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

[neochiny]

  i read this in ibtimes last day, i dont really understand about the backlog.will this affect our online wallets????it says,:
            "UK-based mining service CoinWallet is gearing up to conduct a stress test of the Bitcoin network in early September, which it said will likely render most standard wallet software "worthless" and create "nearly a 30-day backlog".

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[Cryddit]

  i read this in ibtimes last day, i dont really understand about the backlog.will this affect our online wallets????it says,:
            "UK-based mining service CoinWallet is gearing up to conduct a stress test of the Bitcoin network in early September, which it said will likely render most standard wallet software "worthless" and create "nearly a 30-day backlog".

Interesting.  Things are not as they seem, nor as they are claimed to be.

Hint:  They are spending far too much money on it for this to be a "stress test."  Figure out who profits.  Figure out whether the profit is enough to justify the expense.  Then you will understand what is really happening.  "Mining service" my ass.

As to the claim that it will render most standard wallet software worthless?  I know for sure that it won't bother wallets that run on full nodes.  So-called SPV clients?  I dunno, there's a bunch of them and I haven't reviewed all that code.  Web wallets?  There's no way of knowing at all; most don't even make it clear what code they're even running. 

The effect on transactions will be to extort slightly higher fees out of the users.  Pay a tiny increment in fees over what the backlog bids for block space, and your transactions will go through rapidly and get immediately into a block as usual.

[RustyNomad]

Last time round when they did this I was not affected as I just used higher transactions fees. All transactions still went into the next 1 or 2 blocks so no delays were experienced.

I think the important thing to remember when this 'test' is happening is to check your transactions fees. Most wallets now, like Electrum, has a suggested fee which should be fine to still get your transaction through quickly enough. Problem comes when you enter very low fees. Your transaction is then bound to get stuck together with the 'spam' they plan to release.

[neochiny]

  i read this in ibtimes last day, i dont really understand about the backlog.will this affect our online wallets????it says,:
            "UK-based mining service CoinWallet is gearing up to conduct a stress test of the Bitcoin network in early September, which it said will likely render most standard wallet software "worthless" and create "nearly a 30-day backlog".

Interesting.  Things are not as they seem, nor as they are claimed to be.

Hint:  They are spending far too much money on it for this to be a "stress test."  Figure out who profits.  Figure out whether the profit is enough to justify the expense.  Then you will understand what is really happening.  "Mining service" my ass.

As to the claim that it will render most standard wallet software worthless?  I know for sure that it won't bother wallets that run on full nodes.  So-called SPV clients?  I dunno, there's a bunch of them and I haven't reviewed all that code.  Web wallets?  There's no way of knowing at all; most don't even make it clear what code they're even running. 

The effect on transactions will be to extort slightly higher fees out of the users.  Pay a tiny increment in fees over what the backlog bids for block space, and your transactions will go through rapidly and get immediately into a block as usual.

oh you mention about higher fees. i remember this also they said in one of the paragraph..

""Of course, this won't cripple Bitcoin entirely. Those who are smart enough to increase their fees will still manage to push transactions through. However, it will make it prohibitively expensive, and will likely render most standard wallet software, ranging from Multibit, to Mycellium, Blockchain.info and others completely worthless"

[Cryddit]

Blockchain.io is a web wallet, and besides was already known to be completely worthless.  

The other two they mention are among the SPV clients I mentioned; I don't know whether they're robust to a backlog volume or not, but they will certainly require more bandwidth to be convinced they're "synchronized" with the network under high-backlog conditions.

[Kprawn]

This is not a test, it's called sabotage. They want to push people to pay higher transaction fee's and that has no benefit for the Bitcoin users.

The last "test" cost +/- $5000 per day, so they should in theory make more than that to break even.

The problem with these "attacks" is that other people would piggyback onto this and then achieve a much better result with their hostile attack, than what they would have achieved, when they did it alone. It would

become much cheaper to bring down the network.

[ABitNut]

This is an inherit part of the transaction economy. The amount of transactions in a specific time is limited. The miners will determine what transactions to include and they can do so arbitrarily. Obviously most will pick those transactions that bring them the highest revenue (highest transaction fees / size of the transaction).

If a single party wishes to "purchase" all available space they could do so by offering high fees on low size transactions. It will cost a bit but if they can make a profit out if it then why shouldn't they just do it?

[Kazimir]

Hearsay. Whatever. Don't care about this FUD. For most transactions it doesn't matter, and otherwise I will add 0.0002 BTC instead of 0.0001 BTC when I really need something to confirm fast.

[Gimpeline]

What on earth is the point of the stress tests? Sending more transactions than normally will be created the next few months is no test, its just spam

[neochiny]

so in general,you guys telling that it will really not affect us if we just pay higher price than before?  because something like this test happen also before and nothing was affected?

