Let's welcome the stress test

[johnyj]

It is very interesting to see how community react to huge amount of spam transaction with very high fee, say 0.1 bitcoin per transaction

This will effectively push most of the transactions in mempool back in the queue so that they would never get confirmed

However, the fee reward for each block will become almost 100 bitcoins, this will greatly increase the profitability of mining, thus many people will start to mine bitcoin. Difficulty will skyrocket again

At the same time, the attacker would need to buy 14400 bitcoins from exchanges every day to facilitate the test, thus raise the exchange rate exponentially

So it seems that a large scale attack will just strengthen the bitcoin exchange rate, and when the price goes up by 10 fold, existing bitcoin holders can afford a much higher fee to compete with the attacker, and new comers would be attracted by the price rally, and accept a fee as long as it is a couple of percent, which they are familiar with in today's banking system

If the network naturally reach such a limitation, then all the participants will also reduce the transaction frequency and raise their fee to be ahead of the queue, so that eventually will achieve the same result, but slowly over time

This is all in contradiction with today's legacy financial system: In legacy financial systems, people always seek for higher and higher transaction speed to devalue the underlying currency. (mv=pq is the quantitative theory of money, with higher v, p becomes higher, means currency becomes cheaper) It is easy to predict that with lower transaction speed, the value of currency will rise

Notice that we are all born in a fiat money infested world, so we have been brainwashed from birth to take all the reasoning logic from the fiat money financial systems, which encourage lending, frequent spending and higher and higher transaction speed, at a cost of depreciating currency

But bitcoin is totally on the other end of the spectrum, it does not have many similarity with the fiat money system, the traditional utility driven behavior might not fit well with its design

[RustyNomad]

You touch on a very true point in regards to bitcoin not being the same as the fiat system.

I think that is also one of the main reasons why so many people do not see bitcoin for what it really is keep on trying to squash it into the fiat box where it does not fit and neither belong.

This stress test is going to be interesting from the point of the increased transaction fees. I however cannot see them keeping it up long enough to cause a 30 day backlog. Time will tell but I think they have high hopes or very very deep pockets.

[unamis76]

Your theory seems interesting, but in practice that might not happen, as we've seen from previous stress tests. Markets move in strange ways... And someone might feel like cashing out on top of the spammer.

And I don't really see people accepting a fee similar to fiat banks, that would definitely make me unattracted by Bitcoin...

That being said, I hope there will be no stress test, even if it has the positive implications you mentioned. As we could see from previous tests, this will only clog up the small 1MB blocks (or these transactions simply won't be mined, making the test irrelevant) and they already proved the point.

[Mickeyb]

Your theory seems interesting, but in practice that might not happen, as we've seen from previous stress tests. Markets move in strange ways... And someone might feel like cashing out on top of the spammer.

And I don't really see people accepting a fee similar to fiat banks, that would definitely make me unattracted by Bitcoin...

That being said, I hope there will be no stress test, even if it has the positive implications you mentioned. As we could see from previous tests, this will only clog up the small 1MB blocks (or these transactions simply won't be mined, making the test irrelevant) and they already proved the point.

Well correct me if I am wrong, but nobody has yet done a stress test with such a high tx fees, no? So the OP's theory is very interesting. Moreover, we cannot know how would network react and if OP's theory would come true if there would be no stress test.

So I welcome this stress test in this case. And I would sure as hell like to see the OP's theory coming true. This would make Bitcoin even more interesting as a technology and would definitely set a precedent in a finance world.

[MicroGuy]

That LAST thing we need at the moment is another stress test.

Anyone conducting such an experiment at this point in time is either misguided are intentionally harming Bitcoin.

[twister]

That LAST thing we need at the moment is another stress test.

Anyone conducting such an experiment at this point in time is either misguided are intentionally harming Bitcoin.

The XT guys are so keen on proving that they are right that they'll continue doing these stress tests even if that ends up harming bitcoin, they see that they might not win the consensus and so they're like if we don't win, no one wins. Let's hope that OP's theory is right and that it ends helping bitcoin by increasing it's price but I doubt it will happen, like last time we're going to see a lot of stuck up transactions with correct fee and it will make a lot of people angry when some of their important transactions get stuck due to this.

[kolloh]

These stress tests really do make bitcoin look bad. They are very annoying to average users as well.

[LordCoder]

These stress tests really do make bitcoin look bad. They are very annoying to average users as well.

