Are we stress testing again?

[bananas]

I don't get all the talking about miner's fee, we don't need to pay any fee at all if we don't want to and miners can leave if they want to.
If they leave the diffculty will be adjusted to the available hash power. We should not be held hostage of these mining corporations, mining could go back as low as the GPU days and it would not be a problem.

Why would the miners leave? What if they just ignore all the "low-fee" transactions? What could we, the bitcoin users, do except increasing the tx fee?

You are right that we could choose to not pay any fee if we don't want to.
But at the same time, the miners could choose to include our transactions if they don't want to.

That's exactly the problem, fees were created solely to avoid spam but it is actually being used as an extortion instrument.
The block reward should and must be the only reason to mine.

I believe miners themselves are spaming.

Are you aware, that the block reward will go to zero eventually?
So, that basically means, miners should work for free.

I don't believe that the last bitcoin will ever be mined, but supposing mining is not possible anymore for whatever reason we have to implement a solution when it is about to happen, not 500 years before it could happen in theory. Possibly voluntary non profit mining would be enough, see the nodes, there is a relay fee that i hardly believe could even pay for expenses of running it, for the most part nodes are voluntary.

[neurotypical]

3. Mempool will be overflow if the attacker just send millions of transactions, so there should be a mechanism to remove the transactions from the mempool if they are more than xx hours old

But then the real users and the attackers would and could re-broadcast their unconfirmed transactions to the network. IIRC, by default, bitcoin core will do so every half an hour.
So, I am not sure if this "remove from mempool" helps to counter or reduce the problem.

This could give legitimate users a choice to re-broadcast the transaction with higher fee or wait until another time. For attackers it does not matter since they are going to flood the network anyway

Again there is no universal solution against attacks. Chinese built a great wall, but the general that guarded the gate opened it for the enemy because of a woman

Reject high-frequency transactions from unknown source might be a better solution, but that means each node will be updated with a list for trusted high-frequency transaction entities, thus some kind of management scheme will be setup. Then there will be politics around who should or should not get into that list, will get complicated

Pure market driven solutions will not work due to some people who control large amount of resources will be able to attack for months while majority of users will not be able to compete with a higher fee. 1% of people having 99% of the resource is a fact

What if someone invents a way to automate microtransaction floods that come from a random source each time? that would be an headache.

[JorgeStolfi]

That's exactly the problem, fees were created solely to avoid spam but it is actually being used as an extortion instrument.
The block reward should and must be the only reason to mine.

The main purpose of the block reward was to get the coins in circulation.  In Satoshi's idea, mining would be done by the clients themselves. You want to use bitcoin? You can buy some, or you just mine some, helping to secure the system in a decentralized way.  He was very upset when someone wrote a GPU mining program, because it meant the end of such "popular" mining.  Considering the current centralization of mining (the 5 largest pools have >70% of the total hashpower; the 4 largest Chinese ones have >55%), a honest evaluation should be that bitcoin has failed, and cryptocurrency designers should go back to the drawing board, to find a way to keep mining distributed.

I believe miners themselves are spaming.

They have no motivation to spam; they would only collect fees that they paid themselves.  

But I agree that the variable fee is an open door to extortion. A mining cartel could easily impose monopoly-level fees.  The fee should be fixed by the protocol, so that miners could not charge a satoshi more or less; and transactions were processed first-come-first-served, to the extent that miners can be persuaded to do so.

[Rampion]

What I don't understand: there is a huge backlog (lots of waiting unconfirmed txs in the mempool) yet most blocks being mined are far from full. Most blocks seem to be ±731 KB, so there's almost 30% of unused space to put in more txs.

Why would miners not want to include txs when there's a whole bunch of them waiting? It's only extra fee for the miners.

It's just because having smaller blocks with faster propagation times is more profitable for them, or at least it was until now. Be sure that if allowing more transactions per block turns out more profitable they will just adjust.

[JorgeStolfi]

This could give legitimate users a choice to re-broadcast the transaction with higher fee

This is called "replace-by-fee" and there are several versions of it.  But it will only make the problem worse.  Your transaction many be delayed not only by those that will be issued after it, but also by those that were already issued and will be re-issued with a higher fee.  So you will have to stay connected, watching the queue and re-issuing your own transaction with higher fees, until it gets confirmed.

