Spam attack solution?

[OmegaStarScream]

I believe that the unconfirmed transaction number reached all time high as I never seen it like this before. (100,000+)
Is it theoretically possible to create a solution for the current spam attacks that we are facing? (assuming that we already have SegWit, bigger blocks, etc.). I believe that people could always do this spam attacks, even though It costs money, someone who have something against bitcoin will definitely pay for the "cause".

[d5000]

I am not sure if that's really a spam attack. Surely there is some spam, but the fees that were paid for the largest number of transactions are pretty high for that (100-120 satoshis/bytes), and as expected, now that the weekend has begun, the mempools are a bit emptier again.

I predicted that situation some time ago if there was a new Bitcoin price rally, because in every rally in the past the transaction volume spiked (probably as more people move their coins from and to exchanges). The more calm situation in the last weeks, in my opinion, was mainly because of the high fees that disincentived some use cases that were popular before (I don't know if "satoshi-dice type gambling" still exist, for example) and people are incentived to bundle their transactions now.

And no, if there are really spam attacks, I see no (realistic) solution. I had thought in paying transaction fees in advance, for example, but that would have too many negative side-effects (e.g. if you paid accidentally a low fee, your fee would be gone).

[SvenBomvolen]

People will not stop talking and spamming in any case. many of them just live with that. It called speculation and reasons can be different: to make the price for bitcoin to fall or to awake the interest to altcoins and many others actually.

[Emoclaw]

The chance of there actually being spam attacks is very low. The cost is too high and the congested mempool for a few hours does nothing to harm Bitcoin in any way.
Bitcoin's price clearly reflects that.

[olubams]

I am not sure if that's really a spam attack. Surely there is some spam, but the fees that were paid for the largest number of transactions are pretty high for that (100-120 satoshis/bytes), and as expected, now that the weekend has begun, the mempools are a bit emptier again.

I predicted that situation some time ago if there was a new Bitcoin price rally, because in every rally in the past the transaction volume spiked (probably as more people move their coins from and to exchanges). The more calm situation in the last weeks, in my opinion, was mainly because of the high fees that disincentived some use cases that were popular before (I don't know if "satoshi-dice type gambling" still exist, for example) and people are incentived to bundle their transactions now.

And no, if there are really spam attacks, I see no (realistic) solution. I had thought in paying transaction fees in advance, for example, but that would have too many negative side-effects (e.g. if you paid accidentally a low fee, your fee would be gone).

This is same thing I also witnessed when I tried to make some transactions and I was equally looking for explanation as to why the transaction was delayed beyond reasonable time in which I was even guessing why would all this be happening at this time. But if its actually a spam then its a serious one that the makers and shapers in the industry should really do something about because paying high fees and waiting for several long hours for confirmation is definitely a red flag to me.

[lottery248]

if their fees are low, then if you put a slightly higher fee for the transaction, then you don't need to worry about it. miners put the higher possibility of verifying higher fee transaction, so doesn't matter. if you cannot hold with the high volume unconfirmed transaction, time to switch to other altcoin for temporary use.

[Vaccinus]

I believe that the unconfirmed transaction number reached all time high as I never seen it like this before. (100,000+)
Is it theoretically possible to create a solution for the current spam attacks that we are facing? (assuming that we already have SegWit, bigger blocks, etc.). I believe that people could always do this spam attacks, even though It costs money, someone who have something against bitcoin will definitely pay for the "cause".

is the spam attack the reason for this high fee? aren't spammer sending these attacks with no fee? by logic, they are not increase the average fee if their attack have zero fee, and there is no impact on the transaction fee, what is the purpose of these attack then? i'm just asking because i can't understand

[Lauda]

OP we can't even solve spam on a centralized platform such as Bitcointalk. Take a look:

People will not stop talking and spamming in any case. many of them just live with that. It called speculation and reasons can be different: to make the price for bitcoin to fall or to awake the interest to altcoins and many others actually.

The chance of there actually being spam attacks is very low. The cost is too high and the congested mempool for a few hours does nothing to harm Bitcoin in any way.
Bitcoin's price clearly reflects that.

if their fees are low, then if you put a slightly higher fee for the transaction, then you don't need to worry about it. miners put the higher possibility of verifying higher fee transaction, so doesn't matter. if you cannot hold with the high volume unconfirmed transaction, time to switch to other altcoin for temporary use.

is the spam attack the reason for this high fee? aren't spammer sending these attacks with no fee? by logic, they are not increase the average fee if their attack have zero fee, and there is no impact on the transaction fee, what is the purpose of these attack then? i'm just asking because i can't understand

I am not sure if that's really a spam attack. Surely there is some spam, but the fees that were paid for the largest number of transactions are pretty high for that (100-120 satoshis/bytes), and as expected, now that the weekend has begun, the mempools are a bit emptier again.