[LFC_Bitcoin]

Great news (not). This is just what we need after a 50 USD crash during the last month or so. Do they really need to start another stress test? Sometimes I feel like headbutting a wall reading some of the stuff supposed advocates of bitcoin propose. In all seriousness these stress tests are not needed now. I thought everything that needed to be learnt has already been documented after the last time?

[Yeah?]

  i read this in ibtimes last day, i dont really understand about the backlog.will this affect our online wallets????it says,:
            "UK-based mining service CoinWallet is gearing up to conduct a stress test of the Bitcoin network in early September, which it said will likely render most standard wallet software "worthless" and create "nearly a 30-day backlog".

Interesting.  Things are not as they seem, nor as they are claimed to be.

Hint:  They are spending far too much money on it for this to be a "stress test."  Figure out who profits.  Figure out whether the profit is enough to justify the expense.  Then you will understand what is really happening.  "Mining service" my ass.

How much are they spending? and wont they just be sending money from their own wallets to another wallet? So probably not costing them that much in fees if they're paying them at all that is. I don't buy the bullshit about them rendering wallets useless. All that'll happen at most is a backlog and probably not as long as they're claiming. Probably just fud.

[kelsey]

  i read this in ibtimes last day, i dont really understand about the backlog.will this affect our online wallets????it says,:
            "UK-based mining service CoinWallet is gearing up to conduct a stress test of the Bitcoin network in early September, which it said will likely render most standard wallet software "worthless" and create "nearly a 30-day backlog".

Interesting.  Things are not as they seem, nor as they are claimed to be.

Hint:  They are spending far too much money on it for this to be a "stress test."  Figure out who profits.  Figure out whether the profit is enough to justify the expense.  Then you will understand what is really happening.  "Mining service" my ass.

How much are they spending? and wont they just be sending money from their own wallets to another wallet? So probably not costing them that much in fees if they're paying them at all that is. I don't buy the bullshit about them rendering wallets useless. All that'll happen at most is a backlog and probably not as long as they're claiming. Probably just fud.

i think they are spending about 40k USD in fees all up to spam the network.

[ebliever]

It's not a "test" at this point, but rather an operation with a purpose. I suppose it is geared to  highlight the capacity bottleneck currently facing bitcoin and raise awareness of the need for a solution.

But I would have assumed that at this point the average bitcoin user is fairly aware of the whole block size debate. Perhaps not though, especially among certain sectors of users and the business community.

[gentlemand]

We already know what the issues are. I don't see the point of them wasting money and making lives more difficult than they need to be. Perhaps we should club together and stress test their wonderful service that'll save us all until it becomes unusable.

[BillyBobZorton]

We still have no idea who is being the coinwallet.eu website or enterprise, no real names or anything to be found, this leads me to believe that given the timing of the XT fork, it's an obvious plan to scare people away into pushing the agenda of moving to the XT fork. This is a genius plan to take over Bitcoin in my book.

[ljudotina]

We still have no idea who is being the coinwallet.eu website or enterprise, no real names or anything to be found, this leads me to believe that given the timing of the XT fork, it's an obvious plan to scare people away into pushing the agenda of moving to the XT fork. This is a genius plan to take over Bitcoin in my book.

This.

They are doing this just to show everyone: "This would not be possible if we had XT upgrade". What will everyone do? Well they will switch.
Instead of consensus they are forcing ppl to accept changes.

This is like mafia "protection". First you slap poor bastard hard and than you offer him "protection" from slapping.

"Who" is behind this "stress test"? Same ppl that have something to gain if everyone switched to XT.

[zeroday]

CoinWallet.eu is shady anonymous individual appeared recently just to advertise himself and XT fork.
Just ignore this crap. Slightly raising mining fees during attack will make his efforts useless.

[Dissonance]

who cares.  If bitcoin can't stand a stress test then it will never make it as a global payments protocol.

[valiz]

If we encounter problems with the size of the mempools for our nodes during the attack, then we can look in the release notes:

At the time of this release, the P2P network is being flooded with low-fee
transactions. This causes a ballooning of the mempool size.

If this growth of the mempool causes problematic memory use on your node, it is
possible to change a few configuration options to work around this. The growth
of the mempool can be monitored with the RPC command `getmempoolinfo`.

One is to increase the minimum transaction relay fee `minrelaytxfee`, which
defaults to 0.00001. This will cause transactions with fewer BTC/kB fee to be
rejected, and thus fewer transactions entering the mempool.

So we need to see whatever meager fee the attacker is paying, and set this minrelaytxfee slightly above and thus we make the attack ineffective.