[monsanto]

I wonder if a wallet that utilized multiple blockchains (i.e., coins) would defeat this kind of attack. The wallet could monitor several blockchains for the most efficient route, based on fees, tx backlog, etc.  This might also incentive miners to discourage these attacks while also keeping fees low, because it would allow a real time comparison of the options for transferring funds.

Other than that, maybe these attacks would stop if transactions required captchas 

[johnyj]

What if someone invents a way to automate microtransaction floods that come from a random source each time? that would be an headache.

Exactly, there are many ways to spam the network, so there is no universal solutions, each type of spam can be identified through a pattern, and blocked through a protocol change, like anti virus /malware software update

Because majority of bitcoins are hoarded and used for large transactions, the spam will not impact too much, it will just reduce people's transaction frequency and increase the transacted amount each time (thus more fee is bearable). Only exchanges who do frequent transactions will be affected

At 7tps spam rate, 600K transactions per day will cost 60 btc at a fee of 0.0001 btc, that is $18000 at exchange rate of $300. even if the fee rise to 0.001 btc and blocksize increase to 10MB to make 70tps possible, that is $1.8 million, pocket change for banks. So if banks want to disable bitcoin, they can do it easily for a sustained period of time (FED can print 2.8 billion per day in QE). However, if bitcoin price rise another 10 times, fee rise to 0.01 btc and blocksize increase to 100MB, then banks need 1.8 billion per day to disable bitcoin, not practical any more, but then transaction will cost $30, just like an international wire, not suitable for small transactions any more

[Quantus]

What if someone invents a way to automate microtransaction floods that come from a random source each time? that would be an headache.

Exactly, there are many ways to spam the network, so there is no universal solutions, each type of spam can be identified through a pattern, and blocked through a protocol change, like anti virus /malware software update

Because majority of bitcoins are hoarded and used for large transactions, the spam will not impact too much, it will just reduce people's transaction frequency and increase the transacted amount each time (thus more fee is bearable). Only exchanges who do frequent transactions will be affected

At 7tps spam rate, 600K transactions per day will cost 60 btc at a fee of 0.0001 btc, that is $18000 at exchange rate of $300. even if the fee rise to 0.001 btc and blocksize increase to 10MB to make 70tps possible, that is $1.8 million, pocket change for banks. So if banks want to disable bitcoin, they can do it easily for a sustained period of time (FED can print 2.8 billion per day in QE). However, if bitcoin price rise another 10 times, fee rise to 0.01 btc and blocksize increase to 100MB, then banks need 1.8 billion per day to disable bitcoin, not practical any more, but then transaction will cost $30, just like an international wire, not suitable for small transactions any more

This would also create a fucking huge blockchain with massive bandwidth requirements causing full nodes to drop like flies. Bitcoin has hit a wall with no solution. WE are so fucked.  

EDIT:
Hyena posted https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1113292.0

I think bitcoin-core should start discarding unconfirmed TXs if they start to consume too much memory. TXs with the lowest priority should be discarded first. Also, individual TXs should contain a proof of work in addition to the fee. The proof of work should be optional and should increase the priority of the TX so that it would not be discarded so easily.

Could this be implemented without a hardfork?

[Sitarow]

What if someone invents a way to automate microtransaction floods that come from a random source each time? that would be an headache.

Exactly, there are many ways to spam the network, so there is no universal solutions, each type of spam can be identified through a pattern, and blocked through a protocol change, like anti virus /malware software update

Because majority of bitcoins are hoarded and used for large transactions, the spam will not impact too much, it will just reduce people's transaction frequency and increase the transacted amount each time (thus more fee is bearable). Only exchanges who do frequent transactions will be affected

At 7tps spam rate, 600K transactions per day will cost 60 btc at a fee of 0.0001 btc, that is $18000 at exchange rate of $300. even if the fee rise to 0.001 btc and blocksize increase to 10MB to make 70tps possible, that is $1.8 million, pocket change for banks. So if banks want to disable bitcoin, they can do it easily for a sustained period of time (FED can print 2.8 billion per day in QE). However, if bitcoin price rise another 10 times, fee rise to 0.01 btc and blocksize increase to 100MB, then banks need 1.8 billion per day to disable bitcoin, not practical any more, but then transaction will cost $30, just like an international wire, not suitable for small transactions any more

This would also create a fucking huge blockchain with massive bandwidth requirements causing full nodes to drop like flies. Bitcoin has hit a wall with no solution. WE are so fucked.  