It is a spam attack with a combination of increased demand to an already constrained block space supply. It only takes some research time to find the addresses sending thousands of transactions between each other.

I believe that people could always do this spam attacks, even though It costs money, someone who have something against bitcoin will definitely pay for the "cause".

As of now, there is no solution. The intermediary relief would be adopting Segwit which would let us process more transactions per second.

[Slark]

As of now, there is no solution. The intermediary relief would be adopting Segwit which would let us process more transactions per second.

Same goes for every scaling solution (BU, BIP 100), as tx capacity is directly linked to blocksize, so increasing blocksize will help.
The downside of this solution is, that even 2MB or bigger blocks can be spammed, as the space is still limited and we don't have anti spam filter AFAIK.

There is a high chance that current spamming attacks are conducted by someone who wants BTC to be upgraded ASAP and once we will, spam attack will stop.

[Lauda]

Same goes for every scaling solution (BU, BIP 100), as tx capacity is directly linked to blocksize, so increasing blocksize will help.

Wrong. You don't know what you're talking about. Both of those "solutions" would damage and even possibly kill the network due to an DOS attack vector.

The downside of this solution is, that even 2MB or bigger blocks can be spammed, as the space is still limited and we don't have anti spam filter AFAIK.

Common sense.

There is a high chance that current spamming attacks are conducted by someone who wants BTC to be upgraded ASAP and once we will, spam attack will stop.

I highly doubt that any attacks will stop, especially until the actor is either "banished" from BTC by everyone or succeeds in exerting totalitarian control (see BU president).
Go spam somewhere else with your alts and let the *adults* do the talking, alright?

[digaran]

Ban them nodes relaying those spams, ignore them and refuse to sync with them, then start rejecting any blocks containing spam transactions.
This needs everyone to work together, and if the majority of miners/nodes are doing the spamming and mining them then what are we doing here? we don't have any power unless we fight them with more than 50% of hash power.

Honest pools/miners should provide a service similar to what ViaBTC is offering to manually submit our TXs and if the big pools do that, then we can make sure the automated spams doesn't happen.

[Heruur]

You have just to analysed stats of bitcoin on 05/05/2017 : http://statoshi.info/dashboard/db/memory-pool

If it was a spam attack the estimated cost is : 20000 Tx (number of min spam transaction estimated) * 93099 sat (Avg fees per Tx) = 18.61980000 BTC (28856 $)

 

[Xester]

I believe that the unconfirmed transaction number reached all time high as I never seen it like this before. (100,000+)
Is it theoretically possible to create a solution for the current spam attacks that we are facing? (assuming that we already have SegWit, bigger blocks, etc.). I believe that people could always do this spam attacks, even though It costs money, someone who have something against bitcoin will definitely pay for the "cause".

The spam attacks were also coming from the miner themselves and I believe that the purpose of which is for them to tell that public that there is network traffic and that for the bitcoin users to have a fast transaction they have to pay high miner fees. In the end it is all about profit, they want to have big profit and they can only that if they can scheme that there is a huge traffic in the bitcoin network but in reality it was just a spam attack.

[Lauda]

Honest pools/miners should provide a service similar to what ViaBTC is offering to manually submit our TXs and if the big pools do that, then we can make sure the automated spams doesn't happen.

To be perfectly honest, ViaBTC isn't offering that because they want to help the users. They are offering it so that they can spread propaganda on their website. The 100 TX limit per block is very arbitrary.

If it was a spam attack the estimated cost is : 20000 Tx (number of min spam transaction estimated) * 93099 sat (Avg fees per Tx) = 18.61980000 BTC (28856 $)

Your calculation is a overestimation. Average transactions fees are a bad measurement. The spammer can create lean transaction which are in <300 bytes per TX. Assuming a fee-rate of 220sat/bytes (I don't see why they'd use one that is this high anywhere), it comes down to =< 66 000 per TX. Also, $30k is trivial money for big players.

In the end it is all about profit, they want to have big profit and they can only that if they can scheme that there is a huge traffic in the bitcoin network but in reality it was just a spam attack.

Incorrect. There is high traffic in the Bitcoin network, far higher than any other network. This is a combination of said traffic and a spam attack.

