WARNING:network under Massive spam attack.

[BurtW]

There are two types of spam txs.

The first is a block attack vector designed to bloat the chain with worthless
data. The 1MB Cap prevents that attack type. The fee market is the
mechanism that prevents this while allowing the network to remain
functioning with that 1 MB Cap.

The second is a fee attack vector designed to bloat the mempool and
increase the fee price. These automated scripts are specifically designed
to create different fee levels, in order to increase the priority fee price.
The lower priority txs will either take many hours to days to confirm or
be dropped after "72 hours". The purpose is to cause pressure for altcoins
that allow for new P&D schemes.

These two attack types can and will exist no matter what the Bitcoin
blocksize is, which is what Hydrogen was alluding to.

Only post worth reading in this entire thread.

The economics of the fee attack are obvious.  They do not need to spend that much money in order to get the fees to go up.  If they flood the lower fee levels with transactions they are paying smaller fees if the transactions do go through at all.   Also, due to their own attack their transactions spend a lot of time in the queue just clogging up the queue - less cost for the attacker.  If they are really successful then most of their spam transactions will never get into a block and will eventually get dropped.  The cost to the spammer of the transactions that get dropped is zero.

Just take a look at the chart here:

https://bitcoinfees.21.co/

Clog up the lower transaction levels and everyone who wants to actually do a transaction will have to pay more.

Larger blocks will not solve this, Segwit will not solve this, the actual solution is already in place:  pay a higher fee for your transactions if you want them to go through.

[deisik]

The economics of the fee attack are obvious.  They do not need to spend that much money in order to get the fees to go up.  If they flood the lower fee levels with transactions they are paying smaller fees if the transactions do go through at all.   Also, due to their own attack their transactions spend a lot of time in the queue just clogging up the queue - less cost for the attacker.  If they are really successful then most of their spam transactions will never get into a block and will eventually get dropped.  The cost to the spammer of the transactions that get dropped is zero

I could add even more injury to insult

Even if some or most of these transactions come through eventually, the fees paid will still be received by those who likely paid them (or paid to send them), i.e. miners themselves. Since there is a mining oligopoly out there, we shouldn't be surprised if this attack is a combined effort of a few mining groups (pools), which might in fact belong to the same mining baron at that (and we all know his name). So it is a win-win situation for them (him), most of the time, at least. In a nutshell, expect more attacks in the future

[charlescoin]

There are two types of spam txs.

The first is a block attack vector designed to bloat the chain with worthless
data. The 1MB Cap prevents that attack type. The fee market is the
mechanism that prevents this while allowing the network to remain
functioning with that 1 MB Cap.

The second is a fee attack vector designed to bloat the mempool and
increase the fee price. These automated scripts are specifically designed
to create different fee levels, in order to increase the priority fee price.
The lower priority txs will either take many hours to days to confirm or
be dropped after "72 hours". The purpose is to cause pressure for altcoins
that allow for new P&D schemes.

These two attack types can and will exist no matter what the Bitcoin
blocksize is, which is what Hydrogen was alluding to.

Only post worth reading in this entire thread.

The economics of the fee attack are obvious.  They do not need to spend that much money in order to get the fees to go up.  If they flood the lower fee levels with transactions they are paying smaller fees if the transactions do go through at all.   Also, due to their own attack their transactions spend a lot of time in the queue just clogging up the queue - less cost for the attacker.  If they are really successful then most of their spam transactions will never get into a block and will eventually get dropped.  The cost to the spammer of the transactions that get dropped is zero.

Just take a look at the chart here:

https://bitcoinfees.21.co/

Clog up the lower transaction levels and everyone who wants to actually do a transaction will have to pay more.

Larger blocks will not solve this, Segwit will not solve this, the actual solution is already in place:  pay a higher fee for your transactions if you want them to go through.

If everyone pays a higher fee then the fees will easily rise tenfold or more from their current level. There is a point where increased fees will only hold bitcoin back. Lightning network has the potential both for near unlimited transactions AND higher fees to miners.

In my opinion this is the best solution currently being offered to scaleability issues. And Segwit or larger blocks would solve this as it would make any spam attacks much more expensive to the attacker since they would need to clog up a larger number of transactions.

[stripykitteh]

It's kind of funny to see threads like these made every so often because the price of Bitcoin is going a certain direction. I like how the price of Bitcoin affects the speed of the transactions within the whole Blockchain. Whether the transactions are just slow or if the transactions are really fast, a large portion of the people that spam the network already know that once they get the money they can try to break Bitcoin so no one else could make money from it.

[pooya87]

~
Only post worth reading in this entire thread.

