Spam attacks cost money, how much money do these people have?

[OmegaStarScream]

It's really frustrating to see this spam attacks each time the community decide to do something that these people are against. If you had to guess or to give an almost accurate number, how much this could cost them? I mean, shouldn't we be worried that this may not end at SegWit2x (regardless whether they fail to activate it or not)? If its nothing much, this could continue to happen and as I believe some of these people are millionaires (e.g Roger Ver), It doesn't look promising

[unamis76]

Another spam attack? What's the source and proof regarding the attack?

[GreenBits]

I'm not aware of the particular DDos event you are referring to (is this ongoing, recent?) but I will say this; attacks using compromised devices on the IoT are responsible for some of the massive Ddosage we have seen semi recently. There is no way these guys are using their own resources for something like this; I think I remember CEX.IO getting hit with a record setting ddos a few years back, and Cloudflare was complaining about 'previously unseen' levels of traffic. That, go me, has to be a botnet, or the unthinkable, a state level actor.

[OmegaStarScream]

I have no proof or source but you can't tell me that the increasing number of unconfirmed transactions that we currently have is pretty normal?  because it's clearly not unless I'm missing something.

[franky1]

spam attacks dont cost much

imagine a pool like BTCC
they create a load of transactions themselves and then only put them into their own blocks. the fee's go back to themselves.. hence cheap-free

they then cause other pools to take up the backlog of non internal spam.

[krishnapramod]

spam attacks dont cost much

imagine a pool like BTCC
they create a load of transactions themselves and then only put them into their own blocks. the fee's go back to themselves.. hence cheap-free

they then cause other pools to take up the backlog of non internal spam.

Mining empty blocks is also a spam, transaction backlog especially if you are the biggest mining pool. Antpool spammed at a loss, giving up more than $100,000 in transaction fees in the last 24 hours. Good to see their last 5 blocks are all above 999 KB. Obviously from an incentive point of view, spamming at a loss and letting other pools benefit from it isn't as attractive as incentivized spamming.

[YuginKadoya]

https://news.bitcoin.com/bitcoin-network-spam-attack-one-users-white-whale/

If you are referring about this Article of a Network Spam attack then I think this is the think you have seen, Well it started with the tweeted post of this laurentMT that he is battling with his referred name it as "Moby Dick" and implied it as the White Whale that has come in the form of a spam attack on the network which has caused blocks to consume too many unspent transaction outputs, well it can clog up the network, well just check out the article if this is the real deal.

[countryfree]

spam attacks dont cost much

imagine a pool like BTCC
they create a load of transactions themselves and then only put them into their own blocks. the fee's go back to themselves.. hence cheap-free

they then cause other pools to take up the backlog of non internal spam.

I've thought about that, and I hate that idea because it means spammers are miners. I've thought first that spammers were outsiders, people who wanted to destroy BTC so that they could launch their own altcoin, or something like that. It's highly disappointing to discover that spammers are at the roots of BTC.

[franky1]

Mining empty blocks is also a spam, transaction backlog especially if you are the biggest mining pool. Antpool spammed at a loss, giving up more than $100,000 in transaction fees in the last 24 hours. Good to see their last 5 blocks are all above 999 KB. Obviously from an incentive point of view, spamming at a loss and letting other pools benefit from it isn't as attractive as incentivized spamming.

empty blocks are not an attack, they are a efficiency method.. and yep BTCC and other BSCARTEL pools do it too..
https://blockchain.info/block-height/481930

its about starting a new block before validating the last and not adding tx's until the last block is validated.. because bad things can happen if you add the wrong transactions

the pools then do actually add tx's to the block once validated,, but because they start sooner sometimes they get the LUCK of having a solution before getting to add tx's

thus its about efficiency and luck. not intentional attack.

it might be worth people doing research and learning bitcoin.. instead of reading propaganda scripts

[franky1]

spam attacks dont cost much

imagine a pool like BTCC
they create a load of transactions themselves and then only put them into their own blocks. the fee's go back to themselves.. hence cheap-free

they then cause other pools to take up the backlog of non internal spam.