Indeed, but that's how P2P works. Anyone can do whatever they want.

[acquafredda]

Johnyj,
considering what you say 1 BTC should value a lot more than the actual price if the test goes as you described.
But isn't it only a way for miners to get profits again after all this price stagnation?

[johnyj]

Your theory seems interesting, but in practice that might not happen, as we've seen from previous stress tests. Markets move in strange ways... And someone might feel like cashing out on top of the spammer.

And I don't really see people accepting a fee similar to fiat banks, that would definitely make me unattracted by Bitcoin...

That being said, I hope there will be no stress test, even if it has the positive implications you mentioned. As we could see from previous tests, this will only clog up the small 1MB blocks (or these transactions simply won't be mined, making the test irrelevant) and they already proved the point.

In fact, during their last test, I was not satisfied with my nodes performance, so I added a line in bitcoin.conf to drop the low fee transactions altogether. If many nodes are doing the same this time, then the test will not have any effect on the network unless they raise the fee enough high

Based on blockchain statistics, most of the transactions are larger than 0.5 bitcoin, so people could tolerate 0.005 bitcoin at ease, means that attackers would need to bid higher than 0.005 bitcoin fee to affect enough transactions to raise a concern

[johnyj]

Johnyj,
considering what you say 1 BTC should value a lot more than the actual price if the test goes as you described.
But isn't it only a way for miners to get profits again after all this price stagnation?

I think the price stagnation is caused by the current confusing status about this block size debate, since it revealed that there is no good decision making mechanism in bitcoin community yet. Once we passed this crisis and there is a well-established consensus decision making mechanism, we will be back to the stable growth path

[dothebeats]

Interesting theory. In order to create a significant backlog in the network, the stress-testers should first burn a lot of money for their transactions to pass through. And because of the added fee per tx, miners would profit heavily from this. Very interesting indeed, however, I don't think that they will go to that extent burning millions of $$$ to prove that the network isn't that robust and strong as we think it is.

[MicroGuy]

Looks like these guys could be facing potential criminal charges in the UK.

http://www.coindesk.com/bitcoin-spam-tests-could-violate-uk-law/

If you were to attack a banking network, you would be prosecuted. How is this any different?

[dothebeats]

Looks like these guys could be facing potential criminal charges in the UK.

http://www.coindesk.com/bitcoin-spam-tests-could-violate-uk-law/

If you were to attack a banking network, you would be prosecuted. How is this any different?

Afaik, the whole bitcoin network is not under any authorities or jurisdictions of any country, so why would they be liable to any criminal charges if they want to stress-test a peer-to-peer decentralized network?

[pattu1]

Looks like these guys could be facing potential criminal charges in the UK.

http://www.coindesk.com/bitcoin-spam-tests-could-violate-uk-law/

If you were to attack a banking network, you would be prosecuted. How is this any different?

I doubt if anybody would actually register a case and proceed to prosecute.
Who is going to be the victim? Somebody who didn't get his transaction confirmed because the fees was too small?

[LiteCoinGuy]

we need Blockstreams business sidechains NOW!


/s

[knight22]

Looks like these guys could be facing potential criminal charges in the UK.

http://www.coindesk.com/bitcoin-spam-tests-could-violate-uk-law/

If you were to attack a banking network, you would be prosecuted. How is this any different?

This is nonsense. Since when bitcoin needs laws to be protected? If that's the case, we can conclude that bitcoin is a big technical failure.

AFAIC bitcoin as a decentralized system is supposed to resist any kind of behaviours done by bad actors and they shouldn't be considered as a problem. The problem is the system that can't handle them.

If you disagree with this then why on earth did you put your money in such a weak system?  

[LiteCoinGuy]

The First US City With 10 GB Internet Is Salisbury in the US

http://www.wired.com/2015/09/first-us-city-10-gb-internet-salisbury/


hopefully they can handle 2 MB blocks 

[maokoto]

Stress test suck, they delay a lot of my working schedule, and it is not fair for small users. There might be a need to do one every year or so, but to have Bitcoin malfunctioning for days really does harm.

[dothebeats]

Stress test suck, they delay a lot of my working schedule, and it is not fair for small users. There might be a need to do one every year or so, but to have Bitcoin malfunctioning for days really does harm.

No one could actually do something about it, everyone can do what they want to do in the network as there would be no regulations to stop them. With every stress-test, just think of something like this: someone is burning loads of money in order to push the network to its limit and strengthen it by doing so.