[1000 unconfirmed transaction] Spam attack has practically ended for 2 days!

[AliceWonderMiscreations]

This shows us that there is absolutely no need for Bitcoin Unlimited or I do not know what other scaling solution that is absolutely not needed.

Quite the opposite, it shows us there is a need because it demonstrates quite clearly that the limited block size creates an attack vector that works.

[mindrust]

I withdrew my bitcoins from the exchange today and i couldn't believe my eyes. They arrived in 30 mins or so. There were times i waited more than a day. I don't know what happened but may be it is related to recent 60$ flash pump.

[1Referee]

I withdrew my bitcoins from the exchange today and i couldn't believe my eyes. They arrived in 30 mins or so. There were times i waited more than a day. I don't know what happened but may be it is related to recent 60$ flash pump.

No. Exchanges in general add poor fees that are not pointed at how the network situation is by the time you request a cashout. In this case, mempools are not suffering from a heavy spam attack anymore, and thus people don't have to outbid each other with higher transaction fees to get included in the next block(s). Generally, the fee you need to include right now to attract attention from pools is significantly lower, and thus explains why your current cashout got confirmed sooner than the previous ones.

[Rahar02]

-snip-
as i am writing this there are 920 unconfirmed transactions in the memory pool and the last 4 blocks are practically empty

There is no "the" mempool. Which website did you use as your source for this information? There are some more shown here: https://www.blocktrail.com/BTC/pools?resolution=24h
My node is also hovering a bit above 1k unconfirmed transactions, at the time of writing. Hopefully you now see *who* might have been doing this to support *certain "urgent" solutions*.

thanks for the addition, i understand that.
i mostly meant as a comparison of numbers. 920ish (seen on https://blockchain.info/unconfirmed-transactions which is currently at 2507 also the similar number seen on http://statoshi.info/dashboard/db/memory-pool) versus 10,000 seen on the same sources back when the spam attack was ongoing.

I always thought that so many unconfirmed transaction due to all time high price when people in rush to buy, send or sell bitcoin which overwhelm the network. I'm wondering if that's true, that some people did spam attack.
However, those numbers of unconfirmed transaction are great and proven we do not need unlimited block size for now, SegWit is more than enough, great solution from devs team.

[jonald_fyookball]

Lauda and Holliday you just both proved my point.

Wrong. I have mentioned neither client, neither solution nor anything. If you were deeply involved in trading, you'd know what is up. Investors don't give a single damn about rising TX fees, they care about risks, one of which is a contentious HF.

"no HF" synonymous with "no network split" , synonymous with "core continues status quo.

[Pursuer]

Lots of alt-coins have been cheaper and faster over the last 4 years, still are.
An old saying
"It is not about the return on your money, it is about the return of your money."

this cheapness and fastness always comes with a cost. the only thing people usually see is the price of those altcoins that is volatile but that is only one of the risks and it is not even the biggest one!
one of the biggest threats is always an unsecure network and that happens when there aren't enough full nodes running. we have all heard people bitch and moan about bitcoin blockchain be big and them having hard time running a full node.
now think what happens when the blockchain of these "faster" altcoins reaches 500 GB! how many nodes do you think will remain running a cheap altcoin?
and with their numbers falling the network of that altcoin would crumble and all hell will break lose.

Besides, I personally am glad more bagholders are leaving Bitcoin, for every one bagholder that exits come 10 new excited, interest, entrepreneurial investors ready to take Bitcoin and business to the next stage. And one less pump and dumper.

I disagree.
I don't think anyone is leaving bitcoin. nobody who has "bags of bitcoin" and invested money in it, is not foolish enough to leave with FUD. those who panic are newbies who don't even have enough bitcoin in wallets to call it a "bag"

[dinofelis]

this cheapness and fastness always comes with a cost. the only thing people usually see is the price of those altcoins that is volatile but that is only one of the risks and it is not even the biggest one!
one of the biggest threats is always an unsecure network and that happens when there aren't enough full nodes running. we have all heard people bitch and moan about bitcoin blockchain be big and them having hard time running a full node.
now think what happens when the blockchain of these "faster" altcoins reaches 500 GB! how many nodes do you think will remain running a cheap altcoin?
and with their numbers falling the network of that altcoin would crumble and all hell will break lose.