I've thought about that, and I hate that idea because it means spammers are miners. I've thought first that spammers were outsiders, people who wanted to destroy BTC so that they could launch their own altcoin, or something like that. It's highly disappointing to discover that spammers are at the roots of BTC.

go check out litecoin... all the propaganda that pools love segwit. yet non of them bothered using segwit transactions for their coinbase(blockrewards) because they didnt trust segwit.

theres alot of puppetry happening. but most of it is directed by the BSCARTEL (blockstream+BarrySilbert)
its all about gtting sheep t point at other sheep and scream that everyone should fear other sheep and to instead run towards the wolves for "protection" because they are stronger.. but not realising they are running towards the wolves who are hungry for lamb

and they also do have funding to the tune of hundreds of millions invested to also do outside spamming aswell..

check out 2016.. the blockstreams 2 bips.. june 2016 and november 2016.. then look at when the spam spiking began

[alyssa85]

spam attacks dont cost much

imagine a pool like BTCC
they create a load of transactions themselves and then only put them into their own blocks. the fee's go back to themselves.. hence cheap-free

they then cause other pools to take up the backlog of non internal spam.

How can they guarantee that only their transactions go into their blocks? What if their transactions go into other miners blocks? That represents a loss, right?

I don't think this is a spam attack at all. I think this is the normal amount of transactions. The number of transactions per 24 hours has been steady at about 250,000 or so for well over a year. Because of the hashrate problems, BTC is now processing only about 200,000 transactions per 24 hours, and the rest are going into the mempool.

In other words, users are acting as normal (and NOT in a spammy manner), but there are hashing problems on the bitcoin network slowing down the number of blocks.

One way to cure this is for people to hold back on making transactions till the hashrate settles back down. Use litecoin or ethereum (or bitcoincash) to move money from exchange to exchange instead.

[franky1]

spam attacks dont cost much

imagine a pool like BTCC
they create a load of transactions themselves and then only put them into their own blocks. the fee's go back to themselves.. hence cheap-free

they then cause other pools to take up the backlog of non internal spam.

How can they guarantee that only their transactions go into their blocks? What if their transactions go into other miners blocks? That represents a loss, right?

by not transmitting the tx's unconfirmd, the other pools cant add them.. in short you cant add what u dont receive

the internal spammers just avoid looking at the mempool of general network tx's and avoid transmitting tx's to others. and just add their own private tx's to their own block. leaving general tx's to pile up

BTCC admitted this with their zero fee promotion a couple years ago by preferring their own tx's over other normal tx's.

as for your other comment about tx count.. less people are transacting in general due to high fee's.. so where u say 250 constant can be 150 general and 50 spam =200.. rather than your thought that its 200 general and no spam now

[Kaller]

Spam attacks are done by robots. It barely costs anything to send a bunch of robots to a domain (known as DDOS) and shut it down. On the flipside it can cause massive damage and from their perspective the risk is definitely worth the reward.

[dothebeats]

I have no proof or source but you can't tell me that the increasing number of unconfirmed transactions that we currently have is pretty normal?  because it's clearly not unless I'm missing something.

Spam attacks plus miners not accepting low fee transactions = basically what we have right now. It's kinda frustrating to think that spam attacks can easily be done by the miners themselves to get high tx fees going thus producing more profit. This is what happens when some egotistic miners don't get what they wanted.

[skyline247]

Blackhat hackers don't care about how much money it costs for something they only want to make sure they inflict more damage than they spent.

[bitcoinmaniac52]

Ehm, hackers can have lots of money because they steal it from others by scamming and hacking as well. Think about all the Bitcoins that were stolen from people on this forum, it is unbelievable how much money they can make in a short time just from hacking, and it is also very sad.