EDIT:
Hyena posted https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1113292.0

I think bitcoin-core should start discarding unconfirmed TXs if they start to consume too much memory. TXs with the lowest priority should be discarded first. Also, individual TXs should contain a proof of work in addition to the fee. The proof of work should be optional and should increase the priority of the TX so that it would not be discarded so easily.

Could this be implemented without a hardfork?

Not a solution

However cost to attempt this can be steep. Additionaly as costs go up expect btc value to follow.

[readysalted89]

Just did a couple of transactions from MyCelium wallet and selected 'Priority' for the miner fee, which is still pretty low or almost nothing percentage wise, and all transactions were confirmed within 20 odd minutes.

As a test did another and selected 'Economic' for the miner fee which is the lowest you can set it on MyCelium and the transaction has been hanging for almost an hour now and on BlockInfo states that it will be included within next 6 blocks so maybe another hour.

I had something sent to me in a transaction 14 hours ago and it still isn't confirmed. There were over 16000 unconfirmed transactions when I checked 10 minutes ago. I thought the stress test was only going to last a day but it feels like it's been running longer this time. That makes it feel more like an attack on the network than a network test.

[el kaka22]

Today I've just forgot about the stress test spamming, and I've sent a tx with just 2000 satoshi fees (which could confirm in normal periods). The tx haven't been confirmed yet, together with 12k other transactions. So I could almost prove that the stress test spammers are still working till now.

[ChetnotAtkins]

There are currently 60000 (!) unconfirmed transactions. The Stress Testers are continuing for the third day in a row now.

[johnyj]

There are definitely lots of spam going on, these 0.00001 bitcoin transactions without fee happens quite often, don't know how did they managed to get into the blockchain. I remember that previous spam filter does not allow any transaction less then 5000 satoshi or something to be broadcasted

[Amitabh S]

I just sent a tx of about 0.7 kb with 0.00045 fee, which was confirmed within an hr.

So I think fee needs to be increased to counter this spam.

[spazzdla]

This isn't a stress test anymore boys it's an attack to convice us to fork.

Gavins plan is just way to aggressive.

I would agree to a doubling every 4 years to ensure the hardware advances well faster than the chain.

[Soros Shorts]

it's considered a dust transaction,  my bitcoind blocked it for that reason

Somebody should release to the public bitcoind builds with customizable dust filters. Then every full node that feels like it can to their part to block this garbage. In a perfect world nothing should be filtered, but as resources get scarce people should get used to the idea and implement it according to their own sense of fairness.

[johnyj]

This isn't a stress test anymore boys it's an attack to convice us to fork.

Gavins plan is just way to aggressive.

I would agree to a doubling every 4 years to ensure the hardware advances well faster than the chain.

Even the attack have some political implication, I don't think it will convince anybody to fork, a fork will just make the situation worse

Spammers can send millions of 0.0001 bitcoins without any fee to flood the mempool regardless of the blocksize. With a 20MB block, they will quickly raise the average block size to 20MB and heavily slowdown the network. On the contrary, it is safer to stay at current 1MB blocksize, so that spam can be analyzed thoroughly and dealt with

[Q7]

oh, that explains why I'm waiting too... didn't they run a stress test recently? why another one now? 

Maybe people are just not convinced of the result and wants to test it again. Looking at the current problem that we are having with the confirmation time, it really tells a lot whether we are ready for the future. It's clear we are not

[lucaspm98]

Ok, so does anybody have any clue when will my transaction go through?
Is there anything that can be done to speed the things up?
Thanks guys.
https://blockchain.info/address/1HpaHwTwtk2BHQ7QRGPrvvG2KQm5F1vL4w

You might be waiting a while for that one. If you send any more transactions try increasing the fee.

[lucaspm98]

This isn't a stress test anymore boys it's an attack to convice us to fork.

Gavins plan is just way to aggressive.

I would agree to a doubling every 4 years to ensure the hardware advances well faster than the chain.

The plan can be changed is the hardware doesn't keep up.

It is important to ensure the network keeps up with the transaction volume assuming Bitcoin continues to go mainstream.

If the doubling ins't needed or isn't possible then I am confident it can be delayed.