[BitcoinHodler]

You have just to analysed stats of bitcoin on 05/05/2017 : http://statoshi.info/dashboard/db/memory-pool

If it was a spam attack the estimated cost is : 20000 Tx (number of min spam transaction estimated) * 93099 sat (Avg fees per Tx) = 18.61980000 BTC (28856 $)

you should explain how from these numbers you concluded there isn't any spam attack because it is not clear.

also you are making a couple of mistakes.
1. you are rounding up the numbers. transactions have a wide range of fees. from 0 sat/byte to 700 sat/byte. and also they have a wide range of sizes from small 190 byte to big ass tens of kilobyte. and if anything you should multiply fee/byte with total size in byte not number of tx * average fee.
2. you could have used blockchain.info/unconfirmed-transactions. the total fee of transactions in memory pool is currently at 258.915BTC and size is 139 MB

[naughty1]

I believe that the unconfirmed transaction number reached all time high as I never seen it like this before. (100,000+)
Is it theoretically possible to create a solution for the current spam attacks that we are facing? (assuming that we already have SegWit, bigger blocks, etc.). I believe that people could always do this spam attacks, even though It costs money, someone who have something against bitcoin will definitely pay for the "cause".

Although it is an irreversible existence of bitcoin at the present time. However, in part, it provides a good market. It is absolutely beneficial at the present time. As bitcoins began to increase, people were prepared to sell a lot of bitcoin, however, when the transaction was not confirmed, it still crashes, a number too large, which makes the market stable. And bitcoin is affected by any. So, in part, it's still beneficial.

[Heruur]

If it was a spam attack the estimated cost is : 20000 Tx (number of min spam transaction estimated) * 93099 sat (Avg fees per Tx) = 18.61980000 BTC (28856 $)

Your calculation is a overestimation. Average transactions fees are a bad measurement. The spammer can create lean transaction which are in <300 bytes per TX. Assuming a fee-rate of 220sat/bytes (I don't see why they'd use one that is this high anywhere), it comes down to =< 66 000 per TX. Also, $30k is trivial money for big players.

The purpose of the spammer is not to overload the mempool but to prioritize its own transactions in order to cause a lot of unconfirmed transactions... Just imagine the impact of this kind of attack... (no more confirmation on shapeshift.io and other exchanges...)

[ImHash]

As long as a transaction is paying a fee it is up to miners if they want to include it or not and you can't call them spam because they are paying fees.
What we can do is to identify those miners keep busy with mining their own spam and as well taking the fees, if majority rejects their blocks causing orphans or just rejected then who can help them?
Majority right now are miners running on Core.
Should the guilty party be among them others will reject their blocks still?
All the miners are profiting from this as it increases the fees, so why would miners bother?
If we had a different mechanism of TX delivery, if it was random, if miners couldn't include transactions which were broadcast one second before the block was submitted, meaning transactions were in mempool for some time and anyone of miners could've picked them up, meaning malicious miners couldn't submit 1800 TX 1 or 2 seconds before they find a block which indicates they are not actually spending any money but only causing the blocks not have any real user TX in them and causing delays and increasing the fees.

[Lauda]

The purpose of the spammer is not to overload the mempool but to prioritize its own transactions in order to cause a lot of unconfirmed transactions... Just imagine the impact of this kind of attack... (no more confirmation on shapeshift.io and other exchanges...)

How would you know the purpose of the spammer? You're just making baseless assumptions, that's all. I've seen spam that was in the lower fee-tiers and also spam which was in the high-fee tiers. Additionally, even if we were to follow your baseless assumptions, there is no reason for him/her not to go with lean transactions.

Although it is an irreversible existence of bitcoin at the present time. However, in part, it provides a good market. It is absolutely beneficial at the present time. As bitcoins began to increase, people were prepared to sell a lot of bitcoin, however, when the transaction was not confirmed, it still crashes, a number too large, which makes the market stable. And bitcoin is affected by any. So, in part, it's still beneficial.

Yet another example of a classic and completely stupid spam post.

As long as a transaction is paying a fee it is up to miners if they want to include it or not and you can't call them spam because they are paying fees.

Bullshit. Do I have to explain this to you 100 times before you understand what spam is? The definition of spam transactions is entirely dislocated from your inclusion of a fee (or lack thereof).

[Heruur]

You have just to analysed stats of bitcoin on 05/05/2017 : http://statoshi.info/dashboard/db/memory-pool

If it was a spam attack the estimated cost is : 20000 Tx (number of min spam transaction estimated) * 93099 sat (Avg fees per Tx) = 18.61980000 BTC (28856 $)

you should explain how from these numbers you concluded there isn't any spam attack because it is not clear.

also you are making a couple of mistakes.
1. you are rounding up the numbers. transactions have a wide range of fees. from 0 sat/byte to 700 sat/byte. and also they have a wide range of sizes from small 190 byte to big ass tens of kilobyte. and if anything you should multiply fee/byte with total size in byte not number of tx * average fee.
2. you could have used blockchain.info/unconfirmed-transactions. the total fee of transactions in memory pool is currently at 258.915BTC and size is 139 MB

The spammer is not alone to do Tx on Bitcoin network. The calcul is very simple for a child : Number of Tx * Avg fees/Tx

Avg fees/Tx = Avg fees/Kbytes * Avg Kbytes/Tx