[franky1]

Spam attacks plus miners not accepting low fee transactions = basically what we have right now. It's kinda frustrating to think that spam attacks can easily be done by the miners themselves to get high tx fees going thus producing more profit. This is what happens when some egotistic miners don't get what they wanted.

pools dont care about tx fee's.

its why pools do empty block efficiencies.. its better to get the reward guaranteed rather then waste time organising transactions in high fee's and not be even guaranteed the blckreward because they wasted time

the main perpetrators of high fee's is core.
removing all the fee priority mechanisms, doing it as 'averages' actually pushes fee's up if you bother to run scenarios even due low demand.
and then instead of coding better priority mechanisms, screaming to people to "just pay more"
you also have the core devs doing their mixers, which is another spam method. yep mixers respend funds promoted at anonymity but the reality is that its using up much needed blockspace.. in short its snobbery that only certain people should deserve the priority of block utility

pools do the add personal internal tx's first because they know they are definitely unconfirmed so safe to add when they start a new block before validating first block, purely to pretend they are not empty blocking.

[audaciousbeing]

It's really frustrating to see this spam attacks each time the community decide to do something that these people are against. If you had to guess or to give an almost accurate number, how much this could cost them? I mean, shouldn't we be worried that this may not end at SegWit2x (regardless whether they fail to activate it or not)? If its nothing much, this could continue to happen and as I believe some of these people are millionaires (e.g Roger Ver), It doesn't look promising

There is nothing frustrating than seeing you go through some challenging moments only for some people to hold several millions in ransom because of their own selfish interest and there is nothing one can do about it and this is one thing Satoshi didn't consider because if he had, he would have put a stop to it and there won't be need for all this back and forth situations.

[franky1]

It's really frustrating to see this spam attacks each time the community decide to do something that these people are against. If you had to guess or to give an almost accurate number, how much this could cost them? I mean, shouldn't we be worried that this may not end at SegWit2x (regardless whether they fail to activate it or not)? If its nothing much, this could continue to happen and as I believe some of these people are millionaires (e.g Roger Ver), It doesn't look promising

There is nothing frustrating than seeing you go through some challenging moments only for some people to hold several millions in ransom because of their own selfish interest and there is nothing one can do about it and this is one thing Satoshi didn't consider because if he had, he would have put a stop to it and there won't be need for all this back and forth situations.

thats why we should from now on, only consider bips if they use the real consensus method. and not let core control the bips and then bypass consensus with their bait and switch consensus avoiding soft crap.

in short we need to diversify more and have many brands, ofcourse if the brands are crap they wont reach consensus, but to let core dictate the rules is simply letting the bscartel control bitcoin

[krishnapramod]

Mining empty blocks is also a spam, transaction backlog especially if you are the biggest mining pool. Antpool spammed at a loss, giving up more than $100,000 in transaction fees in the last 24 hours. Good to see their last 5 blocks are all above 999 KB. Obviously from an incentive point of view, spamming at a loss and letting other pools benefit from it isn't as attractive as incentivized spamming.

empty blocks are not an attack, they are a efficiency method.. and yep BTCC and other BSCARTEL pools do it too..
https://blockchain.info/block-height/481930

its about starting a new block before validating the last and not adding tx's until the last block is validated.. because bad things can happen if you add the wrong transactions

the pools then do actually add tx's to the block once validated,, but because they start sooner sometimes they get the LUCK of having a solution before getting to add tx's

thus its about efficiency and luck. not intentional attack.

it might be worth people doing research and learning bitcoin.. instead of reading propaganda scripts

Yeah since there is block reward, why pools should care about tx fees, that makes some sense and with this logic every pool should mine empty blocks, why waste time on tx fees And then there is the hypothetical question, what would happen when all the bitcoins have been mined and no block rewards? Its all messed up

Empty blocks from 2015 to 2016. The number of transactions is somewhat proportional to the number of empty blocks. I guess you are right about the efficiency/luck angle. Compete to get block rewards instead of tx fees especially Antpool, BTCC, and F2Pool.

In this context, it really wasn't about propaganda, it is quite evident that there is a transaction backlog, it might be intentionally caused by the mining cartel or it might be just unintentional, profitable approach by the miners. It was about Antpool mining a good number of empty blocks yesterday, guess the pool was really out of luck yesterday.

Thanks for the clarification. This is how I learn new things.