this time it worked.

Performance (so far) of Bitcoin Core has been exemplary.  Performance of Electrum, less so.

[AgentofCoin]

I think this post pretty much proves your ignorance of the situation and how miners function and what their purpose is.

I'll just point out one thing and leave the rest alone.... Keep in mind that with Eligius filtering the spam transactions miners are not getting the fees those spam transactions carry.  So, this is not a for profit decision.  It's a decision to help bitcoin in general.

Miners have always determined what transactions make it into blocks.  This is nothing new and nothing that will change.

Oh so you didn't actually address what I was saying, but instead made statements of my ignorance.
Which btw, I admitted when I stated I was a noob, so thank you for your confirmation without explanation and correction of my understanding.

My understanding is miners "choose" transaction based on fee amount and are placed into priority, not what you are saying which is:
"Miners have always determined what transactions make it into blocks.  This is nothing new and nothing that will change."

But you aren't doing that. You have blacklisted the addresses of the "attacker", "Spammer", "tester" whatever people want to call them.


Are you saying that all miners are blacklisting addresses? That's news to me and I'm sure other bitcoiners as well.
 

Incorrect.  The specific patch to Eligius which blocks this attack does not include any blacklist or addresses.

Well I don't see how it could determine who the attacker is without some reference point, such as address, ip, node, or etc.

If you are just rejecting all transactions below a certain miner fee and not including in a block, then I have no problem, in theory.
I'm only against outright blacklisting/whitelisting of addresses/coins/etc that will ultimately lead to Bitcoin/bitcoin's destruction.