The economics of the fee attack are obvious.  They do not need to spend that much money in order to get the fees to go up.  If they flood the lower fee levels with transactions they are paying smaller fees if the transactions do go through at all.   Also, due to their own attack their transactions spend a lot of time in the queue just clogging up the queue - less cost for the attacker.  If they are really successful then most of their spam transactions will never get into a block and will eventually get dropped.  The cost to the spammer of the transactions that get dropped is zero.
~

that is not entirely true.
in order to have an effect on what others pay as fee you DO need to pay higher fee or at least a fee on par with others.
the fact that bitcoinfees website shows majority at 101-120 is because many are using old or bad wallet clients that will suggest a fixed default fee of that amount. for example blockchain.info is always going to say 110-120 satoshi per byte.

if the attacker floods the "queue" with low fee transactions they are ALL simply going to be ignored.
for example if there are 100,000 transactions with 100 satoshi per byte fee, i am going to pay a higher fee of 110 s/b and have more priority than them.

in order for a spam attack to be successful and cause higher fees and delays it needs to pay higher fees than what "I" pay. and they do pay higher fees. i have seen from 300 to 600 s/b (there have been 24993 transaction in last 24 hours with 301+ fee)

and it is not just weird unknown entities spamming, it is miners who are filling (wasting) blocks so that they have less space for real transactions.
186704 tx belonging to Bitfury: 3QQB6AWxaga6wTs6Xwq8FYppgrGinGu15f

[davis196]

Fees today are over $2 to send a transaction. 100k transactions in mempool. Someone is spending a lot of cash to spam the network today.

Gee I wonder why? /s

I don't know much about mobile wallets or hardware wallets but they should alert the user when the network is this congested. With a easy to understand fee calculator/prediction pop up before you send your transaction.

BU supporters are attacking the network.
The BC/BU division is more likely to damage bitcoin rather than any country or sentral bank.
Bitcoin will be destroyed from the inside.

[iamTom123]

why "warning" i though something horrible had happened!

and this is nothing new, and it seems like nobody is interested enough in it to do anything about it. miners are enjoying their higher earnings and everyone else is busy fighting over nothing with repeated arguments.

i haven't seen any solid arguments about "Who is doing the spam attacks?" we just keep repeating bitcoin is not anonymous then.
and i am not talking about conspiracy theories or pointing fingers. i am talking about some solid proof of someone doing some serious blockchain analysis and finding where these money for spam attacks are coming from.

The problem here is that the situation is providing miners more incentives not to decide on the question of Bitcoin scaling problem. We are all greedy and miners are just like all of us. The thing here is that miners should not be the one to decide on matter like this. We already see what they can do by not doing anything because they can earn more if we continue on with the status quo. This should have been a big lesson for all stakeholders of Bitcoin and hopefully once this can be solved the same thing should not be repeated in the future. But sometimes people are so weak in learning the lessons of history that is history can always repeats itself.

[Amph]

There are two types of spam txs.

The first is a block attack vector designed to bloat the chain with worthless
data. The 1MB Cap prevents that attack type. The fee market is the
mechanism that prevents this while allowing the network to remain
functioning with that 1 MB Cap.

The second is a fee attack vector designed to bloat the mempool and
increase the fee price. These automated scripts are specifically designed
to create different fee levels, in order to increase the priority fee price.
The lower priority txs will either take many hours to days to confirm or
be dropped after "72 hours". The purpose is to cause pressure for altcoins
that allow for new P&D schemes.

These two attack types can and will exist no matter what the Bitcoin
blocksize is, which is what Hydrogen was alluding to.

Only post worth reading in this entire thread.

The economics of the fee attack are obvious.  They do not need to spend that much money in order to get the fees to go up.  If they flood the lower fee levels with transactions they are paying smaller fees if the transactions do go through at all.   Also, due to their own attack their transactions spend a lot of time in the queue just clogging up the queue - less cost for the attacker.  If they are really successful then most of their spam transactions will never get into a block and will eventually get dropped.  The cost to the spammer of the transactions that get dropped is zero.

Just take a look at the chart here:

https://bitcoinfees.21.co/

Clog up the lower transaction levels and everyone who wants to actually do a transaction will have to pay more.

Larger blocks will not solve this, Segwit will not solve this, the actual solution is already in place:  pay a higher fee for your transactions if you want them to go through.

If everyone pays a higher fee then the fees will easily rise tenfold or more from their current level. There is a point where increased fees will only hold bitcoin back. Lightning network has the potential both for near unlimited transactions AND higher fees to miners.

In my opinion this is the best solution currently being offered to scaleability issues. And Segwit or larger blocks would solve this as it would make any spam attacks much more expensive to the attacker since they would need to clog up a larger number of transactions.

as i see it doesn't make sense for an attacker to spam the network with higher fee, which would cost him money just to increase the average fee for allt he other, unless this spammer is a miner of course which i suspect it could be

i also don't think that pying higher fee is a solution, that's the issue here, segwit would solve the second issue but not the first from what i can understand, i'm curious how they are "sending worthless data"

if by that he mean dust TX with no fee, these will simply be rejected

[deisik]

If everyone pays a higher fee then the fees will easily rise tenfold or more from their current level. There is a point where increased fees will only hold bitcoin back. Lightning network has the potential both for near unlimited transactions AND higher fees to miners

Could you expand more on how near unlimited transactions could possibly go along with higher fees?

First of all, the very idea of unlimited transactions is against higher fees in and of itself. That should be straightforward that higher fees make transactions more expensive and thus suppress the desire to transact. Conversely, lower fees would contribute to more transactions since they would be cheaper in that case. Further, as I understand how Lightning Network works, it makes mining somewhat redundant since people can transact off-chain, and the cost of providing payment channels is negligible (when compared mining). That would greatly facilitate the competition between payment channel providers, and thus lead to low or no fees at all

[Meuh6879]

SPAM warning.



Linked thread : https://medium.com/@SDWouters/why-schnorr-signatures-will-help-solve-2-of-bitcoins-biggest-problems-today-9b7718e7861c