Are blocks really full? (let's have a serious discussion)

[pooya87]

I am not seeing anybody talking about this topic around these parts so let me start.

We have all seen the spam attacks, the huge backlog (100k txs), transactions being sent from one key to same destination with seconds apart and paying small to high fees just to fill the memory pool, transactions using multi-sig and lots of inputs to increase the size of tx (in bytes) to fill the blocks, ...
the problem is, you can't tell which transaction is legit and which is spam attack because how bitcoin works.

looking at this small group of examples: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1776143.0
also seeing the latest block that was mined: https://blockchain.info/block/0000000000000000018d332fbb23692fe67dfb941607e870116e2c4edfae668e which contains lots of strange large value transactions (8 to 19BTC) all having 600 satoshi/byte
was the the last straw leading me to start this discussion.

so what does everyone think?
are the blocks we see full of real transactions or are they full of spam?
how much of it do you think is real and how much spam?

do you have any ideas to finding these transactions and possibly finding the source and hopefully finding the one(s) responsible?

[franky1]

even if you take away the obvious 'respend every block' tx's

there is still an underlying demand of mempool that has for the majority been over the 1mb capacity.

even funnier and most revealing.
https://blockchain.info/charts/mempool-count?timespan=1year

look at the spikes in june/july of 2016
then how more frequent escalated of spikes from october/november 2016 onwards.

then wonder what 2 events would warrant making the community think something needs to be RUSHED due to spam.

oh yea the core updates.. (june/july CSV)  (october/november segwit)

[mindrust]

No, they are being spammed by miners in the antpool who support Bitcoin Unlimited and they are being paid by Roger Ver (owner of bitcoin.com/bitcoin's angel of death) and Jihan Wu. (bitmain ceo) Those 2 are the ISIS of the bitcoin world. They are malicious to bitcoin.

[pedrog]

Yes, they're full.

Bitcoin has been growing steadily over the years and now there's no more room for growth, L2 applications like colored coins are dying because of huge fees and transaction delays, utility of bitcoin is decreasing and projects are moving to other chains where they can buil on.

Ultimately it doesn't matter if you consider a transaction to be 'spam', if it has enough fee to be relayed it is as legit as your purchase at Bitcoin Store.


upload pic

https://blockchain.info/charts/n-transactions?timespan=all

[Xester]

I am not seeing anybody talking about this topic around these parts so let me start.

We have all seen the spam attacks, the huge backlog (100k txs), transactions being sent from one key to same destination with seconds apart and paying small to high fees just to fill the memory pool, transactions using multi-sig and lots of inputs to increase the size of tx (in bytes) to fill the blocks, ...
the problem is, you can't tell which transaction is legit and which is spam attack because how bitcoin works.

looking at this small group of examples: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1776143.0
also seeing the latest block that was mined: https://blockchain.info/block/0000000000000000018d332fbb23692fe67dfb941607e870116e2c4edfae668e which contains lots of strange large value transactions (8 to 19BTC) all having 600 satoshi/byte
was the the last straw leading me to start this discussion.

so what does everyone think?
are the blocks we see full of real transactions or are they full of spam?
how much of it do you think is real and how much spam?

do you have any ideas to finding these transactions and possibly finding the source and hopefully finding the one(s) responsible?

In my opinion those are strands of invalid transactions and will not enter the wallet nor be confirmed. It is also possible that those figures are double spent bitcoins that are being sent. But I am not very sure about it hence I hope that those soam transactions does not affect the confirmation speed and the miner fees in the bitcoin network.

[franky1]

No, they are being spammed by miners in the antpool who support Bitcoin Unlimited and they are being paid by Roger Ver (owner of bitcoin.com/bitcoin's angel of death) and Jihan Wu. (bitmain ceo) Those 2 are the ISIS of the bitcoin world. They are malicious to bitcoin.

so says the core script writers pointing the fingers in the other direction..

but remember core gave pools the vote for segwit.. but pools are not ass kissers.

secondly BU and other dynamic implementation has been around for 2 years, has no deadlines, made no threats. and has no active ban hammer/change algo blackmailing code. they are just waiting for consensus

if the intent of dynamics was to split. they would have already. Gmaxwell even offered the option.. everyone laughed at gmaxwell

[pooya87]

even if you take away the obvious 'respend every block' tx's

there is still an underlying demand of mempool that has for the majority been over the 1mb capacity.

even funnier and most revealing.
https://blockchain.info/charts/mempool-count?timespan=1year

look at the spikes in june/july of 2016
then how more frequent escalated of spikes from october/november 2016 onwards.

then wonder what 2 events would warrant making the community think something needs to be RUSHED due to spam.

oh yea the core updates.. (june/july CSV)  (october/november segwit)

No, they are being spammed by miners in the antpool who support Bitcoin Unlimited and they are being paid by Roger Ver (owner of bitcoin.com/bitcoin's angel of death) and Jihan Wu. (bitmain ceo) Those 2 are the ISIS of the bitcoin world. They are malicious to bitcoin.

funny to see to opposing ideas after one another but lets keep it about the question at hand instead of a witch hunt!