Yes, I think you need to find some excuse why bitcoin is wasting 400 million dollars a year

Even ETC wasn't attacked seriously when it split off ETH as a small minority chain.  No major altcoin ever suffered a serious block chain break down.  Not more than bitcoin in the past, when it was much smaller than those altcoins are right now.

And no, nodes don't count for shit in "maintaining the security of the network" in a proof of work system (PoS is different...)

Keep telling yourself that only bitcoin is secure, and that you need to waste 400 million dollars a year to maintain essentially 10 miners serving the bitcoin block chain, because it is the nodes on the PC of amateurs like me that "maintain the security".  And then ponder why proof of work would actually be needed, if nodes maintain the security of the network.  And then ponder why altcoins, much bigger than bitcoin a few years ago, would fail when bitcoin didn't.

And then ask yourself honestly if the story makes sense.

[dinofelis]

I don't think anyone is leaving bitcoin. nobody who has "bags of bitcoin" and invested money in it, is not foolish enough to leave with FUD. those who panic are newbies who don't even have enough bitcoin in wallets to call it a "bag"

You mean, the people with nodes, like me

I weight for 1/4000 in the "voting", but I can really assure you that my weight is NOT 1/4000 of the market cap
Even if you square that number, you're far off.  I only have bitcoin if I need something to buy with it.  Rarely.

[kiklo]

everyone is too busy arguing about nonsense about a possible fork in a far away future and lots of FUD in this board alone, that they even missed the fact that the memory pool has been literary empty for the past 48+ hours!

as i am writing this there are 920 unconfirmed transactions in the memory pool and the last 4 blocks are practically empty

457985    31.10
--- full
457983    892.58 KB
457982    353.94 KB
457981    316.85 KB
457980    208.78 KB
--- full
457977    0.259 KB
--- full

I know i am going to jinx it now

LOL,  

BTU Unlimited gains the upper hand, and all of a sudden the spamming of transactions stop cold.

You do realize the implications of what you are saying ,
Directly Points to BlockStream/segwit/LN Supporters as the Ones behind the Spam attacks trying to force it's adoption.
Now that it is apparent they have lost to BTU, they drop the attack hoping that BTU does not receive the few 15% more it needs to fix BTC FOREVER.


 

[szpalata]

I withdrew my bitcoins from the exchange today and i couldn't believe my eyes. They arrived in 30 mins or so. There were times i waited more than a day. I don't know what happened but may be it is related to recent 60$ flash pump.

We hope it will stay thus quicker and confirm faster like it used to be. I think there was too much spam in the network that accounted for the undue delays but I'm happy we've started seeing positive signs of quicker confirmations.

[pooya87]

It seems like i have indeed jinxed it. the good times only lasted about 2 days and spam attack has started again!


and we are back to 10K to 20K with a steady rate of injecting transactions into the network:

i mean c'mon at least make the effort of hiding it

[spartacusrex]

I'm gonna have a stab at this and say that it wasn't spam.

When you reach capacity at any club, and people keep turning up, the queue starts to grow pretty quickly. That's what's happening.

Whenever Bitcoin is 'Raging' - in all the papers, price going up, optimism flying high, the TXN/s simply increase, by a noticeable factor (2x?). And since we are 'almost' at capacity, it only takes a small push for the mempool to start growing.

Now that things have chilled out again, we're back to normal..

That's my take on it.

[Lauda]

I'm gonna have a stab at this and say that it wasn't spam.
-snip-

You want to tell me that the tens of thousands transactions in the following format: Address A -> Address A
Are real financial transactions? It is most certainly spam.

