CoinWallet says Bitcoin stress test in September will create 30-day backlog

[Racey]

Woohoooo! Hoooray for a new backlog! What are they planning to do? To prove a point that we need to have bigger blocks because of an intended stress-test? How about the normal days wherein transactions don't fill up the 1mb limit?

A planned heavy transaction numbers is different from the natural-occurring transactions per day on the network, so I don't really see what's the point of this stress-testing aside from pushing XT fork to happen.

It might be profitable for miners to force higher fees.

But is against the concept of bitcoin: low transaction fees.

Its nice that Coinwallet wakes up and decides to cripple the network for a month. Also, how far until we start calling these things attacks and not "stress-tests"?

I like that comment Borisz , What would Coinwallet think if the coinwallet website got stressed tested by unhappy users, the last time this happened some of my transactions took over a week to confirm.

It is denial of service (DDOS) the way I see it.

[jl2012]

They are paying 0.0001BTC (0.025USD) for 3000 bytes of tx. However, 0.0001BTC is the standard fee for a normal 250 bytes tx. While they are paying only 1/10 of standard fee, how could that be an effective attack? We may not be able to send free tx for 30 days but normal tx should go through with 0.025USD of fee.

It won't have real impact unless they increase the fee by 20x. However, the backlog will only be 1.5-day, at the attacker's expense of 150BTC. Even so, people can still get their tx confirmed with 0.1USD of fee

[sniveling]

How much is CoinWallet prepare to spend during their stress test? The longer a test goes on the more expensive it will be, and if everyone automatically starts paying higher fees then CoinWallet might have to spend a considerable sum. I guess the last stress tests ended because the testers ran out of money and I guess the duration of the next test will depend on when CoinWallet runs out of money..

[unamis76]

and if everyone automatically starts paying higher fees then CoinWallet might have to spend a considerable sum.

Now this would be nice

[quakefiend420]

I think it is still a good thing to show what happens when more transactions are being made..

People that are saying now that the blocks are currently not filled up need to rethink.. Isn't it better to solve a potential problem before it becomes a real problem?

You mean I should start taking lessons about how to be safe from snipers or sharks just because there is a potential threat of one, until its close I dont think this XT discussion is even needed.

Good point.  I'm sure it's WAY more likely that you're going to get attacked by a shark than the Bitcoin network will acquire more users... :/  Is this really your best argument?

[jstnrgrs]

Heck we got the message the first time, don't do it again.

Right?  What is the point?  Everyone knows.  We all know something needs to be done.  Why shoot bitcoin in the foot to get it done?  Maybe they want the btc price to plummet, and shut down other miners to decrease difficulty, then they can mine some blocks, and get ahead of the game?

I am in favor of larger block sizes, but this is not the way to make it happen.  In fact, if everyone disagrees with me then the end result will be higher fees imo resulting in BTC  becoming a storage of wealth and LTC becoming the major coin for transactions.  But No one should try to force the issue.  We need a community decision, consensus, not a rogue company trying to prove a point that has already been proven.

Stupid is as stupid does.

In this case, why wouldn't people move their wealth to LTC?  And why wouldn't LTC have the same problem as its transactions increase?

[sniveling]

Heck we got the message the first time, don't do it again.

Right?  What is the point?  Everyone knows.  We all know something needs to be done.  Why shoot bitcoin in the foot to get it done?  Maybe they want the btc price to plummet, and shut down other miners to decrease difficulty, then they can mine some blocks, and get ahead of the game?

I am in favor of larger block sizes, but this is not the way to make it happen.  In fact, if everyone disagrees with me then the end result will be higher fees imo resulting in BTC  becoming a storage of wealth and LTC becoming the major coin for transactions.  But No one should try to force the issue.  We need a community decision, consensus, not a rogue company trying to prove a point that has already been proven.

Stupid is as stupid does.

In this case, why wouldn't people move their wealth to LTC?  And why wouldn't LTC have the same problem as its transactions increase?

This post claims it's not possible to do the stress test attack to Litecoin because of a patch added to it. If that's true then wouldn't it be a good idea to add the same patch to Bitcoin? I'm not a dev and I don't know if that quoted post is telling the truth, but it sounds like a simple and easy to implement solution.

For anyone interested, it looks like coblee answered my question:

https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/3ci25k/the_current_spam_attack_on_bitcoin_is_not/

I know this is post is going to be controversial, but here goes...

This spam attack is not economically feasible on the Litecoin network. I will explain why.

Here's one of txns that is spamming the network: https://blockchain.info/tx/1ec8370b2527045f41131530b8af51ca15a404e06775e41294f2f91fa085e9d5

For creating 34 economically unfeasible to redeem UTXOs, the spammer only had to pay 0.000299 btc ($0.08). In order to clean up all these spammy UTXOs, you needed a nice pool to mine this huge transaction for free. And the only reason why the pool was able to was because the spammer sent these coins to simple brain wallets! If these were random addresses, they would stick around in the UTXO set forever! (or until each BTC is worth a lot)

The reason why Litecoin is immune to this attack is because Litecoin was attacked in a similar fashion (though to a much smaller degree) years ago. And I noticed this flaw in Bitcoin and patched it in Litecoin. There's code in Bitcoin that says if someone sends a tiny amount of coins to an output, make sure that he pays the mintxfee. This makes sense because you wouldn't want someone creating "dust" spam by sending small amount of coins. BUT the code still only enforces the same mintxfee if you send to many small outputs. The fix is simple: require a mintxfee for each tiny output.

Because of this fix, Litecoin's UTXO set is much more manageable than Bitcoin's. But the pull request for this that I created against the bitcoin codebase was rejected 3 years ago: https://github.com/bitcoin/bitcoin/pull/1536

One of the reasons why I created Litecoin was because it was hard for someone like me (who was a nobody back then) to make any changes to Bitcoin. Having a different set of developers take the code in a different direction can only be good for the resiliency of the whole cryptocurrency movement. And that is why there is value in altcoins.

[Meuh6879]

It might be profitable for miners to force higher fees.

not ... when the stress test cost than the fees reward.
i espect than Bitcoin network do this to avoid real SPAMMING strategy.

if not, well ... before rise block size, modify the policies (math formula) for fees priority, FIRST.