L2 applications like colored coins are dying because of huge fees and transaction delays, utility of bitcoin is decreasing and projects are moving to other chains where they can buil on.

ok you posted the same thing again even after i removed it, so prove your claims. show us these projects that are being used in the real world using altcoins. specially with your beloved centralized coin. feel free to make a new topic and show everyone how altcoins are doing it better!

In my opinion those are strands of invalid transactions and will not enter the wallet nor be confirmed. It is also possible that those figures are double spent bitcoins that are being sent. But I am not very sure about it hence I hope that those soam transactions does not affect the confirmation speed and the miner fees in the bitcoin network.

please spend some time to read the topic another time and see some of the transactions then see even if i am talking about double spend, not reaching wallet,....! then come back and maybe edit your comment and make it on-topic

[NeuroticFish]

how much of it do you think is real and how much spam?

do you have any ideas to finding these transactions and possibly finding the source and hopefully finding the one(s) responsible?

Unfortunately it doesn't matter.
At start there were a very few spam attacks, announced "tests". Now they are more often than not.
Today X has the financial gain to throw a couple of days of spam attack on Bitcoin. Tomorrow it will be Y. The day after tomorrow Y and Z.
It will take more time to find the responsible ones (it may be easy for the first one or two, but after that they'll know and hide better) than finding a solution for the problem.

As we know, in less than a day after such an attack, the network "cleans itself". However, we need a solution for the honest people to not suffer from this.

If the solution is BU? So be it. But many tell that BU cause more problems than they solve.
The solution would be SegWit? Maybe. From what I've read it opens the way to use Bitcoin for real to pay for goods. Just they have to make sure the miners don't lose their source of income. A balance is needed.
The solution is another one? Hard to tell is there are 2 vocal opposite teams with no no good enough quite PR skills

[Carlton Banks]

The solution would be SegWit? Maybe. From what I've read it opens the way to use Bitcoin for real to pay for goods. Just they have to make sure the miners don't lose their source of income. A balance is needed.

A balance is indeed needed.

Bitcoin's block reward schedule, as we know, lasts until a projected year of 2140. It's impossible to remove or inhibit on-chain transactions between now and then, as miners wouldn't be able to get their Lightning channels open without availability of any on-chain transactions, and any Lightning disputes can end up kicking BTC off the Lightning network, which needs an on-chain transaction, plus another on-chain transaction if the owner of the refunded BTC wants to put that back into a new Lightning channel.

TLDR: Lightning needs on-chain capacity to work at all.


Furthermore, Lightning cannot serve high trust transactions, or apparently even high value transactions (which I only discovered today thanks to this thread and Rusty's Medium article).


So it should be obvious really that a balance between on and off chain needs to be nurtured, yet I've never heard anyone say "let's move every transaction onto the Lightning network". I've heard scare stories like that though.

[ekoice]

No, they are being spammed by miners in the antpool who support Bitcoin Unlimited and they are being paid by Roger Ver (owner of bitcoin.com/bitcoin's angel of death) and Jihan Wu. (bitmain ceo) Those 2 are the ISIS of the bitcoin world. They are malicious to bitcoin.

Yes,some anonymous is sending 650 BTC last week front and back repeatedly within 5 seconds to create huge traffic in transactions.It creates a huge burden in transactions.Its just actions of miners who support BU.

[pedrog]

L2 applications like colored coins are dying because of huge fees and transaction delays, utility of bitcoin is decreasing and projects are moving to other chains where they can buil on.

ok you posted the same thing again even after i removed it, so prove your claims. show us these projects that are being used in the real world using altcoins. specially with your beloved centralized coin. feel free to make a new topic and show everyone how altcoins are doing it better!

Well, CounterParty is pretty much dead and I assume OMNI will follow the same path, any other project that relies on bitcoin blockchain is destined to failure.

SJCX moving away from bitcoin: http://blog.storj.io/post/158740607128/migration-from-counterparty-to-ethereum

If you check top market cap projects you will see many have their own blockchains or are build on other chains, projects build upon bitcoin are dying, this is just going to get worse in the future if bitcoin doesn't scale.

[pooya87]

so far the discussion was pointing finger at who is spamming like a witch hunt and advertising altcoins as an alternative.

i am tired of seeing spam attack be swept under the rug and useless topics like "we need an upgrade" be the topic of the day.

[Yakamoto]

I would say that blocks really are full, and there might be a need to transfer to bigger block sizes, however we don't have effective solutions beyond Segwit (since BU is a centralization meme). I would personally prefer for more legitimate fixes to be put forward and the community can discuss them, but considering we're being pushed towards Segwit due to the insanity of BU's ideas, it is sounding more and more like a bad idea to run with them.

[BitcoinPanther]

Recently, transaction are easier to be confirmed, it seems block spammer had gone tired on spamming the network and needs to rest.  I do not think that blocks are really full with legit transactions.  It is that miners are skipping low fees, and some people are just spamming transactions to make it look that block is full and needed to be updated.  It is all agenda in my opinion.

