The attack on the network is not hostile

[Quantus]

It should be clear to everyone by now that the attacker means us no harm.
Its been 5 days now and the transaction back log has leveled off between 40k and 50k.
It is clear the intention of this (ongoing) attack is to increase transaction fees.
If the top mining pools are behind this they might even be turning a profit.


EDIT to help others understand:

If they wanted to inflict damage, real damage they could have sent all that spam at once.
If this was just a "statement about block size" Then the attacker has failed; thus the attacker would ether give up or increase the rate of spam.

[1714834911]

1714834911

[1714834911]

1714834911

[1714834911]

1714834911

[Carlton Banks]

Interesting theory, but it's another way of saying that someone who intended transaction flooding as an attack has only really demonstrated that it's not much of an attack. Like so many of these sorts of things, we could have the proven perpetrator themselves telling us their motive, and we still couldn't prove that motive any more than they could. What's their next move, obtain more bitcoin for a bigger "attack"?

[Quantus]

If they wanted to inflict damage, real damage they could have sent all that spam at once.
But the spam comes in waves starting and stopping to keep the backlog in a target area.

[NewLiberty]

Miner revenue is up, but not by much.  Fees are still a small fraction of the mining reward.

[newIndia]

It should be clear to everyone by now that the attacker means us no harm.
Its been 5 days now and the transaction back log has leveled off between 40k and 50k.
It is clear the intention of this (ongoing) attack is to increase transaction fees.
If the top mining pools are behind this they might even be turning a profit.

It is clear that the intention of the attacker was not to harm bitcoin. They are trying to prove some point. But, that might not be what you guess here. They might be vying for a block size increase as well (I know that does not solve the problem altogether).

[Xialla]

Miner revenue is up, but not by much.  Fees are still a small fraction of the mining reward.

well, considering that majority of blocks are mined by just few companies, obviously for them makes sense to behave like this. Even fee like 0.5BTC per blocks makes difference, if you are mining XY blocks daily..

anyway I agree, that if there will be some harm behind, all this will be focused to single day or even couple of hours. This looks somehow different so far..

[neoneros]

But it is still running and going strong. It was a bit messy, but nothing really bad happened, i have seen bigger problems ocurring with fiat systems. So nothing has been proved other than the blockchain is a robust currency and validates it's existence. Hope it did have some value for the developers, so they can work on it and make  it even better. As long as the chain is not broken.

[Quantus]

But it is still running and going strong. It was a bit messy, but nothing really bad happened, i have seen bigger problems ocurring with fiat systems. So nothing has been proved other than the blockchain is a robust currency and validates it's existence. Hope it did have some value for the developers, so they can work on it and make  it even better. As long as the chain is not broken.

Yes, if this was just a "statement about block size" Then the attacker has failed; thus the attacker would ether give up or increase the rate of spam, right?

sorry for the edits.

[pedrog]

How much is the cost of the attack?

Is there any analysis on this?

[Quantus]

How much is the cost of the attack?

Is there any analysis on this?

I don't trust myself to do the math myself but I read it could be anywhere from 600 to 1600 dollars a day. The higher transaction fees would only cover this if the top 3 pools were working together. (I'm really bad at math)

[NorrisK]

How would them trying to earn a better revenue by sending spam not be considered an attack? It is still a malicious event.

[Q7]

It goes to show that if one day the bitcoin network grows considerably, it won't be able to cope up with all these amount of transactions coming in. It's trying to a prove a point here whether it is intentional or otherwise, the message is clear we are not prepared for all that.

[pedrog]

How much is the cost of the attack?

Is there any analysis on this?

I don't trust myself to do the math myself but I read it could be anywhere from 600 to 1600 dollars a day. The higher transaction fees would only cover this if the top 3 pools were working together. (I'm really bad at math)

That's way too cheap for a billion dollar network, almost anyone can do it...

It goes to show that if one day the bitcoin network grows considerably, it won't be able to cope up with all these amount of transactions coming in. It's trying to a prove a point here whether it is intentional or otherwise, the message is clear we are not prepared for all that.

Changes proposed by Gavin to increase blocksize were meant to be applied in a year or so, I guess they need to speed up the time frame to increase transaction rate.

[spazzdla]

If they wanted to inflict damage, real damage they could have sent all that spam at once.
But the spam comes in waves starting and stopping to keep the backlog in a target area.

HUm perhaps this is a warning we have a flaw and not an attack.. you could be onto something.

NON THE LESS, we need to act.

[NewLiberty]

How would them trying to earn a better revenue by sending spam not be considered an attack? It is still a malicious event.

The cost is going to be greater than the revenue increase, unless this is being performed by all miners equivalently.

I suppose some of it depends on your definition of 'malice', it may be done by a non-miner, no one has confessed to it yet, yes?

[NewLiberty]

If they wanted to inflict damage, real damage they could have sent all that spam at once.
But the spam comes in waves starting and stopping to keep the backlog in a target area.

HUm perhaps this is a warning we have a flaw and not an attack.. you could be onto something.

NON THE LESS, we need to act.

If you MUST ACT:
Raise your fees on your transactions, and move on to something more interesting.

[dothebeats]

Maybe this isn't done and isn't meant to be an attack in the first place, but somehow a test to see how far can the network go as transaction volume raises. It's true that we have lower number of transactions happening per second in our network, but still even in that low number we are already experiencing some slowdowns. What more if the network faces a huge surge of users and transactions if bitcoin is widely adopted?

[pereira4]

It should be clear to everyone by now that the attacker means us no harm.
Its been 5 days now and the transaction back log has leveled off between 40k and 50k.
It is clear the intention of this (ongoing) attack is to increase transaction fees.
If the top mining pools are behind this they might even be turning a profit.


EDIT to help others understand:

If they wanted to inflict damage, real damage they could have sent all that spam at once.
If this was just a "statement about block size" Then the attacker has failed; thus the attacker would ether give up or increase the rate of spam.

How has the attacker failed? we have tons of people here complaining about transaction taking ages, if anything it proves we need blocksize increase and LN as well.

[anderson00673]

Very funny, saying that it is not a hostile attack is like saying that getting mugged is not a hostile attack either.  Hey, the guy just wants some extra spending cash right?  I don't know of any evidence that the mining companies are behind this, but if they are it is a shady way to make a buck.

[OmegaStarScream]

I would really apreciate if someone could finally answser my question , I keep seeing a lot of threads speaking about an"attack" however I don't understand which attack is this .
If I understood the topic right then it's a transaction spam how he is doing it , dosen't that costs him money or he is sending Satoshi's ? :/ and how we could prevent this . a block size increase should do the job , no ? take it easy on me because I don't understand much on block size and fork and those stuff ty