[spartacusrex]

I'm gonna have a stab at this and say that it wasn't spam.
-snip-

You want to tell me that the tens of thousands transactions in the following format: Address A -> Address A
Are real financial transactions? It is most certainly spam.

ah.. lol.. ok.. That is pretty obvious..

[AngryDwarf]

I'm gonna have a stab at this and say that it wasn't spam.
-snip-

You want to tell me that the tens of thousands transactions in the following format: Address A -> Address A
Are real financial transactions? It is most certainly spam.

ah.. lol.. ok.. That is pretty obvious..

They might not be real financial transactions, but they may be transactions that utilise the blockchain to store immutable data. That may or may not be spam depending on your viewpoint.

[pooya87]

I'm gonna have a stab at this and say that it wasn't spam.
-snip-

You want to tell me that the tens of thousands transactions in the following format: Address A -> Address A
Are real financial transactions? It is most certainly spam.

ah.. lol.. ok.. That is pretty obvious..

also do you see in the second picture, the second red arrow with an exclamation mark in it.
an straight line with a fixed-rate-increase of number of transactions is not normal. and this is just a small scale, if you look at precious times you can see the bigger ones

~
They might not be real financial transactions, but they may be transactions that utilise the blockchain to store immutable data. That may or may not be spam depending on your viewpoint.

although, it is hard to believe about some of these txs but i agree. we can never easily brand transactions as spam, but most of the time when you see someone is sending multiple (100-1000) transactions to same address with 10 seconds intervals, that can not be normal behavior.

[jonald_fyookball]

I'm gonna have a stab at this and say that it wasn't spam.
-snip-

You want to tell me that the tens of thousands transactions in the following format: Address A -> Address A
Are real financial transactions? It is most certainly spam.

ah.. lol.. ok.. That is pretty obvious..

also do you see in the second picture, the second red arrow with an exclamation mark in it.
an straight line with a fixed-rate-increase of number of transactions is not normal. and this is just a small scale, if you look at precious times you can see the bigger ones

~
They might not be real financial transactions, but they may be transactions that utilise the blockchain to store immutable data. That may or may not be spam depending on your viewpoint.

although, it is hard to believe about some of these txs but i agree. we can never easily brand transactions as spam, but most of the time when you see someone is sending multiple (100-1000) transactions to same address with 10 seconds intervals, that can not be normal behavior.

yeah, so do we:

A) increase the blocksize so the spammers have to do WAY more transactions, making it more expensive for the spammers, while simultaneously increasing bandwidth for everyone

or

B) keep the blocksize and just increase the fees so its more expensive for everyone to transaction, while not increasing bandwidth for anyone

Answer should be pretty clear.

[Valiance]

Lots of alt-coins have been cheaper and faster over the last 4 years, still are.

An old saying
"It is not about the return on your money, it is about the return of your money."

Bitcoin is more than just speed, I would advise new investors to go and read some of Satoshi's posts.

Besides, I personally am glad more bagholders are leaving Bitcoin, for every one bagholder that exits come 10 new excited, interest, entrepreneurial investors ready to take Bitcoin and business to the next stage. And one less pump and dumper.

Central bankers fight price corrections, Bitcoiners must embrace them. They clean the pipes like a good plumber.

In reality they are not.  The arguments about Bitcoins are related to it not being scalable.  Just because an altcoin with next to no usage compared to Bitcoin is doing okay, doesn't mean it would actually be okay with the same level of usage.

[leopard2]

Bitcoin network will not need the extra capacity of Bitcoin Unlimited as users began migration to other coins, cheaper to transact networks, you know their names.

Please name me a single viable alternative. By viable I mean the following:
1) Doesn't have an instamine / isn't a scam. (See Dash)
2) Isn't highly centralized / doesn't have a high king. (see Ethereum)
3) Doesn't have even worse scalability issues than Bitcoin. (see Monero)

Please indulge me.

LTC, PPC , NMC.

[European Central Bank]

well, maybe i was paying too much but all of my transactions absolutely flew today.

PPC

this one's a really interesting one. it's bizarre that it's semi forgotten when it's been so innovative.