[kiklo]

The solution would be SegWit? Maybe. From what I've read it opens the way to use Bitcoin for real to pay for goods. Just they have to make sure the miners don't lose their source of income. A balance is needed.

A balance is indeed needed.

Bitcoin's block reward schedule, as we know, lasts until a projected year of 2140. It's impossible to remove or inhibit on-chain transactions between now and then, as miners wouldn't be able to get their Lightning channels open without availability of any on-chain transactions, and any Lightning disputes can end up kicking BTC off the Lightning network, which needs an on-chain transaction, plus another on-chain transaction if the owner of the refunded BTC wants to put that back into a new Lightning channel.

TLDR: Lightning needs on-chain capacity to work at all.


Furthermore, Lightning cannot serve high trust transactions, or apparently even high value transactions (which I only discovered today thanks to this thread and Rusty's Medium article).


So it should be obvious really that a balance between on and off chain needs to be nurtured, yet I've never heard anyone say "let's move every transaction onto the Lightning network". I've heard scare stories like that though.

Same Guy
https://medium.com/@rusty_lightning/bitcoin-lightning-faq-why-the-0-042-bitcoin-limit-2eb48b703f3#.7cg0zhz7r

#bitcoin-lightning FAQ: Why the 0.042 bitcoin limit?

In my previous FAQ post on lightning I mentioned the 32-bit value (“amount_msat”) in the protocol for HTLCs: this restricts any single payment to 4294967295 millisatoshi, or ~$40 as of this writing.
This was agreed early on between Tadge, Joseph and myself (when it was closer to $10) and confirmed in the Milan Summit, but it’s worth delineating the reasoning behind it.
Channels themselves are limited to 4x that amount, but that’s a simpler thing to change.

Software Has Bugs
All software has bugs; the first releases of bitcoin had an overflow bug which let you create money. I guarantee that early releases of lightning clients will have bugs, and people will lose money because of them; in the minor case because of channel breakdowns and the associated fees for unilateral close and re-establishment, in the major case because someone steals their keys and drains their channels.

Things to Point Out 0.042 bitcoin limit is NOT a Permanent Limitation
Channels themselves are limited to 4x that amount, but that’s a simpler thing to change.
FIAT Conversion rates are also not affected at all, as you can see originally that was only a $10 value , increased to $40 merely from the price of BTC rising compared to FIAT.
It could be a $10,000 or 100,000 value if the price of BTC continued upward.


 

FYI:
In the Beginning , People exchanged their FIAT directly for Gold & Silver at the Banks, but as time went on, less & less people did gold & silver transactions directly , to the point now , where only specialize dealers take gold or silver, example, take it to walmart and they won't sell you anything for your Gold.
You have to Convert it to Fiat or checks or credit in their fractional reserve Banking System.
The exact same thing is going to happen with BTC & LN, BTC will only be for special licensed dealers and the common people will use only LN, because that is all the stores will accept directly. History Learn from it , or forever be Repeating it.

[bitkilo]

You only have to look at the size of all the blocks being mined to see that they are just about full to the 1mb capacity. I don't think it really matters if a percentage of the transactions in the blocks are considered spam or not, if they have a fee high enough to be confirmed then i would call them legitimate transactions that have a right to be included.

[Kodon]

No, they are absolutely not. Not so long ago, they were, but as we saw recently, the spam attack ended, and now with 5000 satoshis fees you cand send transactions fastly.

[bitkilo]

No, they are absolutely not. Not so long ago, they were, but as we saw recently, the spam attack ended, and now with 5000 satoshis fees you cand send transactions fastly.

For the first time in a long time the transactions recently have been confirming a lot quicker than anything i have received in the last year or so.

Today i received a transaction that had a fee of 20.117 sat/B with a tx size of 616 (bytes) and it confirmed within 10-15min, a transaction of that size with a small fee like that would have taken hours at minimum to confirm a week or two ago so it's not always bad.

[hv_]

What is SPAM?

Pls define first that anybody can agree about.

Otherwise what quality of discussion you expect?

[pooya87]

What is SPAM?
Pls define first that anybody can agree about.
Otherwise what quality of discussion you expect?

good question. and that is one of the problems which is being abused. you can't really define what is spam and what is not. because it was not defined in the bitcoin protocol like that. anybody can send transactions as long as they are spending valid outputs and in short are according to consensus.

lets say what i call as spam, something like my personal opinion and what clearly is a pointless transaction which was created not to "transfer money" but just "to waste block space" and "fill the mempool".

transactions that are spending an output from one key and sending them to the same.
transactions that use techniques such as multisignature to make the tx huge.
transactions that are send from 1 key to another key but instead of sending all the funds at once they are sent with 1-10 seconds intervals in 100s of tx and with high fees.

~So, it's better to upgrade to SegWit ~

can you explain why?

not that i don't want SegWit but i want to know your thought process on how you got from "there is a spam attack or not" to "